In our 2026 short film competition programme, we search for belonging—within womanhood, between one another, and in the spaces that hold our stories.

The body is the first site of belonging. Across different stages of life, these films linger on women’s ongoing negotiations with their bodies: a girl sensing the shifts of adolescence and learning to inhabit her own skin; the imagining of motherhood through letters addressed to an unborn child; the visceral heat that surfaces as hormones fluctuate on the verge of menopause. No longer merely something to be looked at, the body becomes a means of feeling the world and recognising the self.

As bodies turn toward others, relationships take shape. Girls move through fractured family structures toward psychological independence, forming bonds with other women along the way. These connections may begin with the glitter of schoolyard encounters, only to grow dense and unresolved in the reunions of adulthood. Feelings that resist articulation, entangled with trauma and projection, surface through exchanged glances, making the gaze itself a form of witnessing. As they chase each other’s shadows, relationships may dissolve and boundaries blur, yet the city quietly bears the traces of their existence.

Within these traces, space extends the narrative. Cities witness the past while holding the future, echoing with hollow, lingering sighs. Red lights seep through cracks, revealing the spectres of colonial history; in a park burdened with trauma, souls remain trapped in fantasies of power. To record a space is also to record its fictions. When we encounter other cultures, are we still outsiders? When we reimagine our homeland, do we remain insiders? Behind window grilles, a house becomes both a sanctuary for memory and a shelter for diasporic identity. Yet upon returning, there is always a sharp, inescapable sense of regret.

Perhaps that little regret is home. (Joy YimingHan, edited by Xiyun Li)