Category: BEST AI Creation // Animation & VFX – ARFF Amsterdam 2026

Original Film Title: The Living Corpse

Director’s Name: Takeshi Sone

Writer’s Name: Hideshi Hino

Producer: Hiroki Terai

Country of Origin: Japan, United States

Country of Filming: Japan, United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 7 minutes 44 seconds

Film Description:

When a man awakens on a desolate shore with no memory and a body already rotting, the living world recoils. Arrested as a monster, he is taken to a university hospital, where doctors confirm the impossible: he has no heartbeat, no brain activity, and no living cells, yet he can think, speak, and feel pain. Hidden from the public, he endures preservatives, artificial skin, and brutal experiments meant to halt his decay, while fragments of his past return. A pendant found inside his stomach reveals that he drowned one year earlier, sustained by a single wish: to see his wife, child, and parents again. After escaping the hospital and a city-wide hunt, he reaches his family’s home. There, watching them mourn and continue living, he realizes that showing himself would only deepen their sorrow. Choosing love over reunion, the dead man says goodbye in silence and returns to the sea, where his end may become a new beginning.

Original Film Title: HAYDON: Patron Saint of the Obsessed

Director’s Name: Lucas Sabean

Writer’s Name: Lucas Sabean

Producer: Lucas Sabean

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 19 minutes 21 seconds

Film Description:

The tragic, true story of 19th-century painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s relentless fight for artistic immortality, told through the consuming obsession of his own private journal

Original Film Title: The Last Version

Director’s Name: David M. Teos

Writer’s Name: David M. Teos

Producer: David M. Teos, Xiao Coco Yang

Country of Origin: Canada

Country of Filming: Canada

Language: English

Runtime: 10 minutes

Film Description:

The Last Version is an Al-driven narrative short exploring grief, memory, and digital presence in an era where technology can simulate human identity. Every single Frame of this film is generated by AI based on a picture of the director when he was 5 years old.

Adapted from an original feature-length screenplay, the film follows a young boy navigating loss through an unfinished Al voice system created by his mother. As he confronts what may be the “last version” of her voice and consciousness preserved in code, the film questions whether digital permanence can truly replace human presence.

As digital reconstruction begins to blur emotional boundaries, the story explores whether artificial continuity offers healing or deepens psychological dependence.

All video, environments, performances, and the original music score were generated through Al- assisted production tools under continuous human creative direction.

Character and video generation were created using Kling Al 3.0 and Kling 2.6. Image assets, wardrobe, and environmental elements were developed using Nano Banana Pro and Nano Banana 2 with composition in Adobe Photoshop Generative expand. Script development and structural revisions were supported by ChatGPT 5.2. Voice synthesis was generated using ElevenLabs. The original music score was composed using Suno Al. Video finishing and extensions were completed using Adobe Premiere Generative Al.

Two principal characters were modelled from licensed photographic references: the child protagonist was generated from a childhood photograph of the director, and the psychologist character was generated from the headshot of actor Tracy Fischer with permission. Sound design elements were generated through Al tools and supplemented with licensed assets from the production team’s sound library.

The project was executed by a two-person creative team maintaining full narrative authorship and editorial control. Artificial intelligence functioned as a cinematic instrument rather than an autonomous creator.

Original Film Title: The Maid

Director’s Name: Jan-Willem Blom

Writer’s Name: Jan-Willem Blom

Producer: Jan-Willem Blom

Country of Origin:

Country of Filming:

Language:

Runtime: 5 minutes

Film Description:

Original Film Title: Headless Singer

Director’s Name: Yang Fan

Writer’s Name: Yang Fan

Producer: Yang Fan

Country of Origin: China

Country of Filming: China

Language: Chinese

Runtime: 9 minutes 59 seconds

Film Description:

A female writer whose life-work was plagiarized by her ex-husband dies, her head left abandoned in the wilderness. A rock vocalist, desperate to alter his voice yet ruined by a botched vocal-cord surgery, takes his own life by lying on the railway tracks. On a storm-thunder night, their blood mingles. The writer’s head fuses with the vocalist’s body, forming a stitched-together new being.
Two souls inhabit one body, locked in constant confrontation and coexistence. To reclaim her stolen writings, she competes on China’s Best Singer under the anonymous alias “Hell’s Voice”. Powered by her ferocious extreme metal black vocals, she advances all the way to the finals. Yet petrifying cracks keep spreading across her body, and time is running out.
The finals stream live nationwide, watched by 15 million online viewers. Before millions of eyes, instead of singing, she enacts a brutal act of vengeance.

