Best Short Film – Delay (dir. Wang Han-Xuan)
Delay is a poignant and observant story that captures late arrival into queer life, exploring unspoken familial pain that carefully comes into view. The director builds a strong narrative through restrained visual and body language. The characters are portrayed with maturity and complexity, without reducing their relationship to a question of who is right or wrong. Most importantly, the film leaves space to understand both characters while still leaving room for hope.
Delay develops its themes indirectly through reflections and carefully composed frames within frames. Its lingering pace and sparse, beautiful dialogue create space for a complex and unresolved portrayal of family relationships, while its indirect narrative structure allows what remains unspoken to resonate. The delay named in the title operates on different thematic levels, shaping a lingering rhythm and a dramaturgy that gradually unfolds its different threads.
Jury’s Special Mention – Three Times Mina (dir. Nans Laborde Jourdàa)
Three Times Mina is a deeply intimate and timely portrait, distinguished by its precise sense of time and composition, as well as by the charismatic presence and emotional generosity of its protagonist. The film enters its situations at intriguing, understated moments, sharing short passages of relationships, encounters and nightlife, allowing small gestures and circumstances to gradually unfold into something deeply affecting. Its courage to speak openly and directly creates an honest and frank portrait that feels both personal and free.
Jury’s Special Mention – I Want My Inner Dog to Wear Pearls (Valeriu Andrișcă)
I Want My Inner Dog to Wear Pearls stands out for its professional animation, self-ironic storytelling, and its playful attempt to queer tradition via familial rug-weaving heritage. It meticulously repeats traditional Romanian rug motifs in a by now similarly nostalgic early-computer-animation aesthetic and switches suddenly between irony and sincerity. The film’s essay-like travel narrative shares how diversity persists within the private sphere of a family, even when they remain absent from official histories or the wider social context. It is an ironic yet tender Romanian story about what we inherit and what we want to abandon when we leave our place of origin.
The films were judged by Santa Lingevičiūtė, a film critic, a former head programmer at Vilnius International Film Festival, Szymon Adamczak, a dramaturg, writer, and theatre and performance maker working across disciplines. and Emil Santtu Uuttu, a dramaturge and performance artist.
