The Strange Plantz Land – The Almond – dir. Jiahao Hou, Jiangbo Cui

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: The Strange Plantz Land – The Almond

Director’s Name: Jiahao Hou, Jiangbo Cui

Writer’s Name: Jiahao Hou

Producer: JInbo Zhao, Xi Feng

Country of Origin: China

Country of Filming: China

Language: English

Runtime: 16 minutes 37 seconds

Film Description:

Flat Almond, Mountain Almond, and Sherlock Holmes — A Trinity Experiment is a surreal allegorical AI short film and the opening prologue to a feature-length AI-animated project adapted from the original novel The Strange Plantz Land. Drawing inspiration from Traditional Chinese materia medica and the lingering shadow of the Great-makers, the film unfolds in a strange world inhabited by medicinal plants in human-like form. In the mountains of Jirgis, where bitterness is upheld as order, Mountain Almond sets out in search of the vanished Flat Almond and, together with Sherlock Holmes from another world, is drawn into a trinity experiment of sweetness and bitterness, desire and discipline. As the secrets behind hedges, pipelines, factories, and the taboo of sweetness slowly emerge, the search for a lost beloved becomes an inquiry into whether “unity” is salvation—or violence. What distinguishes this film is its unique attempt to deconstruct humanistic themes such as love, desire, order and freedom through mathematical logic, formulas and functions: it uses precise mathematical models to map the contradictions between sweetness and bitterness, uses functional relationships to interpret the dynamic balance of desire and discipline, and uses logical deduction to dissect the essence of “unity” and its dual nature of salvation and violence. This mathematical deconstruction is not a rigid display of formulas, but a creative way to inject critical thinking into the narrative—by quantifying and analyzing humanistic contradictions, it prompts the audience to rethink the rationality of established order, the authenticity of desire, and the hidden violence behind the pursuit of “unity”, adding a layer of profound intellectual depth and critical perspective to the surreal allegorical story.