Four films, eight young filmmakers, all in a program that pushes their limits as directors, making short films that brought them to Cannes.
This year, taking the concept initiated by The Factory at the Directors’ Fortnight since 2013, the first edition of the Next Step Studio program brings together eight emerging directors, four local and four international, to co-write and co-direct four 15-minute short films. Each year, it takes place in a different country and highlights local cinema, with Indonesia leading this edition. The four films, co-written and directed, were screened during the 65th edition of the Critics’ Week.
Film Fest Report caught up with the eight directors to discuss their vision for the short films.
Original Wound
Shelby Kho (Indonesia) and Sein Lyan Tun (Myanmar)
There is something quietly stubborn about Sein Lyan Tun. He introduces himself as being from Myanmar, not Paris, where he has lived since 2021, not France, where exile has become a kind of difficult second skin. “I can say I am an exile,” he offers, without self-pity. “It’s a difficult life, but I am trying to survive.” He holds onto the Myanmar identity deliberately, he explains, because he wants to make a Burmese film. “That’s why I didn’t give up my title as from Myanmar.”
Original Wound came out of the Next Step Indonesia programme, where Sein Lyan Tun was paired with Indonesian co-writer Shelby Kho, two people who had known each other only through social media, had never spoken, and had never worked together. What they discovered quite quickly was that trauma travels. It doesn’t need a shared passport. Both had sibling wounds. Both had things they hadn’t quite found a way to say.
“We’re trying to find what kind of story we could state,” he explains, “because we might have a different visual, different perspective. The way we deliver the film is different.” So, they went looking for common ground and found it in the most personal place possible. “We’re trying to find what’s traumatizing for us. Is this about family? Is it brother, sister? Let’s put together your experience, your traumatizing moment, and my experience, and my traumatizing moment, and make it one story.”
The film opens with the mother already dead. The sister knows. She doesn’t tell the brother, at least not immediately, not out of cruelty exactly, but out of something more complicated, more bruised. “She’s realizing that the death of the mother is good for her. At the same time, she’s been living together. It’s sad. She cannot express it.”
The sister keeps the knowledge to herself, and Sein frames it with clarity: “It’s like a punishment to the brother as well. Or a punishment to the mother as well.” What the film circles around, finally, is something simpler and more devastating. “You can see that she really wants love from the mother that she didn’t get. She thinks she didn’t get it. That, I think, is the whole point.”
Visually, the two co-directors had to negotiate. She wanted more dialogue; he tends toward silence. “My perspective is that I don’t really like a lot of dialogue,” he admits. “But she also likes to write more dialogue. And we’re trying to find a common ground. Agree, disagree, and talk, talk, talk.”
What emerged wasn’t a compromise so much as a third thing neither of them had made alone. “This kind of work for us is about how to work together. We’re not going to prove who we are because it’s collaborative work. We’re trying to tell the story so that people can react to the story. That is our main goal.”
The film was shot in Jakarta in January, which felt right because, as Sein sees it, geography is less of a barrier than outsiders might assume. “All Southeast Asians have a very similar background, a very similar story. We’re trying to bring that one story that we really want to tell.”
Annisa
Reza Rahadian (Indonesia) and Sam Manacsa (Philippines)
Sam Manacsa tells the story of Annisa the way you tell a story about something that happened before you were entirely sure a film was going to happen. Her co-director Reza Rahadian had met a girl during a shoot in Jakarta. She kept dropping by his room. They talked. He kept talking about her to Sam, across calls and meetings, before either of them had committed to anything.
“I let him just talk about this young girl,” said Sam. “We haven’t even decided if it’s really the film that we want to do.” She was patient with the uncertainty, and that patience turned out to be the right instinct. “At the end of our few meetings we said, this is really it. Because that curiosity and that interest in her is really very important to make that film. We have to want to know more about her to make a film about her.”
The girl is Annisa, and she is blind. She loves to sing. And she is, as Sam makes clear with some emphasis, not acting; she is herself. “It wasn’t really necessary to coach her in terms of acting. It was naturally her, and we made it deliberate that it has to feel like she’s very comfortable with herself.”
What the directors did was create the conditions for her ease, follow her lead, and make sure the noise of a film set didn’t throw her off. “She’s very sensitive to sound. There are a lot more new things that have to come into the production with their machines and equipment and everything. So, we had to make sure not to shake her so much with anything that’s very loud. That’s where she gets thrown off.”
The cross-cultural question where the Philippines meets Indonesia is one Sam dismisses almost fondly. She grew up in a densely populated neighbourhood in Manila. The neighbourhood where Annisa lives felt immediately recognisable.
“I told Reza that it wasn’t so hard for me to understand even the space that he was trying to describe, where Annisa lives. It was a neighbourhood I feel is also very familiar, it’s something that we also have in Manila.”
What she and Reza found, writing together, was more similarity than difference. “When we were writing the script, we put in a few details, and then we said, that’s something that we also have. We found more similarities with each other actually in this process.”
It was the usual difficulty of collaboration, of learning someone else’s rhythm when you’re used to your own. “Usually I prefer to work with people I know. For my first two short films, I worked with the same team, same people.”
But Sam came into the programme already decided, saying that her reason for coming into this programme was to do things that she may not be doing otherwise. “I am here to listen more to other people’s process.” And at the end of it all: “You have to realise that it’s not just what I want to do, but what we want to do.”
What she seems most moved by is the simplicity of what the film is finally about. More than the blindness, more than the sensory world it opens up, it is about a girl becoming. “We really just wanted to tell the story of a girl growing up and how she processes all of that. And we found a way to tell that through her love for singing, and how she found a way to be able to put herself forward at this very chaotic time in their life.”
