Image Forum Festival 2025

"I thought I would enter another world by climbing over the fence." In August of 1978, the director's father made a second attempt to escape along with two friends. Headed from China to Hong Kong, a distance of 200 km, they made their way through grassy fields. On August 18th, far away in the UK, Siouxsie and the Banshees released the protest song "Hong Kong Garden." That morning, a father … A film that weaves a personal history that has been lost amid a chaotic social history.

As the east wind begins to blow, bringing warmth to the water, landscapes spill and blend together. In time, the mountains drift into a slumber.

In October of 2021, North Korean defector JU Hyeongeon escaped from prison in China's Jilin Province. After 40 days on the run, JU was wounded by police gunfire and captured near the Fengman Dam. Following the traces of a man who escaped from North Korea across a region straddling the part of China formerly known as Manchuria, this landscape film grapples with an aspect of modern East Asian history that still cannot be easily addressed.

Animation with an intense, violent touch unfolds based on the filmmaker's experiences of things like parental relationships and sexual identity. There is simultaneously a manifestation of subjective suffering and the pain of talking about oneself. The unique chyron features a "women's script" used in Hunan Province, China. The dedication to XIANGLIN Sao, a female character who appears in a novel by LU Xun, is also notable.

A dazzling cinematic poem from Macao, the "Las Vegas of the East" where citizens' lives are deeply affected by the casino tourism industry. Against the urban landscape of contemporary Macao, the screen is filled with card tricks that deceive the eyes of the audience. A beautiful, ironic fairytale of a city of illusions, told through the eyes of a "joker" who is kicked out of a casino.

A distinctive work embodying the spirit of animation. A large crow sits on a utility pole. When a boy looks up at it, he hears a voice from somewhere. It is the crow. The crow releases purely white droppings in front of the boy, and says of the shape of their splatter, "It is a star." An allegory containing cultural commentary unfolds. Will the boy come to see the droppings he had considered "dirty" as a "star"?

A director blames the failed shoot on personal feelings toward the actor. The actor auditions for a role in a shamanic tale about a goblin that's entered a woman's body. The story is told twice, solely from one person's point of view, but differently.

July 1st, 2022. An ordinary day on a streetcorner in Hong Kong. Gusts of wind gradually grow stronger, however, and a voice on the radio warns of an approaching typhoon. This was the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong being returned to China by the UK. Banners for the ceremony are whipped by the wind, and attendees are lashed by rain. A record of the day in 2022 a typhoon that would claim 12 lives in southern China made landfall and a historic day in Hong Kong.

There are stones stuck in "my" head. I have settled down with a lazy cat who visits at night and a rambunctious dog who comes in the daytime. The cat and dog oppose each other but exist at the same time, and the biggest problem is the cat. The opposing symptoms of manic depression that plague the filmmaker's life are allegorically depicted through animation in a colorful, pop-art style.

The filmmaker, a student at a Japanese language school, injures his dominant right hand and practices writing Japanese with his left hand. Compared to the Korean his right hand is used to writing, his left-handed Japanese is faltering and imprecise. A day off spent with friends from the Japanese school. Poems recited in his native language are layered on top of images moving violently back and forth in the gap between ease and impatience to create a unique rhythm. A new approach to the diary film.

Because of the pandemic, a shrine maiden for a god of the sea begins working at an archeology museum. This work depicts a protagonist who, embracing the question "is scientific understanding not simply collective subjectivity?", chooses to live with both a modern and traditional "identity" at the same time. It also adopts a documentary/fiction structure in which truth and fiction exist simultaneously. The latest film from WANG Mowen, who was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2021 IFF for Trinity.

The tragedy of an air raid on Tokyo on March 10th, 1945, is described based on witness testimony. The central focus is the narrative of a mother who was 24 years old at the time and ran from the flames leading her four-year-old son by the hand and carrying her eight-month-old twin daughters on her back. The testimony is taken from A History of Tokyo Air Raids/War Damage (1973) and other sources. As though enveloping this history, the footage of the Tokyo rivers and parks through which the mother fled as they are today is deeply affecting.

