The short films:

People Live Here

  • Year: 2025
  • Country: Canada
  • Director: Gabrielle Côté
  • Duration: 12min

Montréal is a city full of parks, cafés and bicycles. Until a new wind starts blowing: historic buildings disappear, making way for AI-controlled towers that erase all traces of the past and cast a shadow over the cyberpunk city. When the system collapses, nature reclaims its rights.

Zau

  • Year: 2025
  • Country: Germany
  • Director: Lennart Langanki, Tom Reimer
  • Duration: 7min

Zau loves nature and music. Until he finds himself in a world where such things no longer hold any value. Zau allows himself to be swept away by the spell of data and profit, and risks forgetting who he really is. Based on Goethe’s story of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Up to No Good (Op Boevenpad)

  • Year: 2026
  • Country: The Netherlands
  • Director: Eva Nijsten
  • Duration: 14min

Everyone gets up to a bit of mischief now and then… don’t they? But what makes that mischief get worse and worse, until you end up in prison? As teenagers, Jordi and Daan made the wrong choices. They explain why that happened, and how they got their lives back on track.

EMPATHY REHEARSALS

  • Year: 2026
  • Country: Italy
  • Director: Jacopo Cullin
  • Duration: 20min

Tommy, the school bully, believes that strength and fear are the only ways to earn respect. Following yet another act of aggression, the principal makes him take part in a theatre workshop, which forces him through acting exercises to step into his victims’ shoes.

Iyawo

  • Year: 2025
  • Country: France
  • Director: Inès Marteel, Maelle Kaufmann, Manon Ruckebusch, Pauline Bernard, Shufau Damilola Abdulateef, Thomas Logez
  • Duration: 6min

A young girl in Nigeria is celebrating her wedding. As the women in her family prepare her for the ceremony, she reflects on her decision and the pressure exerted on her by her community. In doing so, she tells the story of many Yoruba women.