Mothers Are Mothering
Khozy Rizal (Indonesia) and Lam Li Shuen (Singapore)
You learn something about a film when the people who made it can’t quite stop adding to each other’s sentences. Khozy Rizal and Li Shuen sit together with the ease of people who have been through something together; the creative kind of something, the kind that leaves marks.
Mother’s Mothering started with Khozy’s mother, a woman from Makassar who finds the house suffocating and escapes to be with her female friends as often as she can. “She rarely stays in the house,” says Khozy, “because she finds home very suffocating for her.”
It’s that image, of a woman pressing against the walls of her own domestic space, that was the seed of an idea they decided to develop.
Then Li Shuen got hold of it. “I thought it would be cool if it was a story about beings who don’t feel like they really belong on earth, using that to explore repression and otherness in the context of a conservative Indonesian society. Using surreal humour and fantasy to talk about things that are pretty raw and sensitive and also painful for issues that a lot of women face in Indonesia, and also in the world today. And also the queer society in Indonesia as well,” she added.
The aliens don’t explain themselves. The film is deliberately, productively ambiguous, and Khozy sees that ambiguity as the film’s engine. “The approach that we apply in this film could create so many possibilities of stories because it’s very ambiguous.”
The visual language is striking: the house is dark, bleak, almost claustrophobically messy. The outside, where the protagonist can finally be herself, is neon, luminous, alive.
“The depiction of the house in this film, it’s pretty much like the house that we live in at my home. It’s dark, and it’s very bleak, and it looks very messy. You can feel so many traumas in the house, to the point that when we see this house, it feels very suffocating.”
That suffocation was the intention so that when the film breathes, it breathes hard. “We want to make the house completely the opposite feeling from the outside. Because on the outside, the protagonist can be herself, totally.”
What makes Mother’s Mothering unusual even within conversations about process is its material texture. Li Shuen’s husband, Mark Chua, shot 16mm footage and hand-processed it. All of the 16mm footage in the film was shot and processed by Shuen.
“My husband shot and hand-processed all of it, so it’s very handmade.”
Some of the more abstract images were made by applying bleach directly to the film stock, a choice that Li Shuen explains with characteristic precision. “Bleach, because it’s something that represents a very household object, but at the same time it’s also such a harsh chemical. So, we thought it’s a nice way to talk about something that women can reclaim.”
The prosthetics were designed by Singaporean artist June Goh, and the making of them produced one of those wonderful accidents: the mould for the alien vagina became, in the end, the all-mother ship. “So, in a way, the all-mother is kind of the creator of the alien pieces.”
Working across Singapore and Jakarta, in pre-production stretches where they were sometimes too distant to be fully in sync, they found their rhythm by going very physical with the material before they shot it.
“We even acted out the scenes together in the toilet. We even made a video board together, and we edited it.”
On set, Li Shuen says, it was smooth. The work had already been done.
They are not shy about what they were trying to say, and the audience has not been shy in response. At a screening the day before, an Indonesian woman came up to them.
“She was a lesbian,” Khozy says, “and she told me: thank you so much for making this film, because I’ve never seen any lesbian representation in Indonesian cinema. And she literally cried during the film.”
He pauses. “So it was nice.”
Holy Crowd
Reza Fahriyansyah (Indonesia) and Ananth Subramaniam (Malaysia)
This film stood out among the other films because it begins with a funeral and then turns into a series of funny events.
There is something quietly radical about a film that opens with a coffin blowing up. Not as a statement of grief, but as a declaration of intent: anything can happen here.
Holy Crowd, the debut short co-directed by Indonesian filmmaker Reza Fahriyansyah and Tamil filmmaker Ananth Subramaniam, is precisely that kind of film, one that uses dark humour and sharp satire to examine how communities behave when they believe a miracle is unfolding in front of them.
The two directors met and discovered that their respective cultures, separated by geography and religion, share the same tendencies toward credulity, spectacle, and the seductive pull of the crowd.
The result is a film that is, as they put it, “borderline satire,” affectionate but unflinching. The title Holy Crowd emerged organically from the film’s central preoccupation: not the miracle itself, but the people who flock to witness it.
“We wanted to put the camera on the community, the people,” says Reza. “To see how humans react, that’s what we wanted to explore.”
Ananth picks up the thread: “We have this herd mentality thing. In India, in Indonesia, in Malaysia, when we started talking, we realized how similar our cultures are in terms of people and their behaviour.”
The title, then, is both descriptive and lightly mocking: the holy crowd, the faithful mob, the devout herd.
For all its irreverence, Holy Crowd is ultimately a film about how people grieve, or fail to. Asked how he personally reckons with death, Ananth grows reflective. Both his grandparents passed away in the last two years, and he speaks with care about the Tamil mourning tradition, in which rituals stretch across a month, giving families time to weep, to return, and to remember.
“In Tamil, when people die, there’s a word we use that means they become time,” he says quietly. “It’s a very poetic way of looking at death.”
Reza interjects with a grin: “We just want to laugh at people.”
The joke lands, but it also clarifies the film’s emotional logic, laughter as a way of processing the inappropriate, the excessive, the grief that turns into spectacle whether we want it to or not.
The collaboration between both was, by their account, a remarkably smooth one, not because they always agreed, but because they entered the process with a shared set of rules.
“We went into it to learn from each other and have fun,” says Ananth. “So even when we disagreed, if Reza felt strongly about something, we’d say, okay, yeah, let’s try it.”
The short film format suited their ambitions. Both see the short as its own art form, not a stepping stone but a discipline, though they acknowledge this film was also a testing ground.
“After this we’re going to make our own features,” said Reza. “This was a good time for us to see what works, what doesn’t stick.”
Our team is on site for the 79th Cannes Film Festival, from May 12 to 23, 2026.