A hallucinatory animated film about family. "My" narrative unfolds. My mother called "me" a "traitor." My grandmother transforms into a spider, spinning her web through endless hardships. Countless snails creep over torn off fingers, the bed, and "my" body. This work filled with disturbing images that appear in front of "me" examines the question, "What is the destiny to which a woman is born?"

Houtong is an area in the mountains of northern Taiwan that was formerly home to a flourishing coal mining industry. Long ago many monkeys lived in its caves, but they have been exterminated by human beings. As memories of harsh working conditions in the coal mines are laid out through the testimony of the living, the dead who dwell in the ground and spiritual/divine beings are brought into sharp relief. A documentary steeped in imagination that is presented with beautiful visuals.

A meditation on time and perception, Ordinary Life explores the tension between repetition and change, as human consciousness drifts through past and future while the body remains anchored in the present.

"Ghost" is a slang word that means suddenly ignoring someone without any kind of communication. The protagonist, who becomes unable to contact her lover while travelling in Bangkok and finds herself with time on her hands, begins to wander the city like a ghost. While ironically incorporating contemporary communications tools such as smartphone screens and emoji, this work employs stop-motion and reshooting to poetically sublimate travel video-like footage.

A man smokes a cigarette by the sea. A woman in a room seems to be waiting for someone; her face is made up and a table is set for two. The person she is waiting for does not arrive. Before she knows it, she finds herself reminiscing about time spent with her lover… A work of animation that impresses with its use of "macaron colors" amid its dark tone. With delicate sound design, it painfully and poetically depicts a "parting."

This video installation explores Changgyeonggung, a strange place where a zoo, amusement park, and palaces coexist. After uncovering its tragic history, the place – once associated with childhood memories – is stripped of its emotional appeal.

A work of doll animation that superbly combines items such as live beetles, pieces of flesh, and large quantities of rice ears and husks as its backdrop. The setting is a labyrinthine cave. When a doll emerges from the ears of rice, it finds a world in which groups of dolls tread on pieces of flesh, jump rope, and carry fruit. An unconventional work in which lifeless dolls resonate with living beings from the natural world and move as though they have been given a soul.

The fragile materialities of Yangzhou wood engraving and analog film converge in Lei Lei's fractal portrait of labor and craft. Exploring techniques of light and poetry, wood and celluloid, re-engraved montages demonstrations of expertise with a cacophonous electronic soundtrack and the personal histories of the women whose labor sustains these traditions.

With the aid of a layered construction of the image, Takashi has managed to capture the different reflections of light on the surface of water. The acoustic-noise-like music and the dancing particles of light move like swarms of microorganisms and in this way slowly cover the entire screen.

The film captures the dishes on a table in a forest over a long period of time. The audience's imagination is stimulated as time passes and the scenery. An eloquent story is told as meaning emerges from the subject. A drama is born out of the contrast between- and the death of- man and nature.

Mizuki Kiyama's short animation utilizes a paint on glass technique to render a young girl's visit to a neighborhood sento (bath house) with her mother with dazzling sensuous wonder. Evoking childish fascination at daily rituals, this quotidian act amidst feminine intimacy becomes a space of otherworldly fantasy.

Does sound I make here in Seoul reach Paris?

Ernst Mo works for courier service Delivery Dancer. Every day, she transports an endless stream of parcels, following algorithmically generated routes through a labyrinthine Seoul. After she runs into an alternative version of herself, her reality slowly starts to crack – with all the attendant consequences. In her own unique style, artist Ayoung Kim creates a fascinating and pretty disturbing world.

Inspired by Henri Michaux's poems and drawings about his experience with mescaline, "Miserable Miracle" explores the limits of language and perception, creating connections between sound, meaning, line and movement.

Stagnation in the body cannot keep up with the changes in real life. When memory of the trembling hand constantly haunting, when the cavity is filled by artificial materials – if body remembers, how should it response with the years of traumatic past? Three of us, describe the indescribable body changes try picking up the hints and signs.

