The main competition features works by Southeast Asian and diaspora practitioners who will compete for the Grand Prix of the festival: the SeaShorts Award. The competition includes works from established mid-career filmmakers and artists, up-and-coming filmmakers and artists who have made prior short films, and exceptional student works, usually thesis projects, from across the region. The 8th edition of SeaShorts presents over 20 titles from across 8 Southeast Asian countries that each grapple with an absence in their context. From an experimental ethnography of the Burmese community in Singapore, to a young Cambodian man’s existential homecoming in a landscape that has irrevocably changed, these works reflect diverse considerations of the rapidly shifting terrain of Southeast Asia across both material and immaterial dimensions.
SeaShorts Competition 1 (SSC1)
Gambuh The Dance For A Long Lost Soul
Harvan Agustriansyah
A princess hears about her lover who will marry her step-sister. Heartbroken by the news, she prepares a secret plan to prove her love with the performance of Gambuh before everything is too late.
Cross My Heart and Hope To Die
Sam Manacsa
Mila struggles as she remains unpaid at work. A love interest becomes a source of comfort through his constant phone calls, but a promise of hope may also lead to tragedy and sad love songs.
GRANDPA
Mg Moore Phyu
Ba Phan and his grand-daughter Nyo Lae live in a small hut in the desert-like Dry Zone of central Myanmar. They make a tough living by cutting firewood in the forest and selling it to the nearby village. Nyo Lae asks her grandpa for permission to leave home and work at the Chinese border where she can make more money. Horrified, Ba Pha tries everything he can to stop her, but discovers something very disturbing.
Sundays In-Between
Ye Thu
Sundays In-Between reimagines Peninsula Plaza’s liminal spaces on the Burmese community’s off-days. By overlaying footage shot on Sundays, the film carves out an architecture that works through opportunistic acts of invention, articulating a quiet yet political aesthetic, and revealing what it means to thrive in spaces unintended for cultural difference.
SeaShorts Competition 2 (SSC2)
the river that never ends
JT Trinidad
Along a river that undergoes a major change, Baby, a middle-aged trans woman, shuttles between her job as a companion-for-hire and her duty to her father. As the people around Baby start to disappear, she realizes that she has been left behind in a sprawling city.
Did you see the hole that mom dig?
Pobwarat Maprasob
During the Songkran holiday, the director returns to his grandmother’s house with his family. They talked about Grandpa, a person with whom they had limited interaction with until his recent passing. In one night, while everyone was sound asleep, something mysterious unfolded before them.
Glorious Nightfall
Lý Minh Bá
On the way to a highland tourist town, a Youtuber with hidden memories about his family has been unconsciously lost into a deserted pass – where magical events gradually happen to him.
Basri and Salma in a Never-Ending Comedy
Khozy Rizal
A husband and wife married for 5 years, own an Odong-Odong at the carnival together, spending their days entertaining and taking care of other people’s children without any of their own. Between meddling relatives, self-doubt and an explosive confrontation, they uncover why they have not been blessed with a child.
SeaShorts Competition 3 (SSC3)
Animal Lovers
Aedrian Araojo
A pregnant woman, suspicious of her husband’s romantic relationship with his carabao, schemes to banish her beastly rival and reclaim her title as the fairest creature of the land.
Sawo Matang
Andrea Nirmala Widjajanto
In a post-New Order Jakarta, Native Indonesians (Pribumi) are legalized to perform the black magic ritual “Babi Ngepet” to balance their economy against Chinese Indonesians. When Kai, a Chinese Indonesian boy, needs money for university, he asks his best friend Nala, a Pribumi girl who harbors a crush on Kai, to perform the ritual for him.
Luzonensis Osteoporosis
Glenn Barit
Luzonensis, a prehistoric hominid, is about to leave the Philippines to become a migrant worker, but realizes just before his departure that his passport is missing. He and his father retrace their steps to find it. Luzonensis ponders on who he is and his place in the Philippines as their backs ache along the way.
The Last Visit
Keawalee Warutkomain
‘I search outwardly and inwardly, for the trace of your last visit.
Then, in that place, you have never been.
Now, in the place you have always been.
But this silence…is too loud.’
A journey through grief, exploring ‘existence’ and ‘life’ from different perspectives and mental stages, using books as a poetic space/time to reflect on her ‘becoming’ and my ‘shifting’ self.
SeaShorts Competition 4 (SSC4)
Golden Dragon
Boren CHHITH
Returning to Sihanoukville after many years to pay respects to his late father, Vicheka observes the rapid transfomations of the beachtown he once lived in. Waking up in a hospital, he pieces together his presence there while finding his hometown totally transformed. A nurse helps him in this moment between his dreams, memories, and reality.
Behind The Corpse Dolls
Adlino Dananjaya
In 1983, art student Subarkah joined the production of Indonesia’s most controversial film titled “The Betrayal of The Communist Party.” Subarkah was tasked with handling the makeup for the generals’ corpses. Forty years later, Subarkah recalls the memories of portraying this tumultous history in film.
Memory Replica
Đặng Thảo Nguyên
After hearing about a pagoda’s mysterious disappearance, a group of filmmakers embark on their journey to find an explanation.
Memories of Tomorrow
Karina Gayle Jabido
Shievar Olegario
Linguistics student Migo returns to his hometown, discovering its changed landscape. Amidst childhood memories and encountering his friend Ami, who speaks a different language, he’s drawn deeper by a haunting sense of purpose.
SeaShorts Competition 5 (SSC5)
I look into the mirror and repeat to myself
Giselle LIN
With her family on the cusp of change and dissolution, a filmmaker questions the meaning of her given name, her place among her four sisters, and their stories.
The Altar
Moe Myat may Zarchi
A buddhist fable-like story about the guilt of a childhood incident of killing an ant while washing hands in the sink. Animated through photographic sequences painted with golds and grays, the images sweep into one another, reflecting the realms of cosmos, power, guilt, prayers, and existence.
Buoyant
Đoàn Thanh Toàn
Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc
Along the coast of Vietnam, a mermaid is rescued from the fish market by a fisherman. As they make it towards the ocean, they are joined by two seahorses. As she awakened at the beach, her joy was cut short: the waves have another plan.
Peaceland
Ekin Kee Charles
Rena, Mina and Joni, hitchhike on an illegal truck to make a long journey from their village far from town, with plans to purchase monthly household goods, and to convince Rena’s daughter to come home.