Category: BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM – ARFF PARIS 2026

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: The Dulcinée Dialectic

Director’s Name: Tao Ruspoli

Writer’s Name: Tao Ruspoli

Producer: Tao Ruspoli

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 20 minutes

Film Description:

After artist Dulcinée DeGuere is diagnosed with bipolar II, her filmmaker partner Tao Ruspoli begins documenting her journey through mania, depression, and the slow reckoning of diagnosis. Simultaneously, he turns to an artificial intelligence he names “Dulcinea”, a machine that processes language without feeling, creating two parallel conversations: one with a woman of flesh and blood navigating the extremes of human consciousness, the other with the technology that was, at that very moment, sending the world into its own kind of manic episode.

The film was made during the dizzying arrival of generative AI, and Ruspoli’s fascination with it mirrors the broader cultural fever. But the film knows this. His subjects turn the camera back on him — Dulcinée most fiercely, but also the philosophers, scientists, and writers he’s brought into the conversation, all of whom challenge the ethics of documenting mental illness and force Ruspoli to face his own retreat into screens and abstraction rather than sit with another person’s pain.

As Dulcinée grapples with the impossible choice she names “art or sedation” — whether medication (another fraught technological innovation) will quiet the very intensity that fuels her creativity — the film’s deeper questions come into focus. Inspired by Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and shot across locations from the apocalyptic beauty of Bombay Beach to Death Valley’s ephemeral Lake Manly, The Dulcinée Dialectic combines vérité documentary, purposefully integrated AI-generated imagery, philosophical dialogue, and Dulcinée’s searing original poetry into a work that refuses tidy resolution.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Reason To Fight

Director’s Name: Hiram L. Johnson

Writer’s Name: Hiram L. Johnson

Producer: Hiram L. Johnson

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming : United States

Language: English

Runtime: 2 minutes 39 seconds

Film Description:

It was a double injustice, Bernice was wrongly imprisoned, then wronged in prison.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Bol Bol Raani, itta itta aani

Director’s Name: Varsha Sunil Rane

Writer’s Name: Varsha Sunil Rane

Producer: Varsha Sunil Rane

Country of Origin: India

Country of Filming: India

Language: Marathi

Runtime: 21 minutes

Film Description:

After failing in her career as an actress, Raani gets together with her cousin in a small village of Maharashtra. Her cousin, generally known as ‘mama’, is making a living as a caretaker of a dilapidated bungalow in that village. Raani & her cousin decide to make a living based on her acting skills. Raani pretends to be a witch & mama gets gullible villagers to her, promising them remedies for their problems. A smart girl called Anu from the same village gets irked when parents decide to take sister to Raani. Anu is suspicious of Raani & along with her friends decides to unveil her truth.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Baishe:Abyss in the dream

Director’s Name: Lu Chuan

Writer’s Name: Lu Chuan

Producer: Zhang Hao

Country of Origin: China

Country of Filming: China

Language:

Runtime: 10 minutes

Film Description:

Bai Snake practiced to become an adult. Under the alias of Bai Suzhen, he went down to earth to seek Taoism. He made a good relationship with Xu Xian, a scholar, and left a beautiful story of the legend of Bai Niangzi. However, the Buddhist sect was ruthless. The Zen master Fahai separated the two on the grounds of heaven and put Bai Suzhen Yongzhen under the Leifeng Tower, and Xu Xian forgot everything and entered reincarnation. A thousand years later, Bai Suzhen was infatuated and broke through the seal and came back to the world. With the help of her sister Qing Snake, she searched for Xu Xian after reincarnation. After stepping into a fantasy world, she finally reunited with Xu Xian, but Xu Xian left ruthlessly. Under the words of the green snake, she realized that she had not escaped from the Leifeng Tower, and the so-called search in the world was just a dream woven by Fahai…

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: One day the sun will only shine for you.

