Category: WSXA AMSTERDAM 2026

Original Film Title: Pillow Men

Director’s Name: Jacky Wong

Writer’s Name: Jacky Wong

Producer: Jacky Wong

Country of Origin: China

Country of Filming: China

Language: Chinese

Runtime: 5 minutes 26 seconds

Film Description:

Pillow Men is a short music video steeped in a dark, absurdist aesthetic. In a world governed by the Pillow System, people voluntarily don white square-shaped pillows, surrendering their consciousness to an AI system. Under the guise of benefiting humanity, the system distills individual skills, creativity, and emotions into replaceable tapes—archived and ready for deployment at any moment.
The protagonist, a lone dissenter who refuses the pillow, is marked as a depreciated asset by the system, hunted, captured, and subjected to forced assimilation. She breaks free, sabotages the system’s power core, and triggers a cascading collapse. Yet when she stands on an overpass looking down at the city, she discovers that faced with the choice to take it off or not, those who briefly awakened have all chosen the same path.
The film culminates in a solitary vocal performance amid a torrential storm—a modern fable about freedom, control, and the haunting question: Is blankness also a crime?
All visual assets were AI-generated and human-refined. Every stage of the production was handled by a single person.

Original Film Title: Second Chance

Director’s Name: Piotr Szymon Suszka

Writer’s Name: Piotr Szymon Suszka

Producer: Piotr Szymon Suszka

Country of Origin: Poland

Country of Filming: Poland

Language: Polish

Runtime: 12 minutes 2 seconds

Film Description:

This short film is a proof of concept and serves as the first chapter of a larger story, whose future parts have already been planned. It presents only a fragment of its events, characters and mysteries, leaving the audience with questions whose answers lie within a broader narrative developed through an ebook, a screenplay and future film projects.

“Second Chance” combines thriller, action cinema, metaphysical elements and themes related to artificial intelligence in a story about loss, redemption and the struggle to reclaim one’s life.

Original Film Title: I.AM.2042

Director’s Name: Sara Niroobakhsh

Writer’s Name: Sara Niroobakhsh

Producer: Sara Niroobakhsh

Country of Origin: Canada

Country of Filming: Canada

Language: English

Runtime: 6 minutes 33 seconds

Film Description:

This film is a diary spoken aloud — not for an audience, but for the sake of remembering. It doesn’t tell a story. It listens to what remains when stories disappear.

Each scene is a breath held in time. A trace. A refusal to vanish.

What you hear is a woman who speaks from a future where nothing is stable — not land, not memory, not language. She speaks quietly, because everything loud has already collapsed.

This is not about what happened. It’s about what was never allowed to happen. A birth that only took place in a dream. A name never written. A place never returned.

The film holds space for what is unrecorded — not as absence, but as presence. A different kind of survival.

Original Film Title: HAYDON: Patron Saint of the Obsessed

Director’s Name: Lucas Sabean

Writer’s Name: Lucas Sabean

Producer: Lucas Sabean

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 19 minutes 21 seconds

Film Description:

The tragic, true story of 19th-century painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s relentless fight for artistic immortality, told through the consuming obsession of his own private journal

Original Film Title: A New Day

Director’s Name: Dariush Rezaei

Writer’s Name: Dariush Rezaei

Producer: Dariush Rezaei

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany

Language: English

Runtime: 11 minutes

Film Description:

When a “Text-to-Reality” AI update grants him god-like power from his bedroom, a teenager’s playful experiments spiral into something he can’t undo.