Category: BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM – 2025 ARFF AMSTERDAM

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: When silence boils

Director’s Name: Shentong Zhang

Writer’s Name: Shentong Zhang

Producer: Shentong Zhang

Country of Origin: China

Country of Filming: China

Language: Chinese

Runtime: 25 minutes 11 seconds

Film Description:

In the private murmurs of his son, he tries to glimpse the collective resonance. In an ordinary family, it is separated by a mysterious noise. The son experiences the abnormality of the father, the breakdown and repair of the family relationship.
“A while ago, death was an event, a sudden appearance… and then, one day, it was no longer an event, but another continuation – a sluggish, unmeaningful, unnarrated, dull, helpless continuation.” – Roland Barthes. The son completes a glimpse into the complex world between the ways in which human wars break and heal in search of the mysterious clues of his father’s grief. Unlike those immediate celebrations, we, as people with memories and emotions, should stay in such grief longer.

(Honorable Mention)

Original Film Title: Director’s Cut

Director’s Name: Alvaro José Cogollos, Juanita Santafe

Writer’s Name:

Producer: Alvaro José Cogollos

Country of Origin: Colombia

Country of Filming : United States

Language: Spanish

Runtime: 6 minutes 4 seconds

Film Description:

A choice between two lives: the calm, slow pace of peace or the exciting, relentless scream of the city.

A young couple in New York City ponders the future of their relationship. Under the camera’s gaze, this couple debates living together in New York.

(Winner)

Original Film Title: Everything Comes to Harm

Director’s Name: Max Rommel

Writer’s Name: Max Rommel

Producer: Max Rommel, Enece Film

Country of Origin: Italy

Country of Filming : Italy

Language: Italian

Runtime: 60 minutes

Film Description:

Bruno, a solitary man living in a prefab home in the remote mountains of Friuli, spends his days
monitoring a nearby dam and hunting deer for survival. His life of quiet routine is upended when he
receives a call from Germany: his estranged brother has died, leaving behind a teenage daughter,
Tecla. With no one else to care for her, Bruno becomes her reluctant guardian. Mistrustful and
wounded by their pasts, the two slowly build a fragile connection. As Tecla adapts to mountain life,
she finds moments of joy with new friends and a horse she deeply bonds with. But when the horse
is unexpectedly sold, her emotional turmoil escalates. On a bleak winter day, overwhelmed by grief
and confusion, Tecla takes Bruno’s rifle and retreats into the stable — seeking solace, or perhaps an
end, as the snow falls silently outside.

(Honorable Mention)

Original Film Title: I Just Don’t Want To Do It

Director’s Name: Fernando Favela, Kerry Muir

Writer’s Name: Fernando Favela, Kerry Muir

Producer: Fernando Favela

Country of Origin: Mexico, United States

Country of Filming : Mexico

Language: English, Spanish

Runtime: 32 minutes 48 seconds

Film Description:

Stationed at a hotel room in an ominous world of San Cristóbal de las Casas, México, two assassins, Fernando and Fernanda, are given a script to act out with each other. As they become increasingly absorbed in the script, it takes them hostage, transporting them into unfamiliar spaces that blur the lines between dream and reality.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: The Highest Good

Director’s Name: Ingmar Stange

Writer’s Name: Ingmar Stange

Producer: Ingmar Stange

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming : Germany

Language: English, German

Runtime: 15 minutes 39 seconds

Film Description:

The Highest Good explores how social media and doomscrolling manipulate our attention—fueling anxiety, apathy, and a distorted sense of reality. Drawing on Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, the film intertwines neuroscience, theory, and self-experimentation to critically examine the role of cinema in today’s digital age.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: Children of the Wind

Director’s Name: Katia Thienpondt

Writer’s Name: Katia Thienpondt

Producer: Katia Thienpondt

Country of Origin: Belgium

Country of Filming : Belgium, France

Language: Dutch

Runtime: 11 minutes 11 seconds

Film Description:

I make “Festive Silence animation”, which is my concept. In this story the butterfly is the storyteller. She invites the bird to go on an inner journey which starts in the silence of a dark forest. In order to solve current issues she prays in the forest trough lighting candles. There is a Maria cave, but for the butterfly God always has a motherly, caring form that can vary throughout the story. Later this female God becomes the Wind that created the whole universe with tender love.

Together they learn that there will always be help from “above”, if they follow their soul. And the soul is materialized in the deer. This deer has the ability to look through the heart of the other, and only through the warmth of its heart, it can change things. The bird and the butterfly gradually transform synchronous and thereby can come really “home”.