Curatorial Foreword

In an era of multispecies coexistence, we need to broaden the ways in which we see and understand life. Our attention to different species has never been equally distributed: "charismatic species"—those perceived as cute, familiar, culturally significant, or more likely to evoke emotional connection — tend to receive greater public attention and protection. By contrast, "non-charismatic species" that fall outside human aesthetic and emotional preferences are more likely to be overlooked, rejected, or assigned negative meanings. This raises a fundamental question: what shapes our sense of affinity, preference, and distance toward different forms of life?

Building on this question, this year's festival further examines how species-based biases are formed, and how our experiences, language, and cultural frameworks shape the ways in which we define other forms of life. We will explore the diversity of emotional, sensory, and cognitive experiences across species, while reflecting on the limits of human understanding and the possibilities of developing more reciprocal forms of understanding and coexistence with other life forms.

The 2027 Animal Nature Future Film Festival uses moving image as a medium and invites documentary, fiction, experimental, and interdisciplinary works that engage with animal subjectivity and lived experience, human–animal relationships, ecological ethics, nonhuman perspectives, and possible futures of coexistence.

Through screenings, conversations, and public moving-image education programmes, we seek to extend the act of looking beyond the screen and into everyday life, attending to forms of life that are often overlooked and their relationships with human environments and everyday experience. We welcome marginalised narratives, unresolved emotions, and works that move beyond anthropomorphism and sensationalism to portray other species with authenticity, complexity, and respect.