Category: WSXA PARIS 2026

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Enemy Heroes

Director’s Name: Mark Diamond

Writer’s Name: Mark Diamond

Producer: Laura Lee Diamond

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English,

Runtime: 7 minutes 51 seconds

Film Description:

Enemy Heroes “Because… sometimes it is not easy to tell… Who is the Enemy?.. Who are the Heroes?”

Enemy Heroes is a multi-level WWII version of ‘All Quiet on The Western Front’ in which the audience agonizes over the heart-wrenching choices the protagonists are forced to make – and in so doing clarifies their own values.
It’s not a film about War. It is a film about Humanity.

(WINNER)

Original Film Title: Horizon

Director’s Name: analogmirage

Writer’s Name: analogmirage

Producer: analogmirage

Country of Origin: France

Country of Filming: France

Language:

Runtime: 4 minutes 2 seconds

Film Description:

“Sometimes I look at the horizon and it feels like something in me slips away.”

Horizon is an AI-generated short film, the story of the Air Runner Girl, a girl who can fly through dreams.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Blurred Days

Director’s Name: 博文 郑, 昱晗 张

Writer’s Name: 昱晗 张

Producer: 佳鑫 董

Country of Origin: China

Country of Filming: China

Language: Chinese

Runtime: 18 minutes 3 seconds

Film Description:

This is the world of an Alzheimer’s patient.
Here, reality and memory intertwine.
The same conversations and similar actions repeat in endless loops. As the audience tries to find clues within the repetition, they gradually come to realize that this is not a dream, but an unstoppable cognitive decline. Through the ongoing confrontation with the caregiver, the individual’s hesitation and helplessness are no longer something belonging to others—they quietly turn inward, toward ourselves.

In the ebbing of memory, one is trapped between wakefulness and dreaming. At that moment, what is it that we still possess?

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: The Strange Plantz Land – The Almond

Director’s Name: Jiahao Hou, Jiangbo Cui

Writer’s Name: Jiahao Hou

Producer: JInbo Zhao, Xi Feng

Country of Origin: China

Country of Filming: China

Language: English

Runtime: 16 minutes 37 seconds

Film Description:

Flat Almond, Mountain Almond, and Sherlock Holmes — A Trinity Experiment is a surreal allegorical AI short film and the opening prologue to a feature-length AI-animated project adapted from the original novel The Strange Plantz Land. Drawing inspiration from Traditional Chinese materia medica and the lingering shadow of the Great-makers, the film unfolds in a strange world inhabited by medicinal plants in human-like form. In the mountains of Jirgis, where bitterness is upheld as order, Mountain Almond sets out in search of the vanished Flat Almond and, together with Sherlock Holmes from another world, is drawn into a trinity experiment of sweetness and bitterness, desire and discipline. As the secrets behind hedges, pipelines, factories, and the taboo of sweetness slowly emerge, the search for a lost beloved becomes an inquiry into whether “unity” is salvation—or violence. What distinguishes this film is its unique attempt to deconstruct humanistic themes such as love, desire, order and freedom through mathematical logic, formulas and functions: it uses precise mathematical models to map the contradictions between sweetness and bitterness, uses functional relationships to interpret the dynamic balance of desire and discipline, and uses logical deduction to dissect the essence of “unity” and its dual nature of salvation and violence. This mathematical deconstruction is not a rigid display of formulas, but a creative way to inject critical thinking into the narrative—by quantifying and analyzing humanistic contradictions, it prompts the audience to rethink the rationality of established order, the authenticity of desire, and the hidden violence behind the pursuit of “unity”, adding a layer of profound intellectual depth and critical perspective to the surreal allegorical story.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Marked for SNUFF

Director’s Name: Pavel Karusev

Writer’s Name: Pavel Karusev

Producer: Pavel Karusev

Country of Origin: Kazakhstan

Country of Filming: Kazakhstan

Language: English

Runtime: 9 minutes 59 seconds

Film Description:

The ’70s. While on a black ops mission in Latin America, two GIs broke ranks to pursue a lucrative score. The plan went sideways, and they went their separate ways. But the wounds of war never truly heal; these old buddies will meet again, this time in the concrete jungle. And this time, one of them will be motivated not by greed, but by something else…

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: The Last Lie

Director’s Name: Boyeon Kim

Writer’s Name: Boyeon Kim

Producer: Boyeon Kim

Country of Origin: South Korea

Country of Filming: South Korea

Language: English

Runtime: 5 minutes

Film Description:

A terminally ill dementia patient requests memory manipulation to conceal her mistakes. Designed to reproduce only truth, the humanoid ‘Ian’ violates protocol and gifts her a ‘happy lie’. Ultimately, standing trial for ethical violations, Ian erases even his own memory, preserving that lie as the sole truth, and poses a question to the audience: Who is more unethical? The humanoid who violated regulations for human happiness, the human who distorts truth for their own happiness, or the powerful who collect memories to enjoy wealth and eternal life?

A memory-recording and playback specialist humanoid manipulates the elderly man’s memories of his own wrongdoing—a betrayal of humanity—into fantastical recollections at his earnest request. After the elderly man’s death, facing disposal for tampering, the humanoid testifies at the tribunal: ‘The old man wanted happiness, unaware of the truth that he killed his daughter’s parents.’ It reveals it had already synchronized its entire system with the man’s false memories. Through the most sublime crime committed by a machine, this sci-fi human drama questions whether the essence of humanity lies in ‘truth’ or in ‘benevolent deception’. Its twist ending reveals how powerless our beliefs in ‘free will’ and ‘choice’ can be within the design of a vast system, compelling us to reexamine what true humanity truly means.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Stars of Modern Architecture, Part 1 (Santiago Calatrava)s

Director’s Name: Dancho Atanasov

Writer’s Name: Dancho Atanasov

Producer: Dancho Atanasov

Country of Origin: Bulgaria

Country of Filming: Bulgaria

Language:

Runtime: 3 minutes 4 seconds

Film Description:

A 3D interactive photo exhibition in Space, combining my award-winning architectural photos with planets, stars, nebulae, suns. A flying camera, follows an invisible path, just like a giant roller-coaster in Space, turning and meandering between the celestial objects, passing through hyperspace jumps and bursting asteroids, while the photos suddenly appear. All that is combined with a beautiful music and sound effects. The project is available 2D (HD -1920×1080) and 3D (4K UHD – 3840×2160) for immersive art experience and 360 VR, and fulldome (4K – 4096×4096).

Part 1 of this project is based on the architectural artworks of the famous Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and the photos were taken in various cities in Spain – Valencia, Barcelona, Santa Cruz de Tenerife.