The Season of Burning Things

Director: Matthew Berka

Year: 2026

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

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.