イメージフォーラム・フェスティバル 2020

Prize-Winning Works of East Asian Experimental Competition 2025

2025.10.05

This year’s “East Asian Experimental Competition” received a total of 530 submissions from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and South Korea, and after two carefully conducted rounds of screening 20 works were selected for nomination. The final evaluation was conducted during the screenings in Tokyo by the three jurors listed below.

On 3rd October, award ceremony has held at Theatre Image Forum, and 6 works were awarded prizes and 1 work was selected by the audience’s voting, it’s as below.

 

 

 

■ Prize-Winning Works and Jury’s comments

 

Grand Prize

Hostile Landscpaes

ZHANG Hanwen / digital / 59 min  / 2025 (Mainland China / Germany)

It takes a perspective that might otherwise be buried in the history of a North Korean defector who once escaped prison, tracing his escape route as a landscape. Through its exceptional dual-screen composition and narration, it transforms what might be mere imagery into something that connects to the grand history of land and nation. The process is thrilling, exposing how the state can control individuals and continues to do so. We the jury highly praise the film’s assured vision, which connects geography, nation, and the individual through landscape.

 

 

TERAYAMA Shuji Prize

The First Photograph

Jess LAU Ching-wa / digital / 11 min / 2024 (Hong Kong)

The film is outstanding for its ability to poetically convey the texture of feelings—the most challenging element to construct from the past—by combining various formal elements of a moving image’s composition: sound, dots of light, digital archives, pace, etc. The visual craftsmanship is able to communicate the historical events’ immaterial aspects in between complex geopolitical constellations, an approach that is not often considered in other historical works. This personal approach comes from the hidden family story of the director’s father crossing the 200-kilometer illegal border between China and Hong Kong in 1979, providing a fresh viewpoint on how we think about archives and the ‘objectivity’ of history.

 

 

SHIBUYA SKY Prize

My Organs Lying on the Ground

SOEJIMA Shinobu / digital / 11 min / 2024 (Japan)

Many of the submitted animated works looked inward, visualizing the artists’ own experiences, thoughts, and emotions. By contrast, this film directly engages the interior of the body　“organs and the womb” and translates them into the materiality of blood and flesh, vividly restoring our physical, visceral awareness. The trace of the hand inherent to stop motion lingers as subtle tremors from frame to frame, generating a palpable sense of “touching / being touched.”　At the same time, the work moves back and forth among fundamental questions: Where does the soul reside? Where does human life begin? What is the body and the physical world beyond it? While it is a poem of introspection, it rekindles tactile memory through a ritual-like process　and we value that achievement highly.

 

 

Award for Excellence

Dirty Eye

LAO Keng U / digital / 13 min / 2025 (Macau)

This film’s imaginary characters are a clever way to tell a story about a fictive city. A witty and captivating visual postponed this film into a somber film—a typical film that produced for a tragic setting. Still, the film also succeeds in providing an internal perspective, indicating the deep connection between the filmmaker and the city.

 

Award for Excellence

The Tales of the Tale

SONG Cheng-ying, HU Chin-ya / digital / 30 min / 2025 (Taiwan)

The scenery of an abandoned mining town overlays with the voices of those who once worked there, narrated in voiceover, recounting strange tales. These are stories of gods, spirits, and ghosts—of things that may not exist. And indeed, nothing is shown in the footage. Yet when the people who likely belong to those voices appear on screen, depicted opposing the demolition, the things that were once there—things whose very existence was doubtful—come rushing forward as undeniable realities. They are gods, spirits, and history itself.

 

Award for Excellence

BILOCATION

WANG Mowen / digital / 35 min / 2024 (Mainland China)

The reality of the character’s life as a curator in a mueum overlaps with the traditional image of the “Sea Godess,” blurring the line between reality and fiction. The work presents the intensified duality of the self post-pandemic not as a reenactment of events, but as a design of sensation. Employing mirror images (or “false images”) and the device of one actor playing two roles, it deliberately blurs the boundary between record and fiction, confronting the audience with the question “Who exactly is she?” until the very end. By not distinctively drawing a line between documented scenes from staging, and by layering the surface with allegory, the focus shifts from recovering personal history to the editing of the self-image: online personas, institutional roles, portraits projected by others. This work confronts us, who navigate multiple selves in the modern age, with a quiet reality.

 

 

Audience Award in TOKYO

Hostile Landscpaes

ZHANG Hanwen / digital / 59 min  / 2025 (Mainland China / Germany)

 

■ Final Evaluation Jury

 

IGARASHI Kohei（film director / Japan）
Bunga SIAGIAN（curator, researcher / Indonesia）
MONNO Kazue（filmmaker, animator / Japan）

*From left to right