Wastopia

Director: Qianhui Yu

Year: 2025

Didi moves into an unkempt house in the British city of Stoke-on-Trent. Whilst feeling ill at ease in this unfamiliar environment, she comes across a curious statue in the garden. This enchanting object helps Didi to appreciate the heritage of her new neighbourhood through an unexpected journey back in time. Official Selection London International Animation Festival 2025

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.

Director: Trim Lamba

Year:

After buying a second-hand iPhone, a man discovers it’s filled with notes and doodles that reveal a disturbing portrait of its former owner. Official Selection London Short Film Festival 2026