Category: BEST DIRECTOR – 2025 ARFF AMSTERDAM

(Honorable Mention)

Original Film Title: The Squirrel

Director’s Name: Yang Tsao

Writer’s Name: Yang Tsao

Producer: Wenqing Chen

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming : United States

Language: English

Runtime: 13 minutes 10 seconds

Film Description:

A janitor possesses an authentic painting passed down from her great-grandfather, but she is forced into a scheme of capitalism and art deception. In the end, the genuine artwork is deemed a forgery and disappears from the world forever.

(Winner)

Original Film Title: This Damnation

Director’s Name: Russell De Rozario

Writer’s Name: Russell JOHN De Rozario, MARK WORRAL

Producer: BEN DILLION De Rozario

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming : United Kingdom

Language: English

Runtime: 12 minutes

Film Description:

Period drama set in London and Belfast in 1977

(Audience Award Winner)

Original Film Title: Dirty Talk

Director’s Name: Oliver Herdberg

Writer’s Name: Oliver Herdberg

Producer: Felicia Bärgh

Country of Origin: Sweden

Country of Filming : Sweden

Language: Swedish

Runtime: 14 minutes 30 seconds

Film Description:

On a hot summer morning Linn and Jacke lie in Linns bed, about to have sex. To spice things up Linn wants them to talk dirty to each other. Somewhere in the act the border between fantasy and realism gets blurry and what starts out as a playful game suddenly turns into something far more serious.

(Jury Award)

Original Film Title: What the heart says

Director’s Name: René Bueno

Writer’s Name: René Bueno, Enrique Torres

Producer: Barbarella Pardo, Carolina Aymerich

Country of Origin: Mexico

Country of Filming : Mexico

Language: Spanish

Runtime: 1 hour 22 minutes 10 seconds

Film Description:

For Tomás, there is nothing more important than Kevin, his son, who’s 12 years old. Kevin is an autistic child. So Tomás has his hands full, and Kevin consumes most of his time. When Tomás finds out that he has a terminal illness and a few months of life left, his main worry is what will become of Kevin?

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: Highly Explosive

Director’s Name: Kerstin Polte

Writer’s Name: Kerstin Polte

Producer: Andrea Schütte, Dirk Decker, Sarah Born, Rajko Jazbec

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming : Germany

Language: English, German

Runtime: 1 hour 35 minutes

Film Description:

A tragicomic episodic film that weaves together stories of resilience and connection in a city on the brink. Captivating, human, and deeply moving.

In the heart of Hamburg, the discovery of an unexploded World War II bomb not only leads to a large-scale evacuation but also triggers an emotional state of emergency. As residents are forced to confront their long-suppressed fears and traumas, unexpected encounters arise amid the chaos—meetings that would never have happened under normal circumstances.

With BLINDGÄNGER, award-winning director Kerstin Polte presents a moving and profound drama, brought to life by an outstanding and diverse ensemble cast — including Anne Ratte-Polle, Haley Louise Jones, Bernhard Schütz, Claudia Michelsen, Daniel Sträßer, Karl Markovics, Ivar Wafaei, Lukas von Horbatschewsky, and many more.

Like a kaleidoscope of fates, BLINDGÄNGER tells its story with sensitivity, subtle tension, and a touch of warm humor. From various perspectives, the film explores intergenerational trauma, the search for human connection, and unexpected solidarity amidst chaos.

With empathy and narrative finesse, the director intertwines personal destinies with the pressing question of emotional resilience in an uncertain world — casting a curious, tender gaze upon what binds us together when everything else seems to fall apart.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: KETU VALLEZOHET ME HIJET

Director’s Name: Pluton Vasi

Writer’s Name: Bashkim Hoxha

Producer: Vjollca Dedei, Pluton Vasi, Kastriot Abdyli, Dobromir Chochov

Country of Origin: Albania

Country of Filming : Albania

Language: Albanian

Runtime: 1 hour 38 minutes 25 seconds

Film Description:

Based on a true story. The secrets that scar the soul.
Flora (Rovena Lule Kuka), a young journalist of Austrian-Albanian origin, works with an European Media visits her homeland to produce a feature on Mother Teresa. She was grown as the daughter of the enemy and she never knew her father poet who was killed by the communist regime. But soon she will face the surprise of her own identity, the clash of two times, yesterday’s and nowadays’. A knock at her door will change her life. Zigur, an ex-agent of the secret police, tells her a different truth. Flora learns the freaking story of her family and herself from the shadows of the past.
Zigur (Karafil Shena), an ex agent of the secret police reveals a secret of that time, a relationship of death and life that only a system as communism produces and stretches its tentacles nowadays. Before the fall of communism, Albania’s Secret Police listened to anyone’s secrets. Nothing is private or sacred. What they did not expect: the intimate view on the world of the ones he’s surveilling, changes the snitch. Looking at “the life of those artists” makes him aware of the beggarliness in his own life and enables access to a so far unknown world of love, art, free thinking and speaking he is hardly able to elude. And he falls in love.
Miriam (Eri Shuka), the mother of Flora, a beautiful ballerina of Austrian origin, brings a yesterday relationship between the individual and the state with all its atrocities that result with a dilemma of today’s choice. The individual, the state, the love, the survival in a time of surveillance, killing, rape, persecution. Everything faces the love for life.
The psychological statuses of relations among people and with the state where the dramas of each character are intermingled. Stories and characters that intervene with their past, present and they affect the future, stories that won’t let you escape the past. While the shadows of the past dance freely from one time to the other.

(Honorable Mention)

Original Film Title: JAMEELA

Director’s Name: David Winning

Writer’s Name: Zainab Malik, Mina Isabella, Jafri Maliki,

Producer: Imtiaz Malik, Razia Jafri

Country of Origin: Pakistan

Country of Filming : Pakistan

Language: Urdu

Runtime: 1 hour 32 minutes 33 seconds

Film Description:

Born into a cruel and unaccepting world, a young transgender woman embarks on a journey to follow her dreams and live her truth.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: Curious Caterer: Forbidden Fruit – dir. David Winning

Director’s Name: David Winning

Writer’s Name: Julie Kim, Karine Marwood

Producer: Michael Goldstein, Alexandre Coscas

Country of Origin: Canada

Country of Filming : Canada

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 24 minutes

Film Description:

A caterer’s date turns awry when the singer at the event she’s catering gets electrocuted, making it a crime scene she has to help investigate.