Eye Catcher Grand Award 奪目短片大獎

Comment by Jury 評審評語：
This film elevates quotidian life through a fierce, searching, dynamic exploration that is evocative, artful, and existential. This relatable, but illuminating reflection on modern life has exceptional tension and levity. The Eye Catcher Grand Award goes to Boundaries.

Eye Catcher Best Short Award (Hong Kong) 奪目最佳短片獎（香港）

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
This film dealt beautifully with perspective and rhythm, using motion and light to create intricate images that impressed the jury deeply. For its vigorous simplicity and specially situated point of view, the Eye Catcher Best Short Award (Hong Kong) goes to Fly Train.

Eye Catcher Best Short Award (Asia) 奪目最佳短片獎（亞洲）

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
Told through a deceptively simple yet powerful single take, the film is both technically impressive in its use of off-screen sound and camera movement to present the sometimes harrowingly intimate nature of violence and chaos, and immensely gut-wrenching in its restrained yet precise use of perspective and juxtaposition to tell a sadly familiar situation with maximum impact.

Asian New Director Grand Award 亞洲新導演大獎

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
Teoswa Sonata: In a small town, the young man and woman spent the last summer of their youth together. The film is sincere, delicate, and light, the film avoids excessive embellishment while effectively capturing their wanderings between innocence and confusion. It’s a story that truly belongs to the youth.

《夏日终曲》：縣城青年男女共渡人生的最後一個暑假，真摯、細膩、輕巧，不刻意雕琢卻有效捕捉了人物游蕩與天真與迷惘之間的狀態，是屬於年輕人的電影。

Category winner – Eye Catcher Short Awards
組別優勝 – 奪目短片獎

AI-Generated AI 生成

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
Nine Awaken is the most complete and polished work among all the participating AI shorts. The team shows clear control over image generators and for many moments successfully come across as handmade stop motion. The quality of this work shows how generative AI is changing existing workflows on moving image production.

Animation 動畫

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
Boundaries is an exceptional cut-out animation, praised for its visually complex and striking aesthetic. Without dialogue, it powerfully explores themes of social inequality and personal space. Its innovative use of animation to tackle such profound issues highlights the director’s impressive vision and creativity, making it a standout and a clear top contender.

Dance Video 舞蹈影像

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
Starting from an old photograph, the film uses mature cinematography to guide the audience back to colonial memories, depicting rubber plantations, workers, the Malayan communists, and intergenerational dances. Accompanied by touching melodies that subtly narrate history, the work is grand in both visuals and production, seamless and eye-catching.

Documentary 紀錄片

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
In the Same Boat reimagines social storytelling with creativity and depth, challenging conventional narratives while illuminating the fragility of lived experiences.  A poignant meditation on connection, resilience, and the power of cinema as a tool for reflection.

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
Two Travelling Aunties is more than an adventure film: it’s a powerful story of defiance and love. Norah and Susie’s journey—both on the road and against societal expectations—is captured with intimacy and grace. A moving reminder of the courage it takes to live authentically.

Drama 劇情片

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
Save My Soul is a uniquely captivating film blending surreal elements with human emotion. It explores the blurred boundaries between cat and human, showcasing exceptional storytelling, refined cinematography, and unconventional yet mesmerising techniques. Despite limited resources, it delivers originality and charm.

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
The Tortoise employs bold cinematic language, using sound and visuals to explore the abstract father-son relationship with deeper meanings for the audience to uncover. It hauntingly depicts historical religious and cultural suppression through calm yet intensely evocative imagery.

Music Video 音樂影像

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
The music video for Do We Live Too Seriously is an intriguing blend of dark yet playful storytelling, combining Gothic aesthetics with local Hong Kong settings. Its outstanding art direction, cinematography, and lo-fi aesthetic align beautifully with the song’s jazz vibes and shifting moods, creating a captivating contrast between death as a theme and cheerful tones. The use of local shops highlights Hong Kong’s unique charm, perfectly reflecting Kowloon K’s whimsical and mischievous style.

Student 學生

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
Reconstruction of New Life blends documentary, fiction, and animation to revisit Taiwan’s White Terror and transitional justice. By reconstructing Green Island’s “New Life Correctional Center,” it explores memory, history, and forgetting. With animated coral stones and hybrid storytelling, the film examines historical affirmation and progression, urging reflection on the balance between remembering and forgetting.

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
The Steak begins with an Iranian mother cooking a raw steak and ends with it charred, interwoven with sudden off-screen war sounds. Using a 360-degree tilt shot in a single take, the film juxtaposes domestic tranquillity with the brutality of war, reflecting on violence, death, and humanity. The steak serves as a rich, symbolic motif, prompting reflection on the meaning of war imagery.

Special Awards – Eye Catcher Short Awards
特別獎項 – 奪目短片獎

Children’s Award 童夢獎

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
For a textured, dreamlike, and painterly animation that employs a meaningful use of colour, sound design and a simple but emotional narrative thread that amplifies the interconnectedness between parent and child, and the crippling psychological loneliness that come from physical or emotional abandonment, the jury presents the Children’s Award to Silent Tides by Yorki.

Humanitarian Award 人道主義獎

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
Simultaneously specific yet universal, important yet devastating, the film is a reminder of the fragile nature of peace and normalcy, and that the unexpected disruption of domestic security could incur within the duration of a sizzling steak.

Queer Award 酷兒獎

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
For an audacious, bizarre, and imaginative short film that tenderly depicts an unorthodox quest for intimacy, where images are constructed through stark graphic cinematography and an offbeat mise-en-scene, the jury admires the bold, risky interpretation of an outsider, bullied, on the fringes, and in the midst of transformation, and presents the Queer Award to Save My Soul by Leung Kam Fai.

Tree of Life Award 生命樹獎

Jury’s Citation 評審評語：
The protagonist of the documentary has already passed away. What supports the entire film are the memories of their companions—memories filled with doubts and setbacks, yet also with hope born from it all. This has become the most valuable lesson they learned on the university hillside.
錄片的主角已經不在人世，支撐著整個電影的，是伙伴們的追憶，當中夾有疑惑，不乏挫敗，但亦有因一切而生的希望，是他們在大學山頭上的最寶貴一課。