Category: WSXA AMSTERDAM 2026

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Abiding Madeira – dir. João Monge

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Original Film Title: Abiding Madeira

Director’s Name: João Monge

Writer’s Name: João Monge, Eduardo Pimentel

Producer: João Monge, Andre Carvalho, José Valente

Country of Origin: Portugal

Country of Filming: Portugal

Language: English

Runtime: 49 minutes

Film Description:

Abiding Madeira observes the presence of surfer Alex Botelho within the island that shaped him. In Madeira, waves, rock and water have been shaping the territory for millennia. Against that scale, the human presence becomes temporary.
The film shifts the centre of the narrative. It is not a story about a man confronting the ocean, but about a human body existing inside a system far older than itself.
Between sea, stone and memory, time stretches beyond the human rhythm. The island does not react. It does not answer. It simply continues.
What remains is not conquest, but coexistence.

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ROUGH _about the inner depths of fear. – dir. Carsten Fuhrmann

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Original Film Title: ROUGH _about the inner depths of fear.

Director’s Name: Carsten Fuhrmann

Writer’s Name: inorganic fishing Authors’ Lab Berlin

Producer: kollektv soziales geräusch

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany

Language: German

Runtime: 11 minutes 27 seconds

Film Description:

Inspired by poetic texts such as “also… ich hab”, “Rohrtext Nr.1”, and “Schlaftext Nr.3”, the film unfolds a visual and auditory translation of fragmented, splintered language. Sentence breaks, neologisms, and sound play create an experience of uncertainty, hope, and existential disorientation. Physical imagery, spatial contrasts, and the interplay of openness and confinement reflect inner states and dream logic. The film shows how language can be both a tool of expression and a limitation – an open space for association and reflection.

As an association-based film, ROUGH deliberately moves away from linear narrative. It links images, sound, and language through mood, repetition, and rupture – like daydreams. The goal is to make inner spaces communicable and tangible. Viewers are invited to navigate meanings for themselves, wandering between hope, fragmentation, and identity.

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Rooted – dir. Sailesh Rajan Israni

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Original Film Title: Rooted

Director’s Name: Sailesh Rajan Israni

Writer’s Name: Sailesh Rajan Israni

Producer: Sailesh Rajan Israni

Country of Origin: United Arab Emirates

Country of Filming: United Arab Emirates

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 45 minutes

Film Description:

In a Real Estate Industry obsessed with Luxury, Scale, and Spectacle, Rooted is a about a 20 years journey of a Real Estate Developer with quiet counter-narrative of building with purpose for the people who need housing the most in the City.
Set against the ever-changing skyline of Dubai, the documentary follows how Dubai has evolved and its juxtaposition with a family, their work, and the spaces they create and plan succession. Through unhurried observation, Rooted explores what it means to build while remaining grounded: in values, in responsibility, and in time.
Rather than celebrating architecture as object or scale as success, Rooted treats the built environment as memory—something inherited, inhabited, and ultimately passed on. Homes are not endpoints, but continuations. Buildings do not conclude stories; they hold them.
Dubai, often portrayed as a city of extremes, appears here differently: not as a symbol of excess, but as a place where permanence is negotiated daily—between tradition and modernity, ambition and restraint, legacy and change.
Rooted asks a simple, enduring question:
What does it mean to grow without losing where you come from?

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Keepers Of The Door – dir. Folasade

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Original Film Title: Keepers Of The Door

Director’s Name: Folasade

Writer’s Name: Folasade

Producer: Folasade, Jessica Auguste

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 20 minutes 22 seconds

Film Description:

A comedy about hosts dealing with the hardships of working in a fine dine restaurant in Hollywood.

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Secret – dir. Jia Chen

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Original Film Title: Secret

Director’s Name: Jia Chen

Writer’s Name: Xinyu Zhang

Producer: Xinyu Zhang

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming: United Kingdom

Language: English

Runtime: 17 minutes

Film Description:

A daughter with a new age female mind yearns for and fears a relationship. Unable to cook, she was forced to get married by her father. A father with Alzheimer’s disease wants his daughter to find support early, before he completely loses his memory. They quarreled and finally reconciled.

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CPA – dir. Gabriela Revilla Lugo

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Original Film Title: CPA

Director’s Name: Gabriela Revilla Lugo

Writer’s Name: Jelena Woehr

Producer: Britt Ellis

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 9 minutes 41 seconds

Film Description:

Three undercover federal agents working in the world of hip-hop discover they’ve been unknowingly investigating each other—but none of them is willing to reveal the mix-up and return to their desk jobs empty-handed.

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DND – dir. Ravi Kishore Donthikurthi

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Original Film Title: DND

Director’s Name: Ravi Kishore Donthikurthi

Writer’s Name: Ravi Kishore Donthikurthi, Krishna Kishore Donthikurthi

Producer: Ravi Kishore Donthikurthi, Krishna Kishore Donthikurthi

Country of Origin: United Arab Emirates

Country of Filming: United Arab Emirates

Language: English, Portuguese

Runtime: 24 minutes 59 seconds

Film Description:

Danny is everywhere—except where he truly needs to be. Trapped between constant notifications and a life that moves on without him, a distracted husband and overwhelmed father begins to lose his family with every moment of inattention. As his routine fragments into surreal visions and painful confrontations, DND reveals the human cost of screen addiction—and the fragile hope found in reconnecting with the present.

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WiFi Date – dir. Daniela Lugo, Giorgio Rossini

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Original Film Title: WiFi Date

Director’s Name: Daniela Lugo, Giorgio Rossini

Writer’s Name: Daniela Lugo, Giorgio Rossini, Derek Stusynski

Producer: Daniela Lugo, Giorgio Rossini

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 11 minutes 47 seconds

Film Description:

Johnathan is ready to start dating for the first time, and when he gets set up on a blind date by his cousin, he arrives at his date’s house dressed to impress. Awkward but sincere, Johnathan shows up only to be mistaken by his date’s sister Vanessa for a last-minute tech guy there to fix the Wi-Fi. Stumbling his way through suggestive misunderstandings, hilarity ensues as he plays along with the absurdity. Will he sabotage his shot at romance, or somehow stumble backward into his first real fling?

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Last Song – dir. Remco Merbis

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Original Film Title: Last Song

Director’s Name: Remco Merbis

Writer’s Name: Remco Merbis

Producer: Remco Merbis

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming: United Kingdom

Language: English

Runtime: 3 minutes 45 seconds

Film Description:

At a school party, a quiet moment of eye contact over a song sparks a relationship shaped by music, closeness, and shared discovery. Last Song unfolds over a single summer, drifting through sun-warmed days, late nights, and the small rituals that define first love. Told in fragments of memory, the film traces how something once effortless slowly falls out of sync, giving way to silence and emotional distance. When a familiar track unexpectedly returns, it pulls the past into the present, asking whether certain connections ever truly fade. A tender, nostalgic portrait of young love, growing apart, and the fragile possibility of reconnection.

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The Future Shapes the Past: The Hilsner Case – dir. Bryan Richard Felber

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Original Film Title: The Future Shapes the Past: The Hilsner Case

Director’s Name: Bryan Richard Felber

Writer’s Name: Bryan Richard Felber

Producer: Bryan Richard Felber

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: Canada, Germany, United States

Language: Czech, English

Runtime: 1 hour 18 minutes 41 seconds

Film Description:

In 1899, the murder of a young woman in the woods of Bohemia sparked a blood libel that still haunts the Czech Republic today. Leopold Hilsner, the Jewish man wrongly accused, remains legally guilty, despite activists fighting to overturn the verdict for more than 30 years.