Call For a Poetic City

Director: Elisabeth Felson

Year: 2022

Why are we so afraid of the dark that we need to brighten the world around us? Shot at night on the "cult" Red Monochrome with Camerimage Winner DOP Mate Herbai, NIGHT BURNS LIKE CIGARETTES approaches Light Pollution through our intimate relation to darkness, torn between love & fear. An anti-consumerist ballad in the night, it has Lily Cole as a Narrator, and British-Zimbabwean singer and dancer Kwaye.

Director: Hasan Kattan

Year: 2026

For 14 years, Syrian filmmakers Hasan Kattan and Fadi Al-Halabi have journeyed together through war and storytelling. Their bond was forged on the frontlines of revolution where their cameras recorded terror and hope, laughter and heartbreak – moments that defined a generation. Years later, their story takes an unexpected turn. Confined inside a UK asylum hotel, Hasan and Fadi document a new chapter shaped not by bombs, but by waiting, bureaucracy, and exile. Amid rising anti-refugee hostility, they turn the camera inward exploring friendship and displacement and how filming itself becomes an act of survival when the future is so uncertain. Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026 - World premiere

Director: Hannah Wu

Year: 2025

"A journey through the pages of my mother’s old Chinese-English dictionary, featuring tigers, socialists and roundabouts." An experimental animated short about language, meaning and moving through the world (one drawing at a time). Combining ink drawings on paper with direct animation on 35mm film, various definitions of the Chinese character for ‘walk’ take on meanings in turn literal, historical, personal and abstract.