The Finalists
INTERFILM Festival
10 - 15 November 2026
10 - 15 November 2026
The Finalists
Nika is a 5-year-old kid living in Georgia during the 1990’s. His parents use an old black telephone to make phone calls. The device has one great feature; if one dials two magical digits, a lady with a wonderful voice answers every single question. When Nika discovers the information service, his life changes. He believes the telephone knows everything and asks all kinds of questions. Years later, smartphones appear with the same function, but aren’t able to replace the black telephone.
George Varsimashvili [he/him]
is a Georgian director born in Tbilisi in 1986. After graduating university in Georgia, he went on to study filmmaking in Paris. His graduation feature film Particulier à Particulier was released in film theatres in France and Georgia. His short film Iko Erti Katsi had a festival run of 9 years from 2013 to 2022. In 2019, he was invited by Bela Tarr to direct a short film in Switzerland, which was premiered at Locarno Film Festival. In 2014, he made a feature documentary Hotel Metalurg, which was premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest and Thessaloniki FF. The film was also theatrically released in London.
Lala, a former chef in a rural South African town, is desperate to leave after losing her dream job due to corruption. Arriving at her local Department of Home Affairs office to collect her passport for a cruise ship job, she faces delays as the processing system is offline. Typical! Desperate, she bribes an official to prioritize her, sparking a showdown between her and Sonto, a widow wrapping up her husband's affairs, who is also demanding priority service. The face-off culminates in a tense vote that Lala wins. A wise old man's selflessness during the showdown reignites her hope in her people and she sacrifices her spot, only for the system to come back online, giving her renewed hope.
Khanyo Mjamba [he/him]
is a writer based in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. His stories are inspired by the everyday skirmishes, the unexpected alliances and, occasionally, the absurd. His educational background in communication science has seen him working in a motley mix of industries including publishing, pathology and journalism.
Home Affairs expresses Khanyo's undying optimism about human nature in the midst of political, social and technological upheaval. He considers the film directors Steve McQueen, Damien Chazelle and Denis Villeneuve as some of his most important filmmaking influences. When he isn't telling stories, he is getting his hands dirty in the complex affairs of his two toddlers.
Trapped in the loop of guilt and fear, her long dark hair has spread all over her apartment, clinging to the walls like plants roots. Water drips from the pipes, moist walls and damped newspapers… In a shabby 6-foot apartment, a single mother bluntly dragged the dead body of her daughter, knocking off the shelter where she used to put her collection of abandoned religious figures.
Paprika Chan [she/her]
is a self-taught independent animation filmmaker and visual artist, born in China and raised in Hong Kong. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a bachelor's diploma in Cultural Studies (Visual Culture), started her career as a freelance animator in 2019, and created several music videos for independent musicians from Hong Kong and the US. Her debut work is an animated music video of the song “Dopamine”, written by indie songwriter and singer Shingaling, which was selected for Animafest Gdansk in 2020.
Two brothers, Nabil and Mikayel, lived peacefully in their small house, protected from the threatening salt outside. Everything was fine until one day, Mikayel married and started his own, big, family. Little by little, the annoying children started occupying every corner of the house, leaving very little space for Nabil. The house started to feel small, and it was noisy. Eventually, Nabil has no choice but to break a window so he can breathe. The salted winds start covering Nabil's body and sneak all the way to his heart. The salted winds enter the house and cover the entire space and every family member. Can family ties be restored in an environment so saturated by the salt?
Nicolas Fattouh [he/him]
is a visual artist and film director. In 2018 his debut film How My grandmother Became a Chair received The Film Prize of the Robert Bosch Stiftung as German Lebanese co-production during the Berlinale. This award-winning film was selected in more than 125 prestigious festivals around the world.
Today, Nicolas works in parallel on his films, exhibitions, and performances in Lebanon and abroad. In 2023, Nicolas created Beirut Animation Nights, in partnership with Cinema Royal to showcase animated short films from all over the world, with a focus on author films from the Mediterranean region.
