Soft Animals

Director: Renee Zhan

Year: 2023

A live action-stopmotion hybrid horror. Fei is the top violinist in her elite youth orchestra. When another Chinese violinist arrives to challenge her place, Fei’s anxieties and internalized racism grow to take monstrous physical form. They whisper to her, urging her to be the best, no matter the cost. Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2023 - World premiere Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2024 Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2024

Director: Renee Zhan

Year: 2020

A woman who can't stand the passing of time turns herself into a black hole. A thousand unchanging years pass inside her warm embrace until the Singularity awakens inside. An immovable woman meets an unstoppable girl in this epic 2D/3D space opera about the meaning of transience and letting go.

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.