Project Detail

The Futora

A girl looking at her phone screen in a dark room

Synopsis

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.

Details

Year: 2025
Type of project: Shorts
Running time: 13 min 5 sec
Format: Digital
Director: Yuqing Lin
Producer: Yuqing Lin
Executive Producer: Yuqing Lin
Editor: Yuqing Lin
Sound: Yew Brown
Principal cast: Ximo Fan, Yifei Hu
Production Assistant: Ailiao Zhang

Genre

Experimental Sci-Fi

Production Status

Complete

Page updates

This page was last updated on 5th January 2026. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

Suggest amendments

After C. P. Cavafy. Dedicated to the body, to remembering, to forgetting. When blinded, the senses can cross-pollinate so that they become more closely bonded. Likewise, they can also disassociate and lose contact with each other. Desire transforms things into other things. The erotics of absence and suggestion direct attention away from the materialism of pornography. Longing is described through cinematic space as distance and proximity. Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026 - World premiere

Experimental