In the Untranslatable Zone

BAN♡ITS

18min, 2025, Belgium/Bangladesh

Omar Chowdhury

On the lawless eastern border between Bangladesh and India, lives a group of proud bandits, obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker. Re-enacting their past and celebrating their outsider status, they philosophise on their role in society, and the balance between order and chaos. In BAN♡ITS, not just the borders between states are unclear, but the borders between fiction and documentary blur, and ultimately, as do the borders between resistance, art and crime.

About the Director

Omar Chowdhury

Omar A. CHOWDHURY (1984, Bangladesh) is a Bengali artist and filmmaker living between Brussels and Dhaka. Originally trained in industrial relations and information systems, he now produces parafictional installations, films, and performances which animate the ambiguities and ruptures of diasporic life. Chowdhury is an immigrant from Bengal, and this is reflected in his layered installations. His work has been exhibited worldwide and he has been the recipient of international grants and commissions, as well as an Australian Cinematographers Society Gold Award.

The Land In Between

15min, 2025, China

Zhou Yilu

In a remote village in Xinjiang, language lost creates a quiet barrier between generations. Mountains, wrinkles, songs, children’s eyes—a bond beyond words lingers in the air.

About the Director

Zhou Yilu

Zhou Yilu, born in 1997 in China, is a young filmmaker and visual artist currently living and working in Hangzhou.

In 2024, she graduated in Film Directing from the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on memory, perception, and the flow of emotions within cultural ruptures, seeking to capture moments that language cannot reach. Through silent observation, she transforms everyday intervals into poetic narratives, exploring the subtle connections of human emotions within shifting cultural and environmental landscapes.

A Moon Made of Iron

28min, 2017, Chile/France

Francisco Rodriguez Teare

The ghosts which fill the film are those of four Chinese workers, who died at sea after jumping off a fishing boat in the hope of reaching Puntas Arenas, a Chilean city north of the Strait of Magellan. Birds have pecked out their eyes; their mobile phones, passports, computers and food were found. They were wearing lifejackets and yet their deaths were deemed a suicide. The inhabitants hence stand in front of their homes or on the pebble beaches to recount their version of events, children learn to read by deciphering newspapers or they recite and sing apocalyptic fables, telling of imaginary illnesses that would attack their jaws, and dreaming of an ark to harbour them, defying the wind to make their voices heard. History stammers and breaks down, the earth sweats and cadavers emerge. At the end of all possible paths, only impressions, directions, apparitions remain.

About the Director

Francisco Rodriguez Teare

Francisco Rodríguez Teare is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in France with a moving image practice. Since 2015 he has been creating film and video works and exhibiting them internationally both in film festival circuits and contemporary art contexts. His work explores the flow of power within fluid global networks and territories, opacity of violence, the traces of the dead in the world of the living, oral traditions and their intersection with personal memory and popular myths. His work OTRO SOL (2023) was selected for Cinéma du Réel. His latest documentary short OCTOBER NOON (2024) has been selected for TIFF and NYFF.

Self-Portrait Along the Borderline

50min, 2023, Georgia

Anna Dziapshipa

Anna Dziapshipa was born in Tbilisi to an Abkhazian father and a Georgian mother. As a child, her Abkhazian surname was initially associated with her grandfather’s footballing success, but has since become closely linked to the conflict that has opposed the two nations since 1992. This situation had a profound effect on her childhood and identity, caught in the middle of two warring countries. In Self-Portrait Along the Borderline, the filmmaker returns to the Abkhazian family home built by her grandfather, located in a country that is off-limits to Georgian citizens and still not recognised by Georgia. Combining unique fragments and archives from her family collection, and from television footage and radio recordings of the time, she offers a rare personal and political biography of the relations between Georgia and Abkhazia. Anna Dziapshipa has created a vibrant and beautifully woven autobiography: she is a new filmmaking voice to look out for.

About the Director

Anna Dziapshipa

B. 1982 Tbilisi, Georgia Anna Dziapshipa is a filmmaker and a visual artist. With experience and a professional biography in art history, film production, cultural management, experimental video, and documentary film. Her recent Self Portrait Along the Borderline has been awarded the Jury Prize for Best Medium Length Film at Visions du Réel. Her works often explore the transformation of physical borders into memory and identity.