Category: BEST SHORT FILM – ARFF BERLIN 2026

Original Film Title: Mortal Exile

Director’s Name: Rowan Gustave Moorkens O’Reilly

Writer’s Name: Rowan Gustave Moorkens O’Reilly

Producer: Rowan Gustave Moorkens O’Reilly

Country of Origin: Ireland

Country of Filming: China, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan

Language: English

Runtime: 38 minutes 55 seconds

Film Description:

Mortal Exile is a short gritty retro-cyberpunk sci-fi thriller, and follows Omri, a neurodivergent homeless teenager. Omri’s escape from poverty aboard a smuggling ship comes at a terrible price – after an invasive cyberbiotic surgery, his memories are ‘encrypted,’ leaving him indentured to his captors until he pays off his smuggling debt. But when a young PhD student offers Omri a chance to recover his stolen memories, he finds himself being hunted by a team of ruthless mercenaries. Omri’s journey explores trauma and meaning through a cyberpunk lens. Set in the 1990s and filmed over a period of eight years, Mortal Exile echoes the themes of memory erasure by resembling a worn-out videotape – filmed in 4:3 with a nostalgic lo-fi charm.

Original Film Title: Drowning

Director’s Name: Daniel Okoe Hooper, William Kojo Agbeti

Writer’s Name: William Kojo Agbeti

Producer: Daniel Okoe Hooper, William Kojo Agbeti

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming: Ghana

Language: English

Runtime: 10 minutes 59 seconds

Film Description:

Haunted by the devastating loss of his wife and child, Kwao drifts through the streets of Accra trapped in a suffocating silence that no one can see. Each day blurs into the next as grief, loneliness, and depression consume his sense of reality. While opposing voices—a pastor who sees a spiritual battle and a seer who perceives a soul already drowning—offer conflicting interpretations of his condition, Kwao remains imprisoned by the memories he cannot release. When an unexpected call from his mother pierces the isolation he has built around himself, he is forced to confront the pain he has carried alone. Drowning is a haunting psychological drama that explores depression, bereavement, and the fragile hope that healing begins the moment we allow someone else into our silence.

Original Film Title: The Last Stagecoach West

Director’s Name: Martin Moll

Writer’s Name: Peter Furrer

Producer: Martin Moll

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany

Language: German

Runtime: 14 minutes 59 seconds

Film Description:

1872, deep in the forests of the German Empire: Two orphaned and penniless siblings put everything on the line to rob a stagecoach and make their dream of a new life in America a reality — but caught between hunger, greed and betrayal, their escape threatens to turn into tragedy.

Original Film Title: Surface Tension

Director’s Name: Nikita Kuzmichev

Writer’s Name: Nikita Kuzmichev

Producer: Nikita Kuzmichev

Country of Origin: Kazakhstan

Country of Filming: Kazakhstan

Language: Russian

Runtime: 9 minutes 5 seconds

Film Description:

A lone pilot is stranded in the middle of the ocean, while investigating a meteorite fall.

Original Film Title: Headlights

Director’s Name: Bobby Najjar

Writer’s Name: Bobby Najjar

Producer: Bobby Najjar

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 9 minutes 49 seconds

Film Description:

A late-night accident spirals into a cover-up when a mysterious witness closes in.

Original Film Title: Kairos

Director’s Name: Harutaka Ashitate

Writer’s Name: Takuma Sato

Producer: Kiichi KUmagai

Country of Origin: Japan

Country of Filming: Japan

Language: English

Runtime: 5 minutes 21 seconds

Film Description:

Kairos is a monochrome short film built from still photographs. In a contemporary world governed by speed, efficiency, and the constant flow of information, the film reflects on how a person may recover an inner sense of time. The title refers not to chronological time, but to the decisive moment that appears unexpectedly in life.
In the film, water functions as a metaphor for time, emotion, and the pressures that continually shape human experience, while sunlight and its shimmering reflections suggest an interruption in that flow—a moment of return to oneself. By removing color and using still photographic images, the film resists rapid visual consumption and invites the viewer to pause before each frame. This approach also offers a quiet response to the tradition of still-image cinema, while reconsidering photography’s enduring power nearly 200 years after its birth. Kairos is ultimately about reclaiming one’s own rhythm, silence, and sense of being alive.

Original Film Title: Retusch

Director’s Name: Faryad Sayadi

Writer’s Name: Faryad Sayadi

Producer: Alexander Ekre, Karim Golestaneh

Country of Origin: Sweden

Country of Filming: Sweden

Language: Swedish

Runtime: 10 minutes 24 seconds

Film Description:

Elma dreams of becoming a model and pushes her body with pills, strict dieting, and relentless training. A summer job with an influencer family reveals how beauty is both sold and discarded. As her body begins to fail, Elma must ask: What remains when every layer of retouching is stripped away?

Original Film Title: Don’t feel sorry for me!

Director’s Name: Eir í Ólavsstovu

Writer’s Name: Eir í Ólavsstovu

Producer: Drós í Ólavsstovu

Country of Origin: Faroe Islands

Country of Filming: Faroe Islands

Language: Faroese

Runtime: 9 minutes 19 seconds

Film Description:

After ten years of marriage, Birgit is confronted with the ultimate betrayal. Her younger husband, Hanus, has left her and moved in with a new and younger woman, Maria. Hanus is the kind of man everyone falls for – charming, magnetic, and with a particular power over women. Even those he has left behind remain emotionally entangled in his invisible web.
Despite having emotionally and financially betrayed them, Hanus manages to maintain control. He returns whenever it suits him – including sexually – and the women let him.
In a car parked in a lot in Tórshavn, everything comes to a head. In a claustrophobic space between car seats, love, power and humiliation collide in a moment of raw emotional reckoning.
“It’s Not Me You Should Pity” is a powerful psychological drama about losing one’s footing and dignity when love dies. The ending is open: Is Birgit’s breakdown a total collapse – or the first, fragile step toward freedom and human dignity?

Original Film Title: Solar Retaliation

Director’s Name: Thomas Matthews

Writer’s Name: Thomas Matthews, Clancy Ellerman-Miller

Producer: Bjorn Weedbrook

Country of Origin: Australia

Country of Filming: Australia

Language: English

Runtime: 14 minutes 40 seconds

Film Description:

In an alternate 1990s where the Cold War rages on, the U.S. and Soviet Union are still stuck in a race for space dominance. Tensions rise among soviet cosmonaut Polina and her crew as the nature of their mission is revealed to be more serious than they ever anticipated.

Original Film Title: Simmer

Director’s Name: Claire Riverland

Writer’s Name: Claire Riverland, Matthew Cantone

Producer: Kristian Josevski

Country of Origin: Australia

Country of Filming: Australia

Language: English

Runtime: 12 minutes

Film Description:

After being fired from her parents’ cooking show in Hong Kong, 20-year-old Sunny Chan returns to Melbourne carrying more than a suitcase — she carries the quiet shame of failure in a family where image is everything.

Determined to prove she still belongs, Sunny turns to the one language she believes her parents understand: food. In her Australian family home, she attempts to recreate her family’s signature Shao Mai, convinced it will be the key to redemption and reconnection with her parents.

As her older brother Peter comes home from managing the family restaurant, their easy sibling banter slowly unravels into something deeper. Peter has already inherited the burden of responsibility; Sunny is still fighting to be seen. When she reveals her plan to return to Hong Kong to prove herself, Peter confronts her with a painful truth: chasing their parents’ approval is a losing game. What begins as playful teasing ignites into a raw confrontation about intergenerational pressure as Sunny is forced to choose between inherited ambition and forging an identity of her own.