Original Film Title: The Last Watch

Director’s Name: Vahid Tanha

Writer’s Name: Vahid Tanha

Producer: Mohsen Sharifioun

Country of Origin:

Country of Filming:

Language:

Runtime: 7 minutes 30 seconds

Film Description:

Humanity’s last hope is asleep. Only one remains awake.
As Earth struggles with devastating droughts and relentless sandstorms, a crew of astronauts embarks on a four year mission to Mars in search of a new beginning.

To conserve precious resources, the crew enters artificial sleep, leaving their lives in the hands of a single caretaker robot.

For four long years, the robot maintains the spacecraft, protects the sleeping crew, and quietly battles the loneliness of deep space. But when a catastrophic failure threatens the mission, he must make an impossible choice, one that will determine the future of humanity.

The Last Watch is an emotional sci-fi short film about friendship, sacrifice, and what it truly means to be human.

“Sometimes the most human heart isn’t made of flesh.”

Original Film Title: Home

Director’s Name: Emil Gasanov

Writer’s Name: Emil Gasanov

Producer: Emil Gasanov

Country of Origin: Italy

Country of Filming: Azerbaijan

Language: Russian

Runtime: 7 minutes 15 seconds

Film Description:

“KIBAЛ” (“Home” in the Lezgi language) is a filmic reflection on my relationship with my culture and my family. It shows how the people and places that once felt safe and familiar in childhood can become emotionally complex over time. As we grow, we change, and returning to those spaces can feel both comforting and overwhelming.
The film reflects on the experience of moving between cultures and the subtle transformations that follow. Adapting to a new environment inevitably shapes you, but it does not mean abandoning your roots. Instead, it creates an opportunity to carry and expand them. Ultimately, no one defines your connection to your origins except yourself.
Visually, the film draws inspiration from the works of Claire Denis, Sergei Parajanov, and Sedaget Kerimova. All locations and symbolic elements are recreated or reimagined from my parents’ wedding tape from 1998.
This film is dedicated to my cousin, Ruslan Gasanov. He asked me to take him to Europe someday, but unfortunately he passed away before I could, so I decided that at least my work, that was created in Europe, could carry a memory of him.

Original Film Title: The Art Between

Director’s Name: Bence Peter Szabó

Writer’s Name: Bence Peter Szabó

Producer: Bence Peter Szabó

Country of Origin: Netherlands

Country of Filming: Netherlands

Language: English

Runtime: 1 minute 31 seconds

Film Description:

A portrait of hyperphantasia: the condition of seeing too much, imagining too deeply. This is the interior world of a creative mind, where every small detail ignites infinite possibilities. Through shifting art styles and vivid visual landscapes, we witness the extraordinary weight of perceiving reality as art. A meditation on genius, isolation, and the vivid cinema that exists only in the mind.

Original Film Title: Silent Friends

Director’s Name: Enyu Tao

Writer’s Name: Enyu Tao

Producer: Enyu Tao

Country of Origin: China

Country of Filming: China

Language: Indonesian

Runtime: 8 minutes 7 seconds

Film Description:

After her mother’s passing, Yena was consumed by profound longing and loneliness, and she often sought solace among plants. One day, while painting in the woods, Yena chanced upon the tree spirits recorded in ancient murals. As the line between reality and myth blurred, this wondrous encounter gradually lifted the heavy weight weighing on her heart.

Silent Companions is a poetic work steeped in magical realism. Through the innocent perspective of a young girl, the film explores themes of life, death, faith in nature, and the eternity of souls.

Original Film Title: Companionship

Director’s Name: LI ZHANG

Writer’s Name: LI ZHANG

Producer: ZHI CHEN

Country of Origin: China

Country of Filming: China

Language: English, Mandarin Chinese

Runtime: 6 minutes 13 seconds

Film Description:

This animated short is created in the traditional Chinese ink-wash art style, depicting a poetic scene of a fisherman drifting on the river in harmony with cormorants. With subtle movements within tranquility, minimalist brushwork, and negative space composition, it conveys a serene and ethereal Oriental aesthetic, showcasing the beauty of harmonious coexistence between humans and nature.
Beyond its lyrical expression, the work subtly reflects on the vanishing ecological balance and traditional fishing culture amid modern industrialization. It calls for the protection of nature and the preservation of this thousand-year-old bond between humans and creatures. Interpreted from a small perspective, the film embodies the Oriental philosophy of “harmony between man and nature” through tranquility and motion.