When light rays bend via refraction, a mirage emerges as a displaced image. A naturally-occurring optical phenomenon, however, a hallucinatory view begets questions on seeing. Who are they? Only their vagueness is observed. When curiosity grows, insatiably, the trivia are surveyed more than a simple silhouette of another being living afar. How would they react to things we know or we have never seen? We set off on a long journey traversing continents, cultures, ethnicities, and genders, overcoming the barriers we thought were shatterproof, and discovering many faces much like us somewhere over the illusion.

In this strand of short films, we hand-picked six works by various filmmakers who likewise choose to look at people coping with a seeming plight consequent to cultural and physical relocations, misplaced social expectations and self-identifications. Often the experience of fictional characters resembles the filmmaker’s memory: the story of She Runs(2019) was inspired by Qiu Yang’s childhood recollection of marching band training, a daughter reconnects her father’s memory with photo album in And Still, We Thrive (2021), along with European premieres of de closin night (2022) and PlayHouse(2022), and an LGBTQ short Lucky Fish(2021), we hope these films make the filmmakers' alternative perspective intersecting with cultural, ethics and gender legible to you.