As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night

Director: Larissa Sansour, Soren Lind

Year: 2019

A sci-fi short set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above. In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder is on her deathbed, as her young successor, who is born underground, comes to visit her. The talk between the two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and inherited trauma. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Official Short Film Competition - Experimenta Strand

Director: Tatiana Collet Apraxine

Year: 2028

You awaken on a fog-shrouded shoreline and meet Echo, a strange child with a hole in their stomach. Together you cross a lantern festival where the veil between worlds is thinnest, sail into an ocean that opens beneath you, and descend through a portal into the Underworld. The Underworld moves through different facets of grief: a rave where silhouettes dance in slow motion, indifferent to Echo's attempts to reach them; a frozen sea where giant statues crack open to release a buried memory of a lost mother; a shadow theatre where an anger monster is unleashed, reducing everything to embers. From the embers, a boat carries you into a vast darkness, where Mother appears, and they are finally reunited. You sail together to the Tree of Life, a bioluminescent, cosmic jungle. Echo begs her to return to the World of the Living, but ancestors appear and surround you. She cannot come back - the journey was never about bringing her back. Echo, revealed to be your own child self, dissolves around you as the hole fills with light.

Director: Aneek Chaudhuri

Year: 2026

Lost Souls, Swimming in a Fish Bowl is a silent documentary about the invisible territories of depression, isolation, memory, and the fragile act of continuing to live. There are people who move through the world every day while feeling as though they exist behind glass. They work, walk, eat, sleep, smile, and disappear into crowds—yet remain suspended within an interior world that no one else can enter. The film observes these fractured states without explanation, diagnosis, or spoken testimony. Instead, silence becomes the language of the film. Through faces, bodies, empty rooms, urban landscapes, found footage, archival fragments, photographs, gestures, objects, and moments of stillness, Lost Souls, Swimming in a Fish Bowl enters the psychological geography of people who feel trapped inside themselves. The fish bowl becomes both metaphor and physical space: transparent enough to see the world outside, yet impossible to escape.