Speculative Film Festival

Norwescon’s Speculative Film Fest is a celebration of science fiction, fantasy, horror and other speculative fiction films. This is a juried festival with over ten judges representing a wide range of people in the science fiction community. The festival screens about eight hours of short films each year.

Norwescon’s Speculative Film Fest embraces and fosters new voices in Speculative Fiction, including those of BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ+ creators. We have judges who represent these voices, and we waived entry fees for BIPOC directors.

Schedule

Block A: Thursday 2 p.m.

Start the festival off with some dark fantasy from foreign lands.

TLSM (North Macedonia)
Work from Home (Netherlands)
The Screenwriter (Italy)
The Minotaur (Spain)

Block B: Thursday 3 p.m.

Featuring speculative fiction from student filmmakers.

Uncertainty Principle (Spain)
Unknown User (United States)
Daybreak (Israel)
Lavenza (Canada)
Dealing with Time (United States)

Block C: Thursday 4 p.m.

Dystopian science fiction, in settings too close to our own.

Furnaces (United States)
Afterlife (United States)
Les Autres (France)

Block D: Thursday 5 p.m.

End the afternoon with a mixture of martial arts and animation.

Spirit Slayer: Rise of the Apprentice (Singapore)
Fathoming Dinner (Lithuania, Netherlands, Ukraine)
My Lovely Beast (Ukraine)
Back to You (Chile)
Burnout (United States)

Block E: Thursday 7 p.m.

Movies made in the Pacific Northwest.

Firecrow (Canada)
Sticky Buns, Ravioli, and White Cake (United States)
The 2400 (Canada)
Earwig (United States)
Before The Sky Took Him (United States)
We Look Like You (United States)

Block F: Thursday 8 p.m.

Time to cross the toxic wastelands

Ignis Oppidum (France)
New Human (United States)
Ekelbrode (United States)

Q&A: Thursday 9 p.m.

A time to ask filmmakers who make it any burning questions you might have on their films. If you have ever wanted to run a festival, the festival director will also answer questions about the process. Moderator: Shawn Marier

Block G: Friday 6 p.m.

Start your evening off with a selection of Science Fiction films.

Star-Crossed (United States)
Emotional Anomaly (Spain)
I Made The Invisible Man (United Kingdom)
Memoria Obscura (United States)

Block H: Friday 7 p.m.

Alien invasions, Bug hunts, Exploration of planets, and Ghost in the machine, this block has all the tropes of Science Fiction.

Invasion '53 (United States)
2042 (Italy)
Downsized (United Kingdom)
Pale Blue Dot: A Tale of Two Stargazers (Italy)

Block I: Friday 8 p.m.

Time to get scared, from cosmic horrors, to aliens, to forest spirits, they are all out to get you.

Amira (Spain)
Leshy (Poland)
Dead Air (United States)
Hide (United States)
The Other (France)

Block J: Friday 9 p.m.

Movies to make your skin crawl, scary monsters, vampires, wendigos, and insects.

Hunger (United States)
Are You There (United States)
Necrosectos (Spain)
Roberta (United States)

The Films

2042

Director: Alessio di Lallo
Country of Origin: Italy
Description: A man wanders through a deserted and ruined world, feeding on the only prey that is not extinct.

Afterlife

Director: Charles Scott Bell
Country of Origin: United States
Description: Haunted by grief in a near-future where sadness can be outsourced, April Neal considers a new outpatient procedure: an AI implant that can replicate her mind, replace it with a digital copy, and spare her loved ones the pain of loss.
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Amira

Director: Javier Yañez
Country of Origin: Spain
Description: In the XIX Century, there's a music school where it's always dark.
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Are You There

Director: Jaclyn Fleming
Country of Origin: United States
Description: A young woman experiences what she believes to be attacks by a poltergeist or demonic presence, only to discover something darker.

