Satisfyingly Short: Inside the Short Film Programme at HKAFF 2025

“Submerged” and “embraced as enchanted participants.” That’s how director Paprika Chan sees the experience of viewing a film. And it doesn’t matter how long the film is. That was the goal for Chan’s four-minute, dialogue-free short Tear Tear Fruit, which tracks a man as he improvises movement that finally draws a tear from him. It’s an abstract demonstration of emotion rather than narrative, but it makes its point.

“I don’t think [features are] the ultimate form of cinema,” says Chan. “My goal is to tell stories of the world, of people I encounter, and of nature. If the story has to be told in 30 seconds or three hours, so be it.”

Chan’s film is included on one of the three short film programmes at this year’s Hong Kong Asian Film Festival (HKAFF), which kicks off its 22nd edition on 22 October. This year’s HKAFF showcases nearly 90 features, shorts and documentaries from the region, including Tommy Ng Kai-chung’s animated fantasy Another World, Veronica Bassetto and Sophie Yang’s CGI-heavy Gamer Girls and Lee Sang-il’s epic kabuki drama Kokuho. 

And then there’s the second edition of HKAFF’s Hong Kong Shorts, a diverse collection of films by Hong Kong artists from all corners of the globe. The open call yielded 19 films probing subjects as broad as gender dynamics, family, identity and place. While HKAFF has always had a mandate to focus on local filmmakers, the festival expanded its scope to shorts in 2024, when discussion about how to support the local film industry intensified post-pandemic.

“We could see that a lot of creators, particularly emerging filmmakers, embraced short film as an independent creative medium instead of just a stepping stone,” says Catherine Lau, HKAFF’s short film programmer since its inception. “So we decided to open up our platform to include creative short films from the local filmmaking community and diaspora. We think that they’re an integral part of the creative soil of Hong Kong, in a macro sense, and it’s important that these talents have a spotlight and opportunity to spark discussions.”

Shorts are having a moment

In recent years, that spotlight has dimmed with the de facto end of the Fresh Wave Short Film Competition, and the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s much broader stage. And yet global attention to shorts has seemed to grow, with filmmaking giants like David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodóvar and Jia Zhangke are just a few specifically opting to make short films in the last few years. 

Feature filmmaking remains the holy grail, but our shortening attention spans are making room for shorter narratives, says Brock R Brahmes, whose Remnants reflects on a woman’s post-surgery struggle for self-acceptance and break-out from a prison of her own making. “You can absolutely tell a profound, universal story in 15 minutes that resonates just as deeply as a 90-minute feature,” he says.

Most of the directors in the line-up this year agree with Lau that shorts are not just a means to an end anymore. And while many filmmakers hope to ultimately make a feature film, they’re not just biding their time with shorts, seeing it as a valid and independent format that often provides greater room to experiment, collaborate, respond to the world and greater expression. As a bonus, shorts conventionally screen in collections, and as In the Name of Memory director Ariel Lau sees it, “the intertextuality between films can lead to creative connections that extend beyond the director’s original imagination.” 

Those creative connections are often the fertiliser for a healthy filmmaking ecosystem. Classics like Un Chien Andalou (1929) and A Trip to the Moon (1902) walked so contemporary filmmakers could run. “Making short films has been an important way for me to experiment and collaborate with people from different cultural backgrounds,” says director Erica Kwok, whose She is Calliope challenges power and gender dynamics in art through dance. 

“There are more spaces for indie filmmakers and artists to respond to life and social events, and also more room for experimentation,” says Dorothy Cheung, whose abstract as a bird that briefly perches explores concepts of home and identity through farming. “Some of these might turn into fuel for features or other forms of art, some might not, but the artistic freedom means so much to me, and to many different people who make shorts as well,” she says.

A chance to experiment

This year’s short film lineup at HKAFF includes dramas and docs, but also animation, absurdist comedy and art films — all chosen for their vision and impact, not their polish, budgets or any famous names above the title. 

“There is this purity in the act of artistic creation that we want to dive into, and present to our audience,” says Lau. “The final selections present a mix that is wildly diverse. Some works [gave] me a good laugh, some allowed me to ponder our contemporaries, some picked our brains through an absurd plot, and some get really intimate and personal. I wanted the mix to be as chaotic, in a good way, as possible.”

Person Universe, a collaboration between Lam Ying-hei and Ho Pak, adds a little chaos to the mix with Horse Person, whose roots are in a Midland Realty short competition. The contest, themed as “Every District Has a Dream,” got the duo thinking about modest everyday aspirations and the personal fixation on chasing real, unfiltered experiences in a city that is equal parts decadent and disorienting. Only a short film could end with a man making himself into a so-called horse with help from a friend performing as his rear half. 

Shorts are also a safe space for departing from standard structure, language and format. Combined with the financial burden feature length animation can bring with it, this one of the reasons shorts are particularly rich with animation. 

Candace Hui, Ellis Chan and Eric Lee have all been working in animation for several years, and chose it because “it allows a unique blend of reality and dream, where imagination becomes tangible,” says Chan, whose painterly Bluebird in the Wind explores breaking free from inner suppression and “rediscovering what it means to feel, to remember, and to be human.” Hui echoes that sentiment, saying animation allows her to be visually expressive and playful without the limitation of the physical world,” ideal considering a piece of yellow tape — which gives the film its title, Tape — sends a woman on a trip through a forgotten memory similar to Lee’s Wind Goes On.

A reflection of Hong Kong

Taken together, the trio of programmes offer a reflection — both historic and current — on Hong Kong and personal identity on several levels. It’s an accidental thematic bond that Lau believes is baked into the artistic DNA of the current generation of creatives. “There’s so much tension and unease in this world right now it’s natural for artists to turn inward and think about our inner selves,” she says. “Identity is always and will always be a subject for Hong Kong creative talents, especially for the diaspora.”

Examples of this include Zack Sit’s collage-style doc Postcolonial Queen, which reflects today’s Hong Kong through Sit’s own experiential filter; Sylvie Wu and Holly Wang’s Last but not Least, which sees two people try and reconcile a shared trauma; Sugar Chan reminiscences on summer in a housing estate in Last Summer; take a break; Cai Qinyu’s feminist deconstruction of heterosexual romance, which turns an eye to what Cai calls “possibilities for new forms of intimacy within patriarchal frameworks”; and Anna Ieong’s comic mockumentary Keep Looking?, in which she dives into the dark side of human nature when a missing memory card unleashes prejudices in times of crisis.

Despite the challenges faced by emerging filmmakers Lau is confident this year’s strong response to the open call, with nearly 150 entrants, bodes well for the future. “I think the programme demonstrates just how resilient and determined Hong Kong filmmakers are,” she says. “It’s these undying souls who keep striving to make it work, telling us that Hong Kong film is not done yet.” 

Person Universe sums it up best when they describe why shorts remain so vital and aren’t dry runs for something bigger. “They’re the city’s raw scream, a way to bottle its decadent, disorienting energy and hit the audience hard,” they say in a joint statement. “In a world that’s all rush and no pause, shorts are our way of distilling the beautiful, broken madness into something that cuts deep.”

The 22nd Hong Kong Asian Film Festival runs from 22 October to 9 November 2025, with the shorts programmes running on 23, 27 and 28 October, and 1 and 2 November. Click here for more info.