Determined to reunite her dying mother with an old friend, Carol, an ex-paediatric nurse in her late 50s, visits Frances, a 78-year-old retired nun, in the convent-care home in which she resides. Their conversation progresses from the mundane formalities of introduction to a series of unexpected revelations that sees decades-old secrets come to light.
Kate Morrison [she/her]
is a filmmaker from Liverpool currently based in Leeds, UK. She has written and directed three commissioned short films – The Derealisation Dinner Party (2023) for BFI Academy x HOME Short Fund, Anatomy of a Crooked Spine (2020) for BBC New Creatives North, and The Affluence Injection (2017) for Channel 4’s Random Acts. She has a 1st class degree in BA Film, Photography & Media from the University of Leeds. She is interested in telling stories that resonate with her own personal experiences of the world.
In a dimly lit graveyard, the introverted Dafne must reconcile with her traumatized father Zephyr, who will transform into a tree after sunset. If she fails, Zephyr will turn into a withered tree, and his trauma will pass on to Dafne and her son.
The Sound of Sunset portrays three different generations and how each of them relates to transgenerational trauma as well as their coping mechanisms. It is a short film about rediscovering your inner child to heal the roots of old wounds in the genre of magic realism.
Vincent van den Ouden [he/him]
is a Dutch 35-year-old filmmaker and novelist from the city of Rotterdam. As a child his favourite stories took on a life of their own in his imagination, and he fantasized about being spirited away to his favourite tales. When he grew old enough to realize those chances were slim, he decided to become a storyteller himself. His short film Hopsa Heisasa – a Dutch Children’s Myth (2020) has been shown at several festivals, and 2025 will mark the debut of his Dutch fantasy novel ”The Realm Where Worlds Start Anew” at Godijn Publishing. Recurring themes in his oeuvre are existential loneliness and transience within narrative forms of magic realism.
What does home mean when your homeland is fraught with political and social challenges? How do you find belonging in a new country when the safety and freedom you assumed you'd have, doesn’t belong to you? These questions are at the heart of "Stranger than Home." The film explores how the torment of Iranian society under an oppressive regime cast a heavy shadow on the life of the main character, an immigrant woman in Berlin. In an attempt to get close to her inner world, the film uses surrealistic elements to convey the character's conflicted existence, torn between two places.
Neda Ahmadi [she/her]
Inspired by the aesthetics and narrative style of east European animation as a child growing up in Iran, Neda makes films through paintings. She studied stage design for theatre in Tehran and later Animation in the UK. Her passion for visual storytelling found tools through experimentation with different techniques and her interests shifted from mythology and folklore to sociopolitical issues. With her short-animated documentary in development, Stranger Than Home, she ventures into the realm of scriptwriting further.
When a young woman gets the chance to have a conjugal meeting with her imprisoned husband after a long time, she decides to re-experience a romantic time in the apathetic and harsh atmosphere of the prison.
Omid Abdollahi [he/him]
is an Iranian director, screenwriter and editor who has participated in many international festivals with his short and documentary films. His short film Glimmer, after receiving special mention of the jury of the 35th International Short Film Festival in Clermont-Ferrand in France, has been displayed in more than twenty international festivals including the 15th International Short Shorts Film Festivals. In 2015, he was awarded the Grand Prize for the best filmmaker at the Sapporo International Festival in Japan and in 2016, he won two supporting awards in the script development and production sections for his documentary project Winners from the IDFA Bertha Fund in Amsterdam.
Solmaz Haddadian [she/her]
is an Iranian artist and screenwriter who graduated from the Tehran Young Cinematographers Film School. So far, she has collaborated in writing several short films and feature screenplays, including Things (2017), Tehran At Once (2019) and Dolphin Girl (2022). She also has an MA in English literature and translated various books in the field of art and literature. The books "Shooting Under Fire", "Slightly Out Of Focus" and "Letters of JRR Tolkien" are among her translations that have been published in Iran.
