Elegy for the Lost

Director: William Hong-xiao Wei

Year: 2022

A transcendental meditation on withered trees struggling to be reborn. A fleeting glimpse into the seemingly trivial occurrences of daily life. A sheer ecstasy of physical intimacy viewed through celluloid films, in which the life of the emulsion is decaying.

Director: William Hong-xiao Wei

Year: 2020

Somewhere in the world there is a remote island. In a lodge by the sea, a Chinese writer immersing herself in reading and writing encounters a Japanese girl who is in a melancholic mood. What has happened and what the two girls are feeling, imagining or remembering starts to overlap.

Director: Lilyana Torres, Carlos Morales

Year: 2027

When filmmaker Lilyana Torres learns that her grandfather hired hitmen to nearly kill her father, she sets out to confront him in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and force an apology. The attack left her father with cracked ribs, a broken nose, and loose teeth. Its architect was his own father. Like much of Lilyana’s family history, nobody spoke of it again. So she begins planning his murder. In darkly comic fictional reenactments, Lilyana trains for revenge with the help of a retired detective. Some methods are efficient, others grotesque, all adapted to an ageing man. Against these fantasies, family home videos reveal a more unsettling contradiction: birthday parties, tenderness, and a grandfather who once appeared devoted to his son and granddaughter. How could a parent put their own child’s life at risk? Before Lilyana reaches him, her grandfather dies peacefully in bed, taking every explanation with him. Determined to complete the film, she casts an actor named Perfecto to play him and kills him on screen, again and again. But the performance exposes the question she cannot escape: what does revenge actually resolve? Lilyana confronts the possibility that the violence she wants to destroy may already live inside her.