Category: STAFF PICK – ARFF PARIS 2026

Original Film Title: Sweet Spiral

Director’s Name: Angela King

Writer’s Name: Angela King

Producer: Angela King

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 4 minutes 5 seconds

Film Description:

One woman’s descent into the uncharted waters of love and infidelity. Her torn decision to enter into a doomed relationship, the most powerful drug of all, is a journey into a quagmire of emotion. Free will can be a scary ride for some and dangerously sweet for others. When you are being pursued by the man of your dreams, is it best to run from him as fast as you can?

Original Film Title: The Last Letter

Director’s Name: Philippe Verichoux

Writer’s Name: Philippe Verichoux

Producer: Philippe Verichoux

Country of Origin: France

Country of Filming: France

Language: French

Runtime: 5 minutes 44 seconds

Film Description:

“The Last Letter” is a poetic short film inspired by a true story.

In the midst of World War I, a French soldier writes a letter that may be his last. Through his words, the film explores memory, absence, and the invisible bonds that endure beyond time.

Straddling historical reality and sensitive evocation, this intimate narrative gives voice to a fragile presence, suspended between life and oblivion.

Created using artificial intelligence tools under human artistic direction, the film offers an emotional experience where image and sound prolong the echo of words never truly lost

Original Film Title: The invisibles. The weight of being a man.

Director’s Name: GERARD CLÚA

Writer’s Name: GERARD CLÚA

Producer: GERARD CLÚA, CHEMA RODRÍGUEZ-CALDERÓN

Country of Origin: Spain

Country of Filming: Spain

Language: Spanish

Runtime: 5 minutes 44 seconds

Film Description:

This short film, directed by Gerard Clúa, is an academic work that arises from in-depth research, through imagery, of an invisible problem: male anorexia. As a product of the specialization studies in film and documentary photography that the director has undertaken between 2023 and 2025, this multidisciplinary piece emerges, combining cinema, photography, and design. Invisibles. The Weight of Being a Man is the first short film produced by Gerard Clúa, created in an academic environment, which aims to show the public with the intention of making visible and making heard those who do not want to see.

Original Film Title: D’ombre et de lumière

Director’s Name: Fabien Loïacono

Writer’s Name: Fabien Loïacono

Producer: Fabien Loïacono

Country of Origin: France

Country of Filming: France

Language: English

Runtime: 8 minutes 13 seconds

Film Description:

An old man, a dark room, a phone.
Brutally attacked at home, he regains consciousness in an unknown location. On the line, the police are trying to trace him. But is he even still somewhere he can be found?

Original Film Title: Court Jester – Revive

Director’s Name: Dhanur Ramana

Writer’s Name: Dhanur Ramana

Producer: Dhanur Ramana

Country of Origin: Singapore

Country of Filming: Malaysia

Language: English

Runtime: 12 minutes 19 seconds

Film Description:

In a sinister tale, a deranged individual known only as the Court Jester revels in the macabre sport of murder. Driven by a twisted sense of amusement, he targets unsuspecting victims with ruthless glee. The Court Jester’s unpredictable nature and seething rage make him an enigma, leaving a trail of fear and chaos in his wake. In a dilapidated building, he claims yet another life, his fury fueling the chilling promise of more bloodshed to come.

Original Film Title: Visualizing Hope

Director’s Name: Kashish Prakash Bhandari

Writer’s Name: Kashish Prakash Bhandari

Producer: Kashish Prakash Bhandari

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 2 minutes 27 seconds

Film Description:

A short film focusing on evoking among the viewers a feeling of hope

Original Film Title: Denali

Director’s Name: Jiafan Lin

Writer’s Name: Jiafan Lin

Producer: Haolang Li

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: Chinese, English, Yue Chinese (Cantonese)

Runtime: 6 minutes 21 seconds

Film Description:

This is a music video. Denali means “of where” in Mandarin Chinese.
The lyrics are in Mandarin, English, and Cantonese, describing all the everyday moments the creator experienced with his partner.
The story of the video is about a man struck by Cupid’s arrow who meets a woman also struck by Cupid’s arrow in the bustling crowd of the city. However, the man tries to escape the control of fate, and in the end, the two meet again because of coincidence rather than destiny.
This is a story about a firm choice of love beneath the complexity of the city.

Original Film Title: The Pen

Director’s Name: Xiaoyi

Writer’s Name: Xiaoyi

Producer: Xiaoyi

Country of Origin:

Country of Filming:

Language:

Runtime: 5 minutes

Film Description:

This story comes from my own experience in middle school. I have verified too many students who have been ruined because of a small misunderstanding. In our education system, “moral character” is often simplified to a label that is not black or white. Once he is labeled with some negative labels, the whole personality of this person will be denied.

What this short film wants to present is not only the story of a misunderstood middle school student, but also a process of how the “truth” is ignored and discovered. In this story, everyone is “right”: classmates uphold justice, teachers uphold order, and mothers uphold family reputation. But it is precisely this “correct” superposition that has caused the biggest mistake. The pen was always there, but no one really looked for it. By letting the master play all the roles, what I want to show is: how the victim internalized the accusation against himself and how he repeated the trial in his heart. He is both the plaintiff and the defendant, both the judge and the criminal. This division is the final result of the discipline of power. The appearance of the pen at the end is not salvation, but irony. The truth came too late, and the harm has been caused. The gap between the corners of the table, like those neglected things in our society, the truth is often hidden there, but no one is willing to bend down to look for it.

Original Film Title: Forever

Director’s Name: Karim Kari

Writer’s Name: Isabelle Bouché Kari

Producer: Karim Kari

Country of Origin: France

Country of Filming: France

Language: French

Runtime: 1 hour 46 minutes

Film Description:

The ghostly reflection: An elegy for a dying art.

“Forever” directed by Karim Kari explores the beauty of an art that is disappearing.

Karim Kari, general manager of the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, has forty years of experience behind the scenes, rehearsals, tours. He knows what he’s talking about.

He saw the theater gradually empty its verve, while the film industry took all the light.

So, he films this suffering, not as a manifesto, but as a procession of specters: the ghosts of the theater.

Passionate, mortified, sometimes disenchanted souls who continue to play despite the pain.

Their game is that of the true enthusiast: the one who still loves, even when everything collapses.

In Forever, there is a black beauty, a poetry of ruin.

Each shot becomes a living painting, a deep delirium of poetic black magic, where the bodies become troubled presences.

Behind the darkness, we can see the depth of the man stripped of his artistic mask.

The film is a theater in the theater, a dizzying abyss: a film shot in a theater where the ghosts of the red velvet wander.

A velvet box for an elegant denunciation of the degradation of the theater.

Like Dorian Gray’s portrait, “Forever” reveals the double face of an art:

Sumptuous in appearance, but whose painting, in the shadows, crumbles and cracks.

Around him, a troupe; Delphine Depardieu, Michèle André, and other actors who came to lend their flesh to this ghostly dance.

All gathered around the same idea:

That art, even dying, remains a gathering space,

A place where we are alive,

Forever

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.