About

‘Alt-realities’ includes a collection of films and moving image works that use speculative futures to imagine evolved states of humanity and consciousness. Bringing together live action narratives with computer generated worlds, this vibrant collection of shorts considers possible realities informed by past narratives, ancestral knowledge, and cultural heritage.

Crazy Lotus 2024

Winner of the Tiger Short Award at the 2024 International Film Festival Rotterdam, a technological invention allows its wearers to shift and wander between infinite possibilities. However, as the wearers soon discover, mysterious occurrences begin to take place as physical and digital environments begin to combine.

This experimental short film features an eclectic barrage of pop-infused visual effects and surreal artificial designs to enhance its exploration of futures and spaces within a techno-authoritarian world, one charged by a larger mission to induce censorship and revisionism onto its citizens.

15 minutes | Ages 15+ | Science fiction themes and injury detail

Ex Nilalang: From Creature ~ From Creation 2017

'Ex Nilalang' is a cumulative performance-video that reinstates indigenous Filipino mythologies that were once used by colonial powers to disparage queer identities.

The fourth episode From Creature ~ From Creation, revisits the Filipino original myth of Maganda and Malakas, the first human beings on Earth. In this speculative version, the two characters performed by Ra and Shoulder become fluid beings devoid of a clear gender and identity, while their choreography recalls an invocation to the reparative power of forgotten ancient spirits.

14 minutes | Ages 12+ | Mild themes

The Fortress

In visual artist and filmmaker Sin Wai Kin’s The Fortress 2024, a solitary figure contemplates the historical, scientific, and social construction of the archetypal man.

Set across Lahore Fort and Alfalah Theatre in Lahore, Pakistan, the film uses stages of performance and rehearsal to exercise themes of knowledge, power and identity at the boundary of the human and the inhuman. Directed in part by elements of Sufi poetry, Wai Kin’s prescient allegory is an unsettling—but seductive—portrayal of a speculative world in which hegemonic narratives cannibalise reality, and the category of human ultimately fails.

Ages 15+

Beast Type Song 2019

Sophia Al-Maria's striking visual poem Beast Type Song uses the scaffold of science fiction to interrogate past histories and identities.

Inspired by Etel Adnan’s 1989 war poem, The Arab Apocalypse, Al-Maria explores the revision of history through graphic and bodily gestures, such as movement, music and drawings, to develop new forms of expression that make up for the inadequacies of language in expressing past trauma.

Each of the film’s performers (under Al-Maria’s instruction) draw upon their own personal experiences and heritage to reflect upon the stories and languages they have inherited as the children of various colonial legacies. In addressing these previously dominant narratives, Beast Type Song deconstructs the past in an attempt to reclaim the future.

38 minutes | Ages 15+ | Mature themes, nudity and infrequent coarse language