Chaplin | Spirit of The Tramp

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.

Director: Yuqing Lin

Year: 2025

An unidentified ghostly entity travels through nocturnal shimmer - A faint and fleeting glow of the night - it is an “egregore”, a collective being formed by unconscious memories. This spectral presence drifts between night towns and children's dreamworlds, navigating fragmented geographies and temporal folds. Inspired by 1980s and 1990s Chinese children's science fiction films like WONDER BOY, the filmmaker reimagines electricity not just as infrastructure, but as a living force - speculating: what if the ghost that once inhabited lightbulbs and circuits is now displaced, scattered across phone screens and the devices of a sleepless global supply chain? In this film, the ghost transforms from a figure of mystical empowerment into a fragmented existence, diffracted, dispersed, and re-coded. Assembling fragmented connections through material and time from light accessory factories in southern China, through the dreams and imagination of children living nearby, and the port town of Grays in eastern England. These peripheral spaces appear to host accidental encounters, yet in reality, they serve as vital nodes in the circulation of low-cost global goods - concealing the shadow infrastructures of globalisation. The light traveler drifts across fragmented geographies, tracing entangled relationships between time, labour, desire, and the more-than-human.

Director: Rime Tsujino

Year: 2026

Exploring the filmmaker Rime Tsujino's evolving relationship with their dog Miso, a one-year-old German Shepherd. Tsujino attempts to understand why, despite raising the dog, Miso seems to prefer Tsujino's partner. Blending observational and verité footage with personal narration, this tender story of unrequited love takes the filmmaker on an intimate journey through the complexities of caregiving and cross-species bonds, contending with the influence of intergenerational parenting styles on the human-dog relationship and how dogs express their agency, ultimately asking whether it is possible to love truly without conditions. Official Selection Visions du Reel 2026 - World premiere