Category: BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM – WSXA PARIS 2026

(WINNER)

Original Film Title: No horses on Mars

Director’s Name: Bea de Visser

Writer’s Name: Bea de Visser

Producer: Bea de Visser

Country of Origin: Netherlands

Country of Filming: Netherlands

Language: English

Runtime: 14 minutes 54 seconds

Film Description:

We experience a trailer ride on the highway and wake up from anesthesia in a veterinary clinic. ‘No horses on Mars’ is practically a road film, whose POV’s from the horse is the most effective element of the film. The horse appears as the galloping mind that resides in all domesticated horses. The human being is introduced as a screen viewer who follows the horse, wants to measure, records and knows her as an object. Ultimately, from the human perspective in the film, there seems to be a glimmer of recognition for the individuality of the horse.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: La Quête

Director’s Name: Jean-Baptiste BAGARIA

Writer’s Name: Jean-Baptiste BAGARIA

Producer: Jean-Baptiste BAGARIA

Country of Origin: France

Country of Filming: France

Language: French

Runtime: 1 hour 36 minutes

Film Description:

Pierre is a young Parisian in his thirties, in perdition. He is summoned to two strange notaries in order to receive the inheritance of his recently deceased father who abandoned him and his late mother before his birth.
The two notaries explain to him that in order to receive this inheritance, Pierre must go in search of a password in Tourrettes sur Loup, where his father lives. He set up a quest for his son to find out the truth about his abandonment and understand who his father was. During these few days in Tourrettes, Pierre will meet different characters related to his father who will guide him in his quest and lead him towards the truth.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Consciousness Air Time – with DJ-OM: Living in the Rhythm of Your Love

Director’s Name: Phillip Wayne Jarrell

Writer’s Name: Phillip Wayne Jarrell

Producer: Phillip Wayne Jarrell

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 9 minutes 29 seconds seconds

Film Description:

Consciousness Air Time — with DJ-OM: Living in the Rhythm of Your Love is a cinematic music experience that unfolds as a guided transmission rather than a conventional narrative. Beginning in the quiet of first light, DJ-OM invites the viewer into awareness through breath, sound, and rhythm. As the song Living in the Rhythm of Your Love emerges, she moves through a cyber-noir city—disconnected, searching, and drawn inward after losing her digital tether. The film flows from isolation into motion, merging sacred imagery with future technology as music becomes environment and time becomes fluid. It closes in stillness, offering an invitation to reflect on attention, creation, and love as a living rhythm.

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: CORPUS MORTIS

Director’s Name: Philippe Verichoux

Writer’s Name: Philippe Verichoux

Producer: Philippe Verichoux

Country of Origin: France

Country of Filming: France

Language: Création numérique (IA)

Runtime: 4 minutes 54 seconds

Film Description:

Corpus Mortis is set in 18th-century aristocratic France, where desire, excess, and power intertwine. Through a dark and stylized vision, the film explores a world of decadence, dangerous love, and duels, where passion inevitably leads to downfall. As lust and ambition intensify, the characters are drawn into a descent toward darkness and self-destruction.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: HIVE

Director’s Name: Kaperro

Writer’s Name: Kaperroka

Producer: Kaperro

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming: United Kingdom

Language: No dialog

Runtime: 3 minutes 43 seconds

Film Description:

HIVE was conceived with the intention of depicting the moment following psychological overwhelm, a sensation that in today’s world we sometimes sense may just be a few more steps in any direction. Movement becomes symbolic of the processing of that overwhelm and in turn the rewiring of neural pathways. Each movement is a psychological shift. It’s a visceral navigation of the daily micro-traumas that the modern world relentlessly throws at us which are then exorcised through a physicality that echoes the primitive and, shakes off the violence of our relationship with those experiences. We start anew. We remind ourselves that it is what we allow in. While there are moments when we come up for air with a sensation of a cleansing clarity we must keep on breaking on through.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: 3

Director’s Name: Kenny Cochran

Writer’s Name: Sammy Kithuka

Producer: TJ Jones

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 12 minutes 52 seconds

Film Description:

A double agent fights to not break his cover

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: “ESSAYS ON YVES”

Director’s Name: Karim Kari

Writer’s Name: Cavi Borges, Patrícia Niedermeier

Producer: Patrícia Niedermeier

Country of Origin: Brazil

Country of Filming: Brazil

Language: Portuguese

Runtime: 1 hour 7 minutes 2 seconds

Film Description:

In ESSAYS ABOUT YVES a meeting is established: an imagined and imaginary dialogue between Patrícia Niedermeier and Yves Klein, who died prematurely at the age of 34.

The film is a free biography that is full of artistic autobiography and, above all, it is an emotional exercise in imagery, pulsing like the unpredictable rhythm of a heart.

(HONORABLE MENTION)

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

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: “No MiLk TOdaY”-HerMan,s Hermits

Director’s Name: Alakfilms

Writer’s Name: Alakfilms

Producer: Alakfilms

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 6 minutes 57 seconds

Film Description:

Weaving old footage into a potholder of humor and pain.
Police brutality and drug addiction.

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: Lullaby

Director’s Name: Julian Bonnin

Writer’s Name: Julian Bonnin

Producer: Julian Bonnin

Country of Origin: Portugal

Country of Filming: Portugal

Language: Portuguese

Runtime: 1 hour 3 minutes 4 seconds

Film Description:

Julian believes he has already died inside. Between dirty rooms, cigarettes and casual encounters, he survives in a state of emotional drift. Until love — real or imagined — erupts, and life fills with bodies, voices, lights, and promises. But what seemed like salvation begins to crumble, revealing the asymmetry between what is offered and what one is willing to receive. With a mise-en-scène made of fragments: cats, trains, spilled wine, and music that invades without asking permission, Many Die Too Late is a film diary of enamorment and loss. It is not about narrating what happened, but about recording what burned in the instant when there was nothing left to save.