The People's Defense Force attempts to retrieve a comrade's body from a battle during Myanmar's Spring Revolution. Two members lose legs, leading to a heart-wrenching funeral with an empty coffin.

A couple who are physically separated find ways to express their devotion and resistance despite the man's imprisonment. He is based on an acquaintance of the filmmaker's who was jailed after being found in possession of small explosives used in anti-government protests. Originally presented as an installation, this film uses screen divisions, choreographed movements and sound design to portray enduring bonds in the face of a repressive regime. It transforms a short story about a dystopian world where affection is prohibited into a poignant reflection on the human cost behind political struggle in Thailand today.

The Spirit Level meditates on the political conflicts, trauma, and violence in the troubled Thailand reflected through the artist's road trips across the northeastern region of Thailand along the Mekong River.

Mueda was a massacre. The name is that of the village in Northern Mozambique where in 1960 it took place. The Portuguese colonial regime did the killing. In independent Mozambique, those inhabitants of Mueda who survived regularly re-enact the massacre in situ. They themselves play the roles of victims, assassins, and spectators. Ruy Guerra, now a Brazilian but born in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique), filmed this extraordinary creation of liberated popular culture, intercutting it with first-hand interviews on the massacre. The mix is compelling, and the grave yet joyous spectacle unique.

An experimental film portraying different skies in very long takes.

Intimate and fragmented moments unfold in a community of zoos and animal rescue centers. As histories of these institutions are uncovered, dedicated workers commit both day and night to caring for the remaining enclosed animals, fostering a mutual bond that transcends imagined boundaries between human and animal.

A major early work by Sharon LOCKHART that pairs with her photographic series entitled "Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team." This is a 1997 work by Sharon LOCKHART, who is active across the domains of art and film through the media of photographs and moving images and has established herself as a unique presence in the domain of fine art. The choreographed warmup exercises of a suburban junior high school girls' basketball club are performed in front of a drop curtain in a school gymnasium in a distinctly ritualistic manner. Compared to the "dynamic" impression given by the artist's photographs of the same scene, this moving image work shot with a fixed camera is extremely "static." This work in which the camera carefully documents the girls' choreographed movements also serves as a portrait of society itself. A masterpiece said to have influenced James BENNING's works from the 2000s, this film will be screened in 16mm.

This film was produced using only existing 3D models, called "Assets". "Assets" are material data distributed on the Internet that can be freely used for various productions of digital images such as games and videos. I downloaded a large amount of data of those assets and placed in a scene. The infinitely replicable data becomes a crowd, sweeping away everything. I shot the model of a soldier who was there. I filmed the soldiers being transformed in the mass of data, depicting the Internet as a contemporary battlefield.

Inspired by the ambiguity of simulation theory, There is No Spoon navigates the blurred boundaries between reality and perception within a world devoid of objectives or destinations. Set in a liminal, computer-generated environment, the work constructs an assemblage of impersonal, timeless structures — pure artificiality, stripped of anything organic or natural. Suspended between dream and nightmare, this surreal landscape evokes both mystery and unease, guiding viewers to move forward in the face of uncertainty. Referencing The Matrix, the work interrogates the paradox of existence within constructed realities, challenging viewers to question simulation, illusion, and perception itself. The absence of a clear purpose compels engagement with uncertainty, inviting reflection on how digital environments shape experience and understanding. The walkthrough is recorded live, with an evolving soundscape performed in real time by a sound artist Craig Wells using synthesizers.

"Rabu Rabu" manipulates the framework and aesthetics of gal game, a type of Japanese video game centred on interactions with attractive young girls, presenting a fictional gal game in which the path of falling in love and winning over the female protagonist no longer exists. In "The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations", Eva Illouz expresses that the idea of unloving is a plot without a clear structure. Mirroring the digital and physical AFK (Away From Keyboard) worlds, "Rabu Rabu" explores one's agency within and beyond the screen in a heteronormative society of late capitalism and blurs the boundary between game and video. "Rabu rabu" means lovey-dovey in Japanese.