Back to You (Devuelta a Ti)

Director: Martina Díaz Martínez
Country of Origin: Chile
Description: Liten, a young clay being, takes care of Lillet, her ill mother. One day, when he gets home, Liten watches his mother in distress. He rushes to help and that's when, while he is watching her gem-memory, it cracks and falls. Despite trying to force the memory back, Liten realizes the importance of treasuring their time, even if his mother can't recall.
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Before The Sky Took Him

Director: David Over
Country of Origin: United States
Description: Jack is down on his luck and trying to mend his relationship with his estranged daughter. The night before her birthday party, he encounters a pair of creatures not from this world.
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Burnout

Director: Karina Zhou, Will Larsen, Lewi Thute, Batu Alpas
Country of Origin: United States
Description: Sixteen-year-old Azel must navigate the cut-throat, class-divided city of Haven through any means possible. Carrying the weight of her Dad's dreams, Azel wishes to become one of the greats in racing and lift herself out of the dregs of society.
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Daybreak

Director: Nava Yaari
Country of Origin: Israel
Description: On a distant planet where sunlight comes once every 500 years, Asa, a young woman, embraces the light, while her community shuns it. What will happen when the sun rises?
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Dead Air

Director: Connor England, Jordon Kinsman
Country of Origin: United States
Description: On air with Lou Sawyer's Last Voice broadcast, a lonely signal drifts through a desolate wasteland. In a world gone quiet, his search for connection reaches into the void—where the line between signal and sanity starts to fade.
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Dealing with Time

Director: Byron J Donaldson
Country of Origin: United States
Description: A woman offers her ability to manipulate time like a salesperson. She showcases her abilities as if presenting the features of a car.

Downsized

Director: Ed Willey
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Description: On his last day of work, a software engineer attempts to salvage the digital remains of his wife before being discovered by his coworker.
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Earwig

Director: Dylan Petrone
Country of Origin: United States
Description: Haunted by visions of an angel, an artist paints his salvation, only to discover that the divine voice inspiring him isn't from above, but from within.

Ekelbrode

Director: Ben Montgomery-Pierson
Country of Origin: United States
Description: Cadulbrockt faces his final night aboard a roaming prison wagon that crawls across a toxic wasteland.
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Emotional Anomaly (Anomalia Emocional)

Director: Ferran Carbonell Pous
Country of Origin: Spain
Description: A robotics technician and a young intern face a strange case: An android assigned to care for an elderly woman begins to show abnormal behavior.
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Fathoming Dinner

Director: Oleksandra Davydenko, Leja Kancerevyciute
Country of Origin: Lithuania, Netherlands, Ukraine
Description: The luxurious setting of Fathoming Dinner introduces a family of four, whose lavish dinner turns into a wild battlefield. They dive into an absurdist feud over plastic surgery and cheating rumors, rather than addressing the profound issues connected to their served meals.
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Firecrow

Director: Markham Samuels
Country of Origin: Canada
Description: Two farm workers are tasked with moving a cryptic scarecrow one day, which, unbeknownst to them, has been afflicted with a powerful curse.
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Furnaces

Director: Nick Dragon
Country of Origin: United States
Description: Another lockdown, but this one is... different. The world slides into an incomprehensible nightmare, and one woman must face it alone.
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Hide

Director: Brenden Hubbard
Country of Origin: United States
Description: Still reeling from an incredible loss, a father and daughter cling to a bedtime routine keeping them safe in a town where an unfathomable horror visits its inhabitants night after night.
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Hunger

Director: Ken Carlson
Country of Origin: United States
Description: A group of trappers lost in the wilderness of the 1830s Pacific Northwest must face more than hunger when they make a fateful mistake.
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I Made The Invisible Man

Director: Luke Walters
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Description: When a jaded ghostwriter is hired to tell the story of a man who claims to be H.G. Wells' real Invisible Man, she assumes it's just another doomed commission. But as Victoria Griffin digs deeper, she uncovers fragments of a mystery stretching across centuries and a terrifying truth hiding in plain sight.
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Ignis Oppidum (Ignis Oppidum)

Director: Maxence Bossé, Nolan Corlay
Country of Origin: France
Description: In a desert world plagued by war and climate change, Dionne, an inhabitant of the city of Ignis Oppidum, worships the Aura, the machine that governs her people. She gets the honor of being appointed as a “flamine,” an aura's apostle.
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Invasion '53

Director: Danielle Weinberg
Country of Origin: United States
Description: A man-eating alien crashes a suburban cocktail party.
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Lavenza

Director: Lauren Eden
Country of Origin: Canada
Description: When Lavenza, a 19th-century noblewoman, overhears her husband complaining about her looks, she turns herself into his ideal wife by thrifting the body parts from all the women he desires.
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Les Autres

Director: Pierre Descamps
Country of Origin: France
Description: Inside a futuristic society, worker Eric lives an internal crisis with his wife, who cheats on him with an android, and an external crisis that threatens France with the election of a young fascist.

