Category: 2025 WSXA Paris

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Coded Black 360 Video

Director’s Name: Maisha Wester

Writer’s Name: Maisha Wester, Desiree Reynolds

Producer: Nick Bax

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming : United Kingdom

Language: English,

Runtime: 11 minutes 23 seconds

Film Description:

Immerse yourself in a highly atmospheric and provoking journey through the history of anti-blackness in the US and UK. Trace the origins of racial ideologies, their motivations, contradictions, and nightmarish consequences – from a 19th-century plantation to a mid-20th-century cityscape.

This 360° video is a condensed version of a larger interactive PC game which explores Black humanity, intellect and resilience, and offers crucial insight into why anti-Black racism has always been destructive, not only to its targets but to bystanders, perpetrators, lawmakers, and entire societies.

An experience designed to be mentally and emotionally difficult; content includes graphic descriptions of racist violence and murder taken from real historical sources.

(WINNER)

Original Film Title: Anomalia

Director’s Name: Delphine Sicard Malafosse

Writer’s Name: Delphine Sicard Malafosse

Producer: Delphine Sicard Malafosse

Country of Origin: France

Country of Filming : France

Language: English, French

Runtime: 7 minutes 41 seconds

Film Description:

This sci-fi nature documentary explores the concept of anomaly. Initially seen as rare deviations, certain species thrive when environmental conditions suddenly shift in their favor. Through multiple cycles, the film questions our perception of difference: is an anomaly truly an anomaly?

Guided by a voice-over narration in the style of a documentary, the film takes the viewer on a journey where the impermanence of life challenges the very notion of normality and abnormality.
The film adopts an hybrid documentary form, integrating an aesthetic exploration of anomaly through the very medium of AI—an anomaly generator itself. The ever-evolving, artificially generated fauna and flora blur the lines between reality and fiction, reinforcing the idea that what we perceive as an anomaly is often a matter of perspective and perception.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Amniotic Artheraπ

Director’s Name: Konrad Mihat

Writer’s Name: Valentina de Piante

Producer: Konrad Mihat, Alexandra Bălăṣoiu, Loredana Larionescu

Country of Origin: Romania

Country of Filming : Romania

Language: Italian, Romanian

Runtime: 8 minutes 5 seconds

Film Description:

An artistic interpretation regarding amniotic therapy that tries to convey in words and feeling the interior and exterior processes of this therapeutic method, aimed mainly for battling psychosis, but with therapeutic effects for any participant.

In 2023 the Entuziart Association, actively promoting introduction of art, dance, new media, and other innovative therapies in Romania, introduced through the Outsider Amnio Art cultural project, sessions of Amniotic therapy formation, in collaboration with Centro Amnios (Perugia, Italy) to the teachers at Sf. Ștefan special school in Bucharest, and to various artist working with neurodivergent and special needs persons.
Outsider Amnio Art (2023) was a project developed by Entuziart Association and co-financed by AFCN (Romanian National Cultural Fund Administration).

At the initiative of Entuziart association’s Loredana Larionescu, IndieBox’s artistic director Alexandra Bălășoiu and coVR Video’s producer Konrad Mihat, the panoramic 360 film was created as a voluntary collaborative workflow between artists, mainly in the contemporary dance scene, teachers, psychology students and practitioners, that participated in the training, as a way to express and simulate the knowledge, and emotions that surfaced in these formative sessions, presented and voiced through the understanding of teacher, dancer, choreographer, and Feldenkrais practitioner Valentina de Piante’s experience.

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: D.I.C.E.

Director’s Name: James jones

Writer’s Name: James jones

Producer: James jones

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming : United States

Language: English

Runtime: 3 minutes 20 seconds

Film Description:

The Department to Incarcerate Conflicting Ethnicities aka “D.I.C.E.” is being used as a political weapon to separate “US” from “THEM” for Master Messiah’s fictious “Political Mandate” destroying the lives of the powerless.

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: Back To The Past

Director’s Name: Dario Melo Maciel

Writer’s Name: Dario Melo Maciel

Producer: Dario Melo Maciel

Country of Origin: Brazil

Country of Filming : Brazil

Language: English

Runtime: 12 minutes

Film Description:

Rui Barbosa is a historic person in Brazil that lived in the later 19th to the 20th century. Famous for being an abolitionist, jurist and politican from the late Empire and the new Republic. He is waiting for his wife to get dressed. They have a party to go soon. While he waits, help him fix a historic scanned car and find out more about his house (that would become a museum later on). This experience uses only hands as controllers to give the viewers an incredible immersive experience using Meta Quest 3. Put your seat belt and come back to the past!