Category: BEST FIRST-TIME FILMMAKER – WSXA AMSTERDAM 2026

Original Film Title: Forbidden Love

Director’s Name: Giulia Nicoletta Latz

Writer’s Name: Giulia Nicoletta Latz

Producer: Giulia Nicoletta Latz

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany

Language: German

Runtime: 11 minutes 19 seconds

Film Description:

In a late-medieval inspired world, a Knight and a Maid secretly fall in love despite the social and personal consequences of their relationship. When their forbidden bond is discovered, the Knight is forced to fight for her life in a duel.

Forbidden Love combines historical research with an arthouse-inspired, fictional narrative to explore how history can be communicated through film while preserving the emotional and narrative strengths of the medium. At the same time, the film uses this space for personal interpretation and to create visibility for queer and female perspectives that are often overlooked in conventional representations of the Middle Ages.

Original Film Title: Jarak

Director’s Name: Joey Pavić

Writer’s Name: Joey Pavić

Producer: Nina Smythe, Esther van Asselt, Dewi Sarginson, Sylvia Arredondo

Country of Origin: Netherlands

Country of Filming: Netherlands

Language: Dutch

Runtime: 15 minutes 12 seconds

Film Description:

Ryan meets his mother Nia for the first time since his coming out in a restaurant to celebrate the life of his late father. And their waiter is Ryans old fling Gabriel.

Original Film Title: Metropolhis A.i. Music Festival 2027

Director’s Name: Giovanni Francesco Ferrai

Writer’s Name: Giovanni Francesco Ferrai

Producer: Giovanni Francesco Ferrai

Country of Origin: Italy

Country of Filming: Italy

Language: English

Runtime: 22 minutes 31 seconds

Film Description:

Metropolhis is a full AI-generated TV music festival with 30 contestants, presenters, voting and original performances.
All music, lyrics and vocal concepts are original works by Ferrai Giovanni Francesco.
Persistent characters recur across roles and songs, while selected performers appear in synchronized parallel versions.
Visuals were created with a custom local multi-model pipeline using LTX-2, Wan and Qwen-based models, followed by manual editing, compositing, audio mixing and mastering.

Original Film Title: Mimic

Director’s Name: A.J. LeSage

Writer’s Name: A.J. LeSage

Producer: Atlie Gilbert

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 37 minutes 19 seconds

Film Description:

A mid level office worker attempts to imitate more successful men with unforeseen consequences

Original Film Title: The Battlefield Beyond the Records

Director’s Name: Euhyun Jahng

Writer’s Name: Euhyun Jahng

Producer: Euhyun Jahng

Country of Origin: South Korea, United States

Country of Filming: South Korea

Language: English

Runtime: 12 minutes 3 seconds

Film Description:

The Battlefield Beyond the Records is a documentary that traces how the roles of women have evolved amid the changing tides of time. For a long time, the history of warfare has been recorded primarily around the names of kings, generals, and warriors. Yet, outside the bounds of those records, there have always been women who sustained their communities in the ways demanded by each era.
In ancient Greek and Roman societies, rather than stepping directly onto the battlefield, women were tasked with bearing healthy descendants, maintaining the household, and preserving the order of the community. Spartan women trained their bodies to raise strong warriors, while Roman women carried vital responsibilities within the home, religion, and society.
As time passed, the nature of warfare underwent a massive transformation. The battlefield—once centered on spears, shields, and physical strength—has now evolved into modern warfare powered by information, technology, AI, and networks. As the methods of war shifted, the capabilities required within the military changed as well, and the roles of women have expanded beyond the supportive positions of the past into much broader domains.
Through the insights of historians and the voices of active-duty female soldiers, The Battlefield Beyond the Records bridges the past and the present to examine how the roles of women have transformed. It is a work that looks not only at the history of war left in the records, but also at the time spent by the women who existed beyond them, alongside the battlefields of today.

Original Film Title: Smoky

Director’s Name: James Fink-Jensen

Writer’s Name: James Fink-Jensen

Producer: Prashanth Gunasekaran, Michael Hurst, Levi Roberts-Brothers, Zachary Macer, Georgia-May Russ, Jonathan Zsofi, James Fink-Jensen, Matt Hicks, Anna Claire Ma, Lynnaire MacDonald, Chris Lambert

Country of Origin: New Zealand

Country of Filming: New Zealand

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 20 minutes 4 seconds

Film Description:

Smoky the Clown is missing, and nobody seems in a hurry to find him.

He vanishes on the eve of a life-saving surgery. No one in the family seems alarmed. The house grows quieter. Questions go unanswered.

Dawn doesn’t accept it. Already under pressure at law school, she pushes back against the silence. She turns to her cousin Chloe, Smoky’s daughter, and starts piecing together what’s been left out.

What begins as a search for a missing man turns into something else entirely.