Phantasms inhabit the space between apparition and memory. They can be conjured in a dream; trapped in an image; shaped by grief and longing. In this fantastic competition program (1) titled ‘Image as Phantasm’, each work moves through that liminal territory where reality is porous, allowing perception to slip toward the uncanny.
 

‘The Shadow of Dawn’ opens with a tale of transformation where a woman’s shadow embarks on a quest through enchanted landscapes to reclaim its owner before sunrise. In ‘Resistance’, the spectral takes form through a meditation on mortality, where poetry and visual rhythm merge to create an elegy that is intimate as it is expansive.
 

Haunting lingers in ‘Capturing the Ghost’, which follows three generations living under a family curse. Do memories act as phantasms? If so, how can one navigate through the difficulty of breaking the curse?

‘The Bottle’ turns its gaze inward, where a daughter’s quiet bond with a fish becomes a mirror to the emotional fractures left by her parents. The surreal surfaces in ‘The Yarn Man’, as a grandmother’s knitting gives life to a figure both protective and strange.
 

A man ventures repeatedly into the darkness in ‘Canto’, drawn towards a creature whose voice is incomprehensible yet urgent. ‘Mu’ confronts unresolved loss through an unsettling inversion, where a son’s care for his ailing father mirrors something familiar from the past.

‘Imago’ closes the program with the act of storytelling itself, its imagined horrors becoming as vivid as the fear they provoke.
 

This first of two sets of competition films explore the phantasm as a vessel for unhealed wounds and unresolved matters, allowing the filmmakers to settle the score for their characters. In most of the works, the images return when we least expect them. In their worlds, the ghostly is never far from the living.