Category: BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM – ARFF BERLIN 2026

Original Film Title: Promised Day

Director’s Name: Abril Andrea Arnauda Appel, Takako Nakasu

Writer’s Name: Abril Andrea Arnauda Appel, Takako Nakasu, Sylvia Hallett, Felicitas Thomas

Producer: Abril Andrea Arnauda, Takako Nakasu

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany

Language: English

Runtime: 11 minutes 1 second

Film Description:

“On a moonlit night, in a forgotten room, two women mirror each other through dance—until a haunting déjà vu awakens buried memories and triggers a spiral into identity and emotional rupture.”

Original Film Title: Dante’ Labyrinth

Director’s Name: Monica Jaramillo

Writer’s Name: Monica Jaramillo

Producer: Monica Jaramillo

Country of Origin: Colombia, United States

Country of Filming: Iran

Language: Spanish

Runtime: 15 minutes

Film Description:

A film about David De Hannay, a former political prisoner—tortured in Iran and the United States, by the same forces—and founder of the NYC Art Movement. A U.S. citizen, born in Iran, and a human rights activist. Conceptual artist. Photographer. Filmmaker. Author. He transforms violence into art and resistance, creating work without borders.

Original Film Title: Kafka’s Metamorphosis

Director’s Name: Kyle McCabe

Writer’s Name: Kyle McCabe

Producer: Kyle McCabe

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 30 minutes

Film Description:

Kafka’s classic tale is artificially sweetened in this AI-rendered, modern adaptation of “The Metamorphosis.” Presented through the eerie lens of machine-generated imagery, this experimental film embraces the uncanny valley aesthetic of AI to mirror the unsettling, dreamlike tone of Kafka’s storytelling.

When the dutiful breadwinner Gregory inexplicably transforms into a gigantic insect, the focus shifts to the quiet horror faced by his family. As months pass and their financial stability crumbles, the Sampsons grapple with an impossible dilemma: what to do about Gregory. Their struggle exposes a darker truth beneath their polite, middle-class façade—where the strangest horrors wear the most ordinary faces.

Original Film Title: Bambou

Director’s Name: Deborah Sfez

Writer’s Name: Deborah Sfez

Producer: Deborah Sfez

Country of Origin: Côte d’Ivoire

Country of Filming: Côte d’Ivoire

Language: French

Runtime: 4 minutes 18 seconds

Film Description:

Reflections about childhood, and its importance in a person’s adult life

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: Creak, on a fragile windowsill, a bird or the obvious

Director’s Name: Petra van der Schoot

Writer’s Name: Petra van der Schoot

Producer: Topp & Dubio

Country of Origin: Netherlands

Country of Filming: Netherlands

Language: No Dialogue

Runtime: 38 minutes 38 seconds

Film Description:

A disoriented amphibian alien figure takes up residence in an abandoned store. Human
passers-by are reluctantly drawn to the location by the sounds coming from the space.
As time passes, they turn into an audience that becomes physically part of a wondrous
ritual in which the alien takes charge as a powerful master and tutor. The initiation
routine has both mental and physical consequences for the visitors.
The film juxtaposes jocosity and deeply rooted discomfort, with sound and space as its
main driving force.

Original Film Title: À la folie, pas du tout

Director’s Name: LUTZ

Writer’s Name: LUTZ

Producer: Juliana Sigolo

Country of Origin: Brazil

Country of Filming: Brazil

Language: English, French

Runtime: 2 minutes 11 seconds

Film Description:

À la folie, pas du tout is a short film about adornment as a way of being transported. Not jewelry as decoration or status, but as something that opens an imaginary life inside the person wearing it. Directed and written by LUTZ for the small family-owned São Paulo fine jewelry brand Marina Vicintin. Built around surrealism and cycles, with a high fashion touch to it. The title is the closing line of the French petal game, ‘Madly, not at all.’ The film lives between those two extremes.

Original Film Title: I Fear the Dusk

Director’s Name: Hua Zeng

Writer’s Name: Hua Zeng

Producer: Hua Zeng

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: Mandarin Chinese

Runtime: 4 minutes 15 seconds

Film Description:

As daylight fades, a quiet unease emerges.

The film captures the emotional weight of time passing and the subtle fear of losing what once felt certain.

Original Film Title: Cicada

Director’s Name: Julia Wilkins, Ramzy Telley

Writer’s Name: Julia Wilkins, Ramzy Telley

Producer: Julia Wilkins, Ramzy Telley

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 9 minutes 36 seconds

Film Description:

Cicada explores transformation through a visual, auditory, and emotional journey which turns a garment into a character, a character into a creature, and captured sounds into an auditory experience.
Cicada takes the viewer from the sensual to the meditative. Distorting time, space and sound, the collaborative team worked together to upend our sense of gravity and aural logic with the performance, sounds of nature, and filmic techniques.
Produced and Directed by Ramzy Telley and Julia Wilkins, Original Score by Qasim Naqvi, and Costume by Jacques Perdigues

Original Film Title: Daddy‘s Girl

Director’s Name: Safira Robens

Writer’s Name: Safira Robens

Producer: Safira Robens

Country of Origin: Austria, France, Germany

Country of Filming: Austria, France, Germany

Language: German, Portuguese

Runtime: 1 hour 57 minutes 27 seconds

Film Description:

Margarete sets out in search of her absent father.
Overwhelmed by communication with those close to her, she plunges into the unknown.
The film is a collage of portraits — encounters: people, places, voices she meets along the way that unsettle her inner image.
The closer she comes to the invisible, the more she herself begins to disappear — between memory and projection, between visibility and dissolution.
Daddy’s Girl is a poetic exploration of origin, loss, and the quiet emergence of our everyday phantoms.