Leshy

Director: Julia Bui Ngoc
Country of Origin: Poland
Description: An ecological folklore noir set in contemporary times. The film explores local traditions and cultural identity, drawing from the richness of Polish Slavic mythology.

Memoria Obscura

Director: David Christopher Nelson, Connor Ryan
Country of Origin: United States
Description: In a world where memory erasure is a legitimate industry, the underground black market known as Memoria Obscura serves as a hub for stolen and repurposed memories.

My Lovely Beast (Мій Коханий Звір)

Director: Anastasiia Tiahun
Country of Origin: Ukraine
Description: A family lives as if in the classic American dream, until strange transformations take place with the husband. He loves his wife, but he loves eating and drinking much more. The wife cannot understand if he is still her husband or if she is now living with a real monster under the same roof.
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Necrosectos (Necrosectos)

Director: Javier Lozano
Country of Origin: Spain
Description: An invasion of strange insects disrupts a family's world.
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New Human

Director: Catherina Cojulun
Country of Origin: United States
Description: A young botanist grapples with the unsettling idea that her robot clone may be humanity's best hope—while she questions her own worth in the future.
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Pale Blue Dot: A Tale of Two Stargazers

Director: Matteo Scarfò
Country of Origin: Italy
Description: A female form is sent to investigate a planet to see if it can be inhabitable. Upon crash-landing, her directive is revealed: She is to be a sacrifice for the exploration against her will.

Roberta

Director: Kang Ojoi
Country of Origin: United States
Description: NOTE: synopsis not submitted

Spirit Slayer: Rise of the Apprentice

Director: Joel Lim
Country of Origin: Singapore
Description: Wen Li, the lazy but talented grandson of two spirit slayers, is sent on an errand during a rare blood moon. When he carelessly botches a talisman ritual at the sacred Spirit Tree, a forbidden seal breaks, releasing Ling Yan, a seductive and vengeful fox spirit once imprisoned by his grandfather, Master Liu.
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Star-Crossed

Director: Bud Myrick
Country of Origin: United States
Description: A beautiful young woman craving connection risks revealing her true nature—only to fall for the wrong man, igniting a night of passion, poor decisions, and consequences you can't sweep under a rug.
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Sticky Buns, Ravioli, and White Cake

Director: Nicole Pouchet
Country of Origin: United States
Description: During breakfast, a grown-up Alice tries to convince the Mad Hatter to share his emotions so that Wonderland won't collapse along with his mental stability.
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The 2400

Director: David Scott Titus
Country of Origin: Canada
Description: An authoritarian regime tracks people by drones, hunting down people with expired residency cards.
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The Minotaur (El Minotauro)

Director: Claudia Benlloch
Country of Origin: Spain
Description: A lonely tattoo artist lives haunted by insomnia and dissociative disorders caused by a past trauma. The imminent visit of a woman with a burnt back drags her to a labyrinth of supernatural phenomenon, from which she would have to escape to heal her wounds.
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The Other (L'Autre)

Director: Cyril Ferment
Country of Origin: France
Description: At 3:15 a.m., Lise is awakened by a strange noise. Dan has disappeared from the marital bed, and a disturbing clue lies on the sheet.

The Screenwriter (Lo Sceneggiatore)

Director: Mark Petrasso
Country of Origin: Italy
Description: A screenwriter is grappling with a new story: a noir with echoes of John Huston. A priceless object, a killer, a dead man, and a femme fatale all play their part in a metacinematic homage.
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TLSM

Director: Filip Momirovski
Country of Origin: North Macedonia
Description: A boy prepares for a final showdown with his bullies. A spirit from Macedonian folktales interferes.
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Uncertainty Principle (La identitat del vent)

No poster available

Director: André Brugnara Petry
Country of Origin: Spain
Description: In a postapocalyptic world, forsaken with old technologies and strange anomalies, Nel and Dàlia have learned to live together after Dàlia's quantum condition, which makes her only exist if she's near somebody.
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Unknown User

Director: Evan Fine
Country of Origin: United States
Description: A scientist built a computer to talk to her alternate self from another world. Something else answered.
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We Look Like You

Director: Devin Alexander Sebasstian
Country of Origin: United States
Description: Three interdimensional human-hybrids come to Earth looking for a lost artifact.
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Work from Home

Director: Medina Sharapova
Country of Origin: Netherlands
Description: On a desolate beach, deities of Death and Love unexpectedly cross paths as a mortal mother fights to save her drowning child.