Sightjacking explores the boundaries of perspective and the nature of gaze within the virtual space of Grand Theft Auto V through a unique mod that shifts the game camera's point of view. Rather than following the protagonist, the camera switches to the perspective of the nearest NPC.

A digital work that probes the shifting concept of "homeland" in a mediated era, exploring how identity, memory and place are re‑imagined under networked conditions. The film was listed under the theme "Cruising in the Realm of the Unreal" and appears to engage with the intersection of virtual space and physical belonging.

Assets collected from the Internet: They are arranged in suburban scenes such as shopping malls and housing complexes, and live in them. Under the program that is executed, the daily life of the assets that are repeated like a game is depicted.

Early in the morning, the children start their journey to kindergarten, hand-in-hand with their parents. There is no shortage of activities for the little ones here – under the supervision of the kindergarten staff, they play sports, have health checks, dance, sing and play.

A short documentary exploring the everyday life of a small‑town resident in Lithuania, capturing personal rituals, the landscape of the domestic and local environment, and the intimate rhythms of a "local" existence.

Nadia, Teresė and Ramutė are the three heroines of this documentary. Although they are very different, they are united by their unusual work - for decades they have been making a living by posing for artists. For Janina Lapinskaite, it is not the exotic profession that is important, but the stories that have marked these women's bodies over time. The heroines of the film talk openly about their choice of work, their colourful, albeit difficult past, and their equally difficult present - they bare not only their bodies, but also their souls to the camera

A multifaceted portrait of the singer Beatričė Grincevičiūtė, crafted with sensitivity and care, documenting her life, performance and presence within the cultural context of the Lithuanian SSR.

Five weavers from a silk factory decide to break a weaving record. The occasion in focus is the 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth. Having achieved their goal, the weavers are undoubtedly delighted with the Lithuanian Communist Party's appreciation and the names of meritorious industrial workers bestowed upon them. However, behind the ideological motif of the weavers striving for the good of the Soviet Union, a story of difficult working conditions, extreme fatigue and the lack of time, not only for their colleagues but also for the family waiting at home, unfolds.

Photographer Snieguole Michelkeviciute, began creating a series Women on Men in 1977, which sharply stood out from the creative context of the time. Her photographs record nudes of older men. For a long time, the artist's works were considered unusual and ignored. The documentary attempts to unravel the creative processes behind the scenes and to grasp the conflict between the artist and the creative object.

The film applies an unconventional narrative. It presents a subjective world through 47 scenes. Small events, interlaced by associations, express the irrational coherence of our surroundings. The surreal situations are based on the interactions of humans and nature.

Watch LOVE on ARTE
LOVE is a short film describing affection in 3 different chapters, through an impact on a distant solar system. Abstract haiku-like situations reveal the change in atmosphere on one planet, caused by the change of gravity and light. This pulsing planet makes the inhabitants become one with each other in various ways.

Repetitive still standing movement, an exploration of the visual image for its own sake. A projection of mental images, which are formed while listening to music. From the simple act of drawing a line, to the intricate movement and complex structure of animation that is able to self-generate.

Solar Walk shows the journey of individuals and their creations on through time and space. Any meaning of action is only existent from the perspective of the individual, but never mandatory when looking at it from the perspective of a solar system. It's about the melancholy of accepting chaos as beautiful and cosmic. Passion for creation is projected through the unique and playful texture of the animation craft itself.

A tiny bird restores the pianist's final hope by revealing the music hidden in everyday moments.

STAMPFER DREAMS is a homage to the scientist Simon von Stampfer, who presented his invention of the Stroboscopic Discs in Vienna in 1833. These discs show all kinds of animated loops from abstract to figurative and from (literally) experimental to documentary, and in this way forshadow the variety of genres in animated film. All characters and animated sequences in STAMPFER DREAMS are taken from / based on these "optical magic discs".

