Short Film Competition 1

In a village near the southern Chinese city of Chaozhou, a boy has spent the summer with his grandfather. As the last day of the holidays approaches, he gathers together his hard-earned savings to fulfil a dream: he has long yearned for a city hairstyle. But the gap between expectation and reality is large.

For a woman who had become part of an urban legend she had heard about in her childhood, the act of remembering and the urban legend take on a different shape. The truth of myth and narration is questioned as her imagination and lived experience come together.

A young Tunisian man Ghassen is trying to get a visa to stay in France and faces multiple administrative obstacles. Finally, an immigration officer tells him he is naïve to think his dreams matter. Whatever, Ghassen will persist with those dreams, sustained by his conviction that he has as much right as anyone to move freely around the world.

The film opens with a tense clash between a government school accountant and an art teacher who is abruptly expelled from his position. Stunned and disoriented, the art teacher returns home, only to find himself locked in a profound dialogue with his son about life’s simplest pleasures—particularly, the very essence of sustenance. As he wrestles with the harsh reality of his situation, the artist's mind teeters on the edge of despair. His struggle becomes a haunting reflection: is his existence now as bleak and confined as the lives of the rabbits he plans to cook?

Khosrow and Asghar are two foolish thieves who, under their boss’s orders, enter a house to find a wallet. They threaten the homeowner to reveal the location of the money, but the homeowner refuses to talk to them. They make a terrifying decision to torture the homeowner in a bizarre way to make him talk. Suddenly, two other thieves enter the house, and Khosrow and Asghar realize they have mistakenly entered their boss’s house, and the homeowner is their boss’s father.