Category: ARFF BERLIN 2026

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.

Original Film Title: The Last Sun

Director’s Name: Nigel Canepa, Orlando Charvetto

Writer’s Name: Simon Reynold, Lynn Hardy, Nigel Canepa

Producer: Lynn Hardy

Country of Origin: Gibraltar

Country of Filming: Gibraltar

Language: English

Runtime: 19 minutes 51 seconds

Film Description:

In a future where the sun is blocked and humanity is forced underground, Gibraltar holds the last light. Lena, a former scientist, strives to bring back the sun. One day, a stranger arrives with ancient knowledge and new hope.

Original Film Title: Blick Ohne Worte

Director’s Name: Art Davis

Writer’s Name: Karwan Mohammed

Producer: Karwan Mohammed

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany

Language: German

Runtime: 8 minutes 19 seconds

Film Description:

Blick Ohne Worte is a short film about, family, loyalty, and betrayal. At its center is a man whose trust is broken by a close family member. Caught between intimacy and suspicion, the film explores how betrayal within the family can lead to irreversible consequences.

Original Film Title: J.J.

Director’s Name: Adam Dietrich, Elliott Gilbert

Writer’s Name: Paula Goldberg

Producer: Anne Beyer

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 14 minutes 40 seconds

Film Description:

We follow the foster parents Jahan and Kiersten Bakshi as they are attending their foster son’s hearing. The court setting is the central focus, as witnesses and the social service department are fighting for the removal of parental rights to keep J.J. safe from his mentally ill mother.