Category: BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM – ARFF Amsterdam 2026

Original Film Title: To My Dearest X

Director’s Name: Frances Arpaia

Writer’s Name: Frances Arpaia

Producer: Frances Arpaia

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour

Film Description:

Finally revisiting old love letters, a trans woman is forced to confront the epistolary ghosts of her past self.

Original Film Title: The Box

Director’s Name: Szilvia Szakács

Writer’s Name: Szilvia Szakács

Producer: Szilvia Szakács

Country of Origin: Hungary

Country of Filming: Hungary

Language: English

Runtime: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Film Description:

Free will or determinism? Reality or illusion? THE BOX invites the audience on a visually stunning and thought-provoking journey into the realm of existential questions. Drawing inspiration from the dark atmosphere of Black Mirror and the simulated reality concepts of The Matrix, the film centers on a protagonist forced to confront the fundamental uncertainty of his own existence.

A journey, not a destination. THE BOX offers no easy answers. Instead, it utilizes an open-ended narrative that encourages viewers to project their own experiences, fears, and desires onto the screen. The film functions as a cinematic “Rorschach test,” where the ending takes on a different meaning for everyone—be it a liberating realization, a devastating truth, or simply another question in an infinite chain.

The power of AI in filmmaking. The film’s visual world was crafted using AI technology, lending a uniquely unsettling atmosphere to the story. The AI-generated imagery intentionally leans into the “uncanny valley,” where the line between the synthetic and the organic blurs. This visual style resonates perfectly with the protagonist’s internal struggle as he questions the authenticity of his own reality.

Ultimately, what is THE BOX? THE BOX is a mirror held up to the modern age. It depicts a world where technology increasingly permeates our lives and where the boundary between reality and illusion grows ever thinner. The film compels us to reflect on the meaning of our existence, the concept of agency, and the extent to which we are prisoners of our own minds—or the boxes imposed upon us by the outside world.

Original Film Title: Chum

Director’s Name: Tim Kreisel

Writer’s Name: Simon Bakenecker

Producer: Simon Bakenecker

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany

Language: German

Runtime: 5 minutes 30 seconds

Film Description:

A ritualistic dream-film exploring transformation, perception and the fragile boundary between body and transcendence.
The film follows a character drifting through a series of subconscious encounters with objects, memory and light.

Original Film Title: Something Something Ectomy Something

Director’s Name: Krista K. Miranda

Writer’s Name: Krista K. Miranda

Producer: Krista K. Miranda

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 3 minutes 43 seconds

Film Description:

“Something Something Ectomy Something” is an experimental short screendance that centers the violence of reproductive injustice and the exploitation of women’s and non-male bodies by the medical-industrial complex. “Something Something Ectomy Something” is part of Krista Miranda’s “Small Impossible Worlds” series, an experimental crip screendance practice where cardboard boxes are used as sets, mini stages, or miniature installations, and objects and Barbies are activated as performers.

Original Film Title: PAUSED

Director’s Name: Dusan Kalicanin

Writer’s Name: Dusan Kalicanin

Producer: Dusan Kalicanin

Country of Origin: Greece

Country of Filming: Greece

Language: English

Runtime: 8 minutes 14 seconds

Film Description:

PAUSED is a dialogue-free short film that explores the illusion of putting life on hold.
Through a contemporary visual language and natural sound, the film follows “Person”,
a character trapped between self-perception, memory, and reality. As he becomes
increasingly preoccupied with his own body, fragments of family, love, displacement,
and everyday life emerge like suspended moments, blurring the line between presence
and imagination.
Gradually, the body reveals itself not as the subject, but as a metaphor for everything
placed on hold: relationships, identity, freedom, youth, dreams, intimacy, belonging,
and the invisible burdens people carry through life.
With no dialogue and relying solely on the sounds of the surrounding world, PAUSED
asks a simple question:
Can life ever truly be paused, or does it continue moving even when we believe it has
stopped?

Original Film Title: Isomer

Director’s Name: Nikki Silvestre

Writer’s Name: Nikki Silvestre

Producer: Nikki Silvestre

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 4 minutes 56 seconds

Film Description:

Original Film Title: Patronnes

Director’s Name: Eloïse Le Gallo, Julia Borderie

Writer’s Name: Eloïse Le Gallo, Julia Borderie

Producer: Misia Film

Country of Origin: France

Country of Filming: France

Language: French

Runtime: 6 minutes 13 seconds

Film Description:

At night, they slip into the white calico dresses of their foremothers passing through the folds of time.

Original Film Title: WHAT’S HAPPENING OUT THERE?

Director’s Name: Kazumi Shimizu

Writer’s Name: Kazumi Shimizu

Producer: Michiyo Hayashi, Tetsuya Matsushima

Country of Origin: Japan

Country of Filming: Japan

Language: Japanese

Runtime: 33 minutes

Film Description:

Conversations unfold in a basement, exchanged by various people.
Their content, probing the inner recesses of the human mind, evokes nothing of what may be happening outside.

—But what is “outside”?

Is it the events occurring in the world at large, incidents close at hand, or even one’s own body—does the body itself exist outside the self?
As each viewer contemplates what “outside” means to them, the film begins to send ripples through the interior of their own mind.

Original Film Title: Corvus

Director’s Name: X New Worlds, William Greiner

Writer’s Name: X New Worlds, William Greiner

Producer: X New Worlds, William Greiner

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming: United Kingdom

Language: English

Runtime: 4 minutes 4 seconds

Film Description:

Corvus is a surreal experimental film tracing the strange, non-linear paths we take through grief, myth, technology, and ecological memory. Moving fluidly between dreamscape and documentary, the film follows the Crow as a symbolic guide – at once trickster, witness, guide and omen – through landscapes both internal and external. Its fragmented narrative resists chronology, instead unfolding like memory itself; associative, looping, and haunted. In this world, televisions transmit forgotten rituals, children commune with birds, and scenes slip between the natural and the artificial. The film considers how we navigate loss, meaning, and change in an age of collapsing boundaries – between human and non-human, signal and silence, past, present and future.

Original Film Title: Monster in Me

Director’s Name: Cecelia Condit

Writer’s Name: Cecelia Condit

Producer: Cecelia Condit

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 8 minutes

Film Description:

In ‘Monster in Me’, a woman wanders through memory, violence, aging, and survival asking herself a single impossible question: “How did I come out of this unbroken?” Blending confession, fairy tale, and psychological horror, the film becomes a meditation on the ways beauty and monstrosity, vulnerability and resilience, remain permanently entwined.