TOPOWA! - Never Give Up

Director: Hasan Kattan

Year: 2026

For 14 years, Syrian filmmakers Hasan Kattan and Fadi Al-Halabi have journeyed together through war and storytelling. Their bond was forged on the frontlines of revolution where their cameras recorded terror and hope, laughter and heartbreak – moments that defined a generation. Years later, their story takes an unexpected turn. Confined inside a UK asylum hotel, Hasan and Fadi document a new chapter shaped not by bombs, but by waiting, bureaucracy, and exile. Amid rising anti-refugee hostility, they turn the camera inward exploring friendship and displacement and how filming itself becomes an act of survival when the future is so uncertain. 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.