Shorts: Folk Futures

Fusion and experimentation mark both subject and cinematic form in this visionary collection of responses to shifting environmental conditions. Across global contexts, myth, folklore and traditional wisdom serve future-oriented visions, while communal resilience, youth voices and vast landscapes take centre stage. In Pakistan, an ancient practice is revived as a contemporary climate solution, while in Greenland, Inuit youth navigate identity, tradition and future aspirations as they come of age. A young girl contemplates the end of time amid a decaying desert landscape in the American Southwest, and folklore takes musical forms in genre-defying ecological tales from India and Czechia.

SILA

Set on an island in Greenland, 600 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, this intimate vérité portrait follows two young Inuit coming of age. Created in close collaboration with a local children’s home and filmed in the Greenlandic language, the story traces identity, tradition, loss, and resilience. Living alongside its protagonists, the film observes a fragile passage between deep cultural roots and an uncertain, rapidly changing world.

The Glacier Wedding

The Glacier Wedding documents the ancient Himalayan glacier grafting ritual, a sacred ecological tradition practiced by high-altitude communities in the trans-Himalayan regions. At the heart of this ritual is the symbolic "marriage" of two types of ice, and the creation of a human-made glacier that sustains dozens of remote farms with a steady meltwater supply.

Through capturing the practice's labor, ceremony, and reverence, the film explores the spiritual and environmental dimensions of glacier grafting, portraying it as both a union of souls and a communal act of resilience against climate uncertainty.

Now That We Are Sending You to The End

A young girl contemplates the end of time. The American Southwest drifts between myth and disappearance. The desert collapses slowly and violently, undone by water mismanagement and climate-induced drought conditions. Film emulsion is created, manipulated, and decayed alongside the desert, using material from the ecosystem itself. Tactile filmmaking becomes a handmade record of ecological loss, echoing the human imprint on a fragile landscape. Through gestures of material experimentation and quiet exchange, we consider what it means to approach The End.

Song of Behula

A Muslim family in rural Bengal performs Mansamangal Kavya, a Hindu folk epic, through 7 distinct Pata Chitra paintings and the ancient folk tradition of Pata Sangeet on the banks of the Khirai River. As the river flows south, it becomes the Adi Ganga, a sacred river central to the myth. The film retells the myth, juxtaposing the living traditions with the river's current ecological state, reduced to a canal.

ORLA (dir. by Marie Lukacova)

In a kingdom bound by a strict hierarchy and surrounded by a magical wilderness, there lives a young maiden named Jasna. Gifted with sharp wit and a heart full of justice, she stands against the wicked and tyrannical ruler, Volk, who exploits his people. In his wrath, he banishes her on a treacherous journey to a faraway land, one from which none have ever returned. But with courage as her guide, and through overcoming her deepest fears, Jasna discovers a powerful ally in Eagle, the guardian of the forest.

Together, they unravel the key to breaking the chains of the kingdom and setting its people free.