Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival 2026 | Asian Shorts

Asian Shorts at NIFFF

A few days ago, my sandals melted on the asphalt. While walking, I glanced down and saw the soles flapping loose. I stopped, turned the shoe over, and found that the sole had ripped apart haphazardly, peeling away in layers. Instantly, I knew what had happened: the burning-hot ground had gradually stripped away the sole, leaving traces of my passage glued to the pavement across the city.

The subject of smouldering asphalt resurfaced at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF). None of us are really equipped for this kind of heat. As one festival-goer remarked, in Swiss cities we try to find solace from the heat by looking down, only to be hit by the intensity of the asphalt from below. Then we look up and are met by the heat radiating from the concrete buildings. She drew a very generous conclusion from her observation: the heat melts the asphalt, and between the cracks, nature eventually reclaims the upper hand.

Perhaps the human body’s survival instinct in the face of adversity is to adapt. Whether that is literally, through physiological changes or through the psychological illusion of imagining ourselves as something other than human. This is why I found myself feeling much closer to the protagonist of Jung Hye-In’s Reviving The Engine, featured in this year’s Asian Shorts selection at the festival.

Gin-hee, who works in the car industry, imagines her body decaying and melting like the tar, petrol, oil, and asphalt that surround her. The roads, the cars, the metal furniture, and the tall industrial buildings in the distance, with their huge chimneys imitating toxic smoke, all become part of an unescapable manufactured environment. Is Gin-hee truly transforming, with oil seeping from her pores, or is this a metaphor for the way industrial systems consume the human body? Who is she as a person when her organic body exists within such an artificial atmosphere? And how can such a body survive?

Where I can trace my own bodily anxieties in Reviving The Engine, this year’s Asian Shorts selection offers different visions of the contemporary human body, from birth to death. Joe Hsieh’s animation Praying Mantis plays with the idea of the mother as a predator, depicting the praying mantis as a ruthless, human-sized hunter. Yet throughout the short, we glimpse what this woman has endured through childbirth and the precarious circumstances that have transformed both her and her child into mantises. The film explores how a lack of bodily autonomy can push people into exploitation. By denying proper care and agency to women everywhere, we create conditions in which bodies are forced to become monstrous for survival.

Yu Chih-chieh’s The Last Jiangshi approaches the body from the opposite end of the spectrum: death. Through a comedic, low-budget mockumentary, it follows a vampire who cannot physically die because his body refuses to decay. Could this be read as an analogy for billionaires and oligarchs attempting to cheat death through endless accumulation of wealth, trying to make their names eternal through technological advancements that will inevitably be surpassed the next day by someone else? Through the short we see there is little meaning in an endless existence. His body may be eternal, but what remains of his consciousness? We encounter a vampire so old, so exhausted and so disillusioned that he no longer even leaves his home. Immortality may have preserved his body, but it has not preserved his desire to live.

Between these two reflections on birth and death lies the question of what we do with the time in between. This is where Nomura Fusso’s Hoodsteps enters: a stop-motion animation about Nomura, a woman trapped in the repetitive rhythm of everyday life. She wakes up, goes to work, and is constantly told that she is doing everything wrong. Until one day, she wakes up to discover that her foot has developed a face and a name: Wosaka.

What initially appears to be a random, absurdist, and deeply humorous story becomes a way to exorcise what lies beneath. The mind’s delirium gradually reveals itself as a means to create, to pay homage, and to confront grief. Hoodsteps is the most hopeful film of the four. Sometimes, having the space to lean into a little absurdity with one’s body and mind might lead to the most positive outcome.

More Info on the section Asian Shorts