Animal Nature Future Film Festival 2025

Event information

A series of films presented by Animal Nature Future Film Festival, screening The Inflammation of Nature (2025), Watchful (2025) & Never too Late (2025)

First Screening 2:30pm

The Inflammation of Nature

These films trace nature’s own responses, unveiling trauma, destruction, and lingering scars, suffused with a persistent sense of unease. When nature is reduced to a resource to be exploited, consumed, and controlled, how does it answer back? Burning electronic forests, the hollow lift of empty nets in Maltese waters, and villages silenced beneath landslides — each bears witness to the ongoing wounds and inflammations of the natural world.

1. Anima

Dir. Lau Rämö, Finland,2025, 13:23mins

Anima follows the perspective of a primate who studies life through books, as images move closer—under the skin. Blending stop-motion animation with personal and archival footage, the film creates an associative exploration of distance, presence, and connection. Ghostly fragments of plants, animals, and memory evoke deep time and Earth’s hidden transformations, weaving a poetic meditation on our ties to other living beings, the environment, and the traces of the past.

2. A Bear Remembers

Dir. Zhang Knight, United Kingdom, 2025, 20mins

A local boy, Peter, follows a strange metallic sound echoing through his village, capturing it on film. When he shares the footage with an old woman, it awakens her childhood memories of a roaming bear. Drawn together by the haunting sound, they journey into the hills, where myth and memory converge. There, amid echoes of the past, boy and elder encounter an ancient spirit, blurring the line between folklore, nature, and lived experience.

3. Firewalk

Dir. Pink Twins, Finland,2025, 9:35mins

Firewalk takes viewers on a pre-apocalyptic midnight journey through a burning forest, where flames signal both impending doom and a surreal gateway between realities. Created by Finnish duo Pink Twins, the short embraces chaos and deconstructs animated storytelling itself. Gloomy visions of catastrophe dissolve into the raw sketchwork of the medium, breaking the illusion of immersion while channeling a dark, Lynchian energy that lingers long after the final frame.

4. Just Sea

Dir. Franziska Von Stenglin, Malta,2025, 25:42mins

Set against the towering cliffs of Gozo, Malta, Baħar Biss follows Punta, a fisherman lowering traditional traps into the Mediterranean while reflecting on the vanishing marine life he once knew. Beneath its quiet rhythm lies a meditation on loss—of environment, of family, of voice. Interwoven with the haunting verses of Maltese Ghana, the film captures both personal grief and ecological decline, offering a melancholic yet poetic portrait of resilience, memory, and the sea.

5. Goldau 4:20mins

Dir. Roman Kaelin, Switzerland, 2025, 4:20mins

In 1806, the collapse of Mount Rossberg unleashed one of Switzerland’s most devastating natural disasters. After days of heavy rain, a massive landslide buried the village of Goldau within minutes, claiming 457 lives and reshaping the valley forever. Drawing on historical records and scientific research, this film reconstructs the catastrophic event with striking detail. More than a recounting of tragedy, it is a powerful reflection on the destructive force of nature and the lasting impact of disaster on human lives.


2nd Screening 4:20pm

Watchful

Dir. Ewa Górzna and Katarzyna Miron, Finland, 2025, 13:30mins

 Watchful contemplates the fragile interplay between humans and the wild, where observer and observed dissolve into a shared gaze. Guided by silent animal protagonists, the film shifts perspective from human dominance to an animal-centered narrative. Merging documentary reality with layered soundscapes, it creates an immersive space of interspecies encounters. Evocative and sensory, Watchful questions how we perceive nature—inviting us to not only see but to listen, feel, and dwell within its hidden stories.

Never too Late

Dir. Cai Ruiqi, China Hong Kong, 2025, 80mins

In Hong Kong, the boundary between city, mountain, and ocean is blurred. Four Hong Kongers, who are strangers to one another, each facing their own life challenges, simultaneously choose to delve into nature in search of themselves. In the depths and peripheries of the city, amidst mountains, fields, the ocean, and shores, they explore their own connection to nature. Different questions converge onto a single issue, leading to a journey of reflection and redemption. If human development and the destruction of nature have become a reality, what else can we do? Is it too late to take action? This is their journey, and ours too, through the spirit of the mountains and oceans.