Submissions deadline
03 Mar 25
Picture a busy shopping mall from your childhood. You likely picture it during the day, sunlight pouring through the windows, families weaving through stores, and teenagers chatting about the latest movie in the cinema lounge. Now, picture sneaking into that same mall late at night, when it’s completely empty. The familiar space takes on an unsettling quality. Stripped of its usual purpose, it becomes something else entirely: an empty shell, an uncanny structure. Suddenly its usual purpose has been robbed and it's just a building with rooms, but not quite. Because now it also feels strangely alien and enigmatic to you, a purposeless, otherworldly architecture.
By morning, the mall returns to its default state, bustling with life and fulfilling its function.But that middle phase it was in when you saw it in the night, it's a liminal phase, a state of transition. The short films selected in this category will showcase spaces like that, unsettling, ambiguous, and hauntingly out of place—capturing the eerie atmosphere of the in-between.