Created between 1974–1989, this silent experimental film by Paolo Gioli was made with a homemade "stenopeic" device instead of a conventional movie camera. A simple hollow metal tube functioning as 150 tiny pinhole cameras captures vertical scans of space and figures, producing an image flow of alternating time and space, movement that never took place, and psychological visual echoes.

The semi-scientific character of this work is in some degree due to the stereo-stroboscopic visual mechanism employed in its making. The careful and paradoxical loading up of profiles alternating between negative and positive is aligned along the axis of a soundtrack of super-synchronized percussions, giving rise to a complexity which can be deciphered only by an attentiveness of the degree required for a visual psychological test.

Piccolo film decomposto [Little Decomposed Film] This extremely short film is dedicated to chronophotography, which—as is well known—is the prelude to cinema. As with one of my earlier films dedicated to Muybridge (The Naked Killer, 1982), this one was excavated from books and catalogues, that is, from typographic ink. I tried, in a certain sense, to reanimate the inanimable as does the photographer Duane Michals, having only, sometimes, three or four frames. I found older stroboscopic technology as well as more contemporary flicker effects to be very helpful here and there. I attempted to realize the cinematic identification of Skladanowksy with Avedon; contaminations, precisely, between creators of films and creators of photography, contemporary or not. It is surprising to see Michals, a contemporary photographer, bearing such a strong cinematographic resemblance to Londe, the proto-filmmaker. I hope, at least, to have told the story of their direct commingling, as if by a single secret author.

It all started with the notorious Buñuelian sliced eyeball, that surprises us every time. The eye of an ox, but still it's the eye of a woman! The anxiety of the incision is transformed into a saccadic, uncontrolled anxiety precisely of the eye and of its pupil.

Faces and figures found on reels of film by an unknown artist from the first few years of the 20th century. I fed the images through what was probably his own movie camera that I had purchased in Rome in 1972. The frames appeared vertically and horizontally, individually and in short sequences and so I allowed them to become superimposed [by rephotographing them in several passes] and dissolves were created naturally by the shutter of the old movie camera due to the speed of manual rephotography, by improvised slowing down or stopping of the camera. To summarize, a movie camera reshoots a movie camera and its viscera through its own gate, creating the animation of an unknown experimental artist.

I made this film using a single batch of 45 pin holes in a 50 cm hollow tube. The idea was to film the [four] seasons but the air, the wind, nature, battering me put an end to the idea. I shot the film always in the gloaming of dawn and dusk - better than the excessive amassed light of day. Flowers, poppies, and vegetation, not completely emerged at first, later at rest like in wintry places.

Her works take as their subjects the figure of her grandmother or everyday scenes from her family home, and begin by expanding upon remembered images.

Wisdom Tooth - In Japanese, I write "I do not know my parents". Unlike the beginning of infant teething, parents never know the beginning of this tooth. One day, a high school student, Asumi who pulled out wisdom tooth, noticed the existence of the new world.

Short film by Fumie Kamioka

The film, which is 10 minutes long, presents a collection of disjointed, sometimes unsettling imagery. The visuals include X-rays of a person's chest and teeth, footage of snow and water, and an old woman. This contrasts with a non-diegetic soundtrack that primarily features the sound of metal coins being handled.

One of the leading artists during the rise of female filmmakers in the 1990s, she studied under SUZUKI Shirouyasu, who fostered many talented artists at Tama Art University.

On a faraway planet where blue giants rule, oppressed humanoids rebel against their machine-like leaders.

The adventures and misfortunes of Dog and Robot in New York City during the 1980s.

Two kittens go on a metaphysical journey on a magical railroad train.

In this vivid animated feast for viewers young and old, two children pick up their babysitter's book and magically fall into the story's fanciful world. There, they must make their way through the Kingdom of the Winds and find a way out before they are trapped forever.

The latest work in an installation series by moving image artist ITO Ryusuke in which he critiques moving images and the devices that create them. An attempt to return the camera, which has become completely digital and no longer even has a viewfinder, to the era of the "dark box (camera obscura)" and to examine the direction of the myriad "perspectives" that exist in the depths of an optical viewfinder.