Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Synopsis

[We Are] A small Asian hair salon in Cambridge. A Chinese-Malaysian immigrant hairdresser, a grandmother, runs her business quietly, happily, and peacefully. [Still Dreaming of Hope] The iconic Middle East photograph featured in the film is a staged image. The two boys in the photograph are not an Israeli and a Palestinian, but two Israeli Jewish children.

Synopsis

THE WALNUT OF KNOWLEDGE turns Niyaz and Jonah’s yearly travels to Iran into a layered home movie. Based in a family garden outside of Tehran, we spend time with Jonah: watching his quest finding treasures beneath an old Walnut tree. The 80 year old Walnut tree has been a witness to many events from war to revolution, generations coming and going. Jonah hears these voices whilst he tries to understand his connection to this land. We hear mother and son’s reflections on life, history and belonging. Official Selection London Short Film Festival 2026 - World premiere

Synopsis

1985 was a difficult year for me. My mother had died, an attempted love affair went badly wrong, I hadn't made a film for five years. I bought a video camera and went to Cuba for three weeks. Music and memory play important parts. I first heard this particular music in Louis Malle's LES AMANTS (1958) when I was a teenager.

Synopsis

A multi-layered crime drama set in contemporary Europe and beyond, inspired by real events and personal experiences. The film follows interconnected characters whose lives are shaped by loyalty, moral dilemmas, and the consequences of their choices. The story spans five countries - Poland, Japan (in the heart of Tokyo), Myanmar, Ukraine, and the UK (London). It draws on true experiences: the main character spent three years in a martial arts monastery in Japan during his twenties, and a war reporter who was kidnapped during the conflict in Ukraine, prompting a tense rescue mission. These events form the backbone of a story the characters never meant to tell. Through parallel storylines, BASTION explores the complex web of relationships, conflicting interests, and personal responsibilities that define human behavior. Grounded in realism and driven by authentic characters, the film delivers an intense, emotionally resonant narrative where every decision carries weight. This drama presents a gripping, uncompromising portrayal of courage, loyalty, and moral choice, revealing the story they never meant to tell and offering a rare glimpse into human experience across continents under extreme circumstances.

Synopsis

“It” is difficult to talk about, so there's an asterisk in place of the “i”.

Synopsis

Now AGAIN is the first filmic interpretation of Marcel Proust's entire novel 'À la recherche du temps perdu'. Part Two encompasses the volumes of THE GUERMANTES WAY. The first filmic interpretation of Proust's entire novel, Philpott stretches narrative form into rich and varied experimental territories, providing a visual feastand sonic immersion, using AI and unique digital production techniques, to reveal the vast panoramic structure of Proust's great masterwork and provide a 21st century foundation for this timeless 20th century epic. A new form of story-telling for a modern age. Closer to documentary invention, rejecting costume drama. Closer to art than stage. Writing in pictures and music.

Synopsis

A personal meditation on the intimate ways our lives are shaped by ongoing colonial histories, how we make sense of this knowing and finding joy. Official Selection CPH:DOX 2026 Centered around the filmmakers’ local park, this film is a celebration of London and the resilience of migrant communities that have shaped the city from its beginnings. It’s about the British Empire Exhibition of 1924-25 and a line which stretches all the way from then to today. It’s about Palestine, which sits along this colonial continuum, and a park full of dancing, BBQs, birthday parties and joy. Through a hybrid form that combines documentary, archival footage, and direct animation this film meditates on the colonial remnants lodged in our lives and asks what it means to celebrate, play, and belong amid the rubble of empire. Official Selection CPH:DOX 2026

Synopsis

In extreme cold, the human body can turn against itself through paradoxical undressing: failing nerves mistake freezing for heat, compelling the dying to shed their last protection. In 水托邦 HYDROTOPIA, hydrophones frozen into ice capture the material disintegration of their frozen body as a projected film gradually emerges into clarity. The film follows British-Chinese artist Jamie Man suspended by hooks pierced through flesh in a winter landscape, practising rituals rooted in Shiva-dedicated traditions that explore a state of perpetual non-being. As the ice surrenders its form and the image sharpens into focus, transformation itself becomes the subject: matter abandoning one state for another, the body held suspended between dissolution and emergence. Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026 - World premiere

Synopsis

A feature documentary journeying into the depths of the COP climate conference in Dubai. Are these enormous get-togethers all about false promises that hinder change? Or are they the only hope we've got for world-saving unity? With his innocuous selfie-stick, filmmaker Josh Appignanesi moves unnoticed through Dubai's seductive slickness to reveal the talks, meetings and backroom parties behind the strange mixture of global cry for help and political jostling that is a COP. Lost in translation, he comes face to face with the irony of an oil baron hosting this last-chance climate saloon in a techno-utopian leisure city -- that, er, happens to be built in a burning desert. But then the business-as-usual is ruptured by a searing encounter with indigenous voices from the frontline of climate injustice…

Synopsis

Through the psychoanalytic and introspective voiceover of a young post-pandemic Chinese migrant in Europe, the film interweaves her private memories of intimacy with public narratives of resistance. As her reflections unfold, she and her community navigate secrecy, repression, survival, looming precarity, and displacement, all while confronting the personal cost of existing in a world that demands their silence.

Synopsis

Playing with Fire introduces audiences to an intimate virtual performance by Yuja Wang, inviting guests to witness the physical and mental act of performance through repertoire personally selected by Yuja, ranging from Bach and Chopin to Debussy, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. From this repertoire, writer and director Pierre-Alain Giraud has crafted a narrative and created transformative visual and musical worlds in collaboration with artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir. At the center of the space, both real and virtual, is a Steinway & Sons Spirio concert grand piano, which acts as the bridge between the concert hall and the artist’s inner visions. The Spirio system—an advanced self-playing technology that can precisely record and reproduce the keystrokes of live performances—recreates Yuja’s virtuosity on the physical instrument in real time, synchronised with the holographic fingers of her virtual self.

Synopsis

A thief postpones robbing a regal traveller out of romantic interest. They have a tender fling before tensions resume.