Director’s Name: Gjert Rognli

Writer’s Name: Gjert Rognli

Producer: Gjert Rognli

Country of Origin: Norway

Country of Filming: Norway

Language: Northern Sami

Runtime: 7 minutes

Film Description:

In a world of perpetual change, the trilogy «One day the sun will only shine for you – Soames beaivvi beaivváš báitá dušše fal dutnje» takes us on a journey through our hedonistic and fragile contemporary age, where the shadows of our actions stretch far into the future. It is a mythological voyage through excess, unrest, noise, injustice, power, and pleasure, weaving the intangible cultural heritage of the indigenous Sámi people into the endless cycles of life.

(WINNER)

Original Film Title: The window

Director’s Name: Carmel Loanga

Writer’s Name: Carmel Loanga

Producer: Susanne Oesterreicher

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany

Language: English

Runtime: 7 minutes 32 seconds

Film Description:

In The Window, thirty-six dancers from France, Italy, and Sweden explore, through movement, the intimate and universal theme of identity. Each approaches a window — a symbol of openness, transition, and revelation. Some step through, others dance beside it or outside, as if hesitating between the inside and the outside, between the private and the public.

The window becomes a space of dialogue between interior and exterior worlds, between what we keep within and what we dare to share. Through this shifting frame, the dancers’ bodies express their origins, their cultures, their differences, and their common ground. The Window is an invitation to open, to look, to let oneself be seen — to reveal what lies at the core of who we are. Behind every gesture and every gaze emerges an identity that, far from being fixed, takes shape through encounter and connection.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: DYNAMICS

Director’s Name: Teo Baehler

Writer’s Name: Teo Baehler

Producer: Teo Baehler, Jeroen Tapper, Jeroen Dirrix

Country of Origin: Netherlands

Country of Filming: Netherlands

Language: English

Runtime: 14 minutes

Film Description:

DYNAMICS (Frozen Movements) is an experimental, dreamy and surreal stop-motion film, created using everyday materials. The film offers a visual reflection on transformations that emerge through the intuitive blending of dissimilar elements. The result is a non-narrative art film where fantasy, form and texture merge into a sensory experience.
This short animation invites viewers to surrender to a world where logic gives way to atmosphere and intuition. The hypnotic soundscape enhances the avant-garde character of the film and leaves plenty of room for personal interpretation.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: BUEN CAMINO

Director’s Name: Young Jun Shin

Writer’s Name: Young Jun Shin

Producer: Ji Soo Gook, Hye Yeon Kim

Country of Origin: South Korea

Country of Filming: South Korea

Language:

Runtime: 8 minutes 12 seconds

Film Description:

This work explores personal growth, healing, and the journey of life. Inspired by the pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, fleeting landscapes, quiet encounters, and moments of solitude unfold through dance, connecting body, energy, and emotion to reveal inner experiences. While the original stage work evoked the pilgrim’s inner journey against the backdrop of a forest, this film reimagines it through the vastness of the sea, a space symbolizing freedom, silence, and the unknown.

The sea embodies life’s uncertainties and the fragile balance of human existence, while the movements express the paradox of vulnerability and persistence. The breakwater marks the boundary between nature and humanity, and the shore becomes a threshold where departure and arrival, the everyday and the infinite, intersect. Within this immense natural space, the film invites viewers to reflect on life, art, and the essence of human existence.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Agnosia

Director’s Name: James Autery

Writer’s Name: James Autery

Producer: James Autery

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 28 minutes 16 seconds

Film Description:

Neva was born blind but has a surgery to see for the first time. She finds the experience difficult and confusing but is guided by her surgeon and psychologist. She finds great joy in experiencing color and slowly begins to engage with her new sense. Based on real case studies, Agnosia is a first-person visual interpretation of what it might look like to see for the first time.

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: The Bird

Director’s Name: Mikyoung Soon

Writer’s Name: Mikyoung Soon

Producer: Hyungoo Jeon

Country of Origin: South Korea

Country of Filming: South Korea

Language: Korean

Runtime: 19 minutes 6 seconds

Film Description:

Eo-jin, who lives as a hikikomori to avoid the virus, sees a bird on the roof of her neighbor’s house and wonders if there is a bird on the roof of her own house. Eo-jin decides to go outside the house and take a look.