PROGRAM
《A》East Asian Experimental Competition1
5 works, 94 min.
【TOKYO】Theatre Image Forum：9/19(SAT)11:00am、9/23(WED)4:00pm
【KYOTO】Demachiza：10/19(MON) 18:00
【NAGOYA】Nagoyakinema Neu：11/9(MON) 17:40
【HIROSHIMA】Hiroshima City Cinematographic and Audio-Visual Library：11/24(TUE) 18:30
Taiwan
Thus Spoke Chatergil Potter
TING Chi-wen／digital／22min／2026
Having been brought back from the dead, Father Potter sets out on a journey to reexamine “this world” from the space between what is human and what is not. When he was alive, he gave answers to people in the confession box, but now, having lost his physical body, he faces the existential question “what is a human being?” Skillfully weaving together found footage and generative AI images, this post-AI surrealist work contrasts this question against a “non-human” perspective.
TING Chi-wen
TING Chi-wen is a director from Taiwan. His artistic expression constantly reflects on the relation of technology and humanity, which are often combined with alternative stories and visual experiments. His latest short film and art video work have debuted in Clermont-Ferrand ISFF and Ars Electronica in Linz.
Hong Kong／Mainland China
Fly Train
Ria ZHANG Riwen／digital／4min／2025
The shadows of buildings in the nighttime scenery that rolls by outside the windows of the train car, and the bright windows of the fast-moving train that race by one after another… Dreams with a floating sensation multiply, and the audience’s memories are stirred as images from the origins of cinema combine with scenes of modern cities. A dreamlike “phantom ride” in which handmade techniques using silhouette art imbue the work’s worldview with emotion.
Ria ZHANG Riwen
Ria ZHANG Riwen is a Hong Kong-based artist and experimental animator working across moving images, abstract animation, and live visual performance. Through a straightforward yet poetic approach, her practice explores the interplay of sound and image, transforming concrete subjects into abstract visual language, with research interests centring on the fluidity of personal identity in relation to geography and memory, and the space abstraction occupies within a narrative-driven media culture.
Mainland China
Xiaogao gonna die LONELY
Isabelle GAO／digital／8min／2025
Dangling between the “millennial generation” and “generation Z,” the protagonist, Xiaogao, finds herself tangled up in relationships with friends, family, and her lover, and on the verge of being crushed by social pressures surrounding marriage and childbirth. Playing the main role herself, the director gives a comical portrayal of a story based on her own experiences through a rhythmical and surprising sequence of scenes.
Junyan (Isabelle) GAO
Junyan (Isabelle) GAO, a Shanxi-born filmmaker with a background in French language and literature, explores femininity, loneliness, passion, and emotional honesty. As a writer and producer, her short film Seeding, Blossoming, Fruiting was selected by Leeds IFF, Norwegian Short FF, Nashville FF, Bogotá Short FF, and other international festivals.
Taiwan
Well-Intentioned
CHIEN Man-Chun／digital／30min／2025
The filmmaker lost her family home inscribed with memories of her late mother because of an airport expansion. Images of her mother’s death and mo-sin-a, creatures from Taiwanese folklore that are known to carry people away, are layered on top of each other. Through objects that reflect her mother’s absence, such as notebooks, her mother’s clothes, and her own drawings, the filmmaker describes her own sense of loss and her relationship with her widowed father.
CHIEN Man-Chun
CHIEN Man-Chun is a Taiwanese artist whose practice is rooted in lived experience, exploring family memory, emotional residue, and the vanishing landscape. Guided by somatic awareness and working across multiple media, she stays intimately attuned to sensory perception, allowing fluid, unsettled inner experiences to momentarily settle into form.
Japan
Boss of Green
OBITANI Yuri／digital／30min／2026
The newest work by OBITANI Yuri, who has been making unique, experimental films in the Japanese personal filmmaking scene since the 1990s. “I” run into a man playing a toy piano in the street looking for “Tenten,” and then… Incorporating entirely first-person shots and sound images that can be described as the pronoun of the filmmaker, the film draws viewers into a strange everyday world. The long take of a road cutting across farmers’ fields is particularly striking.
OBITANI Yuri
OBITANI Yuri is a filmmaker and artist. Since the 2007 film “An Acid Field”, he has consistently employs POV shots, wide-angle imagery, handheld long takes (or sequence shots), and post-sync sound an unwavering pursuit of a unified sense of spatial distance between seeing and hearing, as well as presence and verisimilitude of soundscapes.
