The Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, in central France, is the largest of its kind in the world, with more than 500 films screened during a week-long event. Its African Perspectives section this year tackles themes from social media to colonial archives.
Tim Redford, in charge of the festival's international competition and the African Perspectives section, says it acts as a cultural barometer, measuring the level of short film production around the world.
He also says there's no getting away from geopolitics and global economics, which have great impact on the quantity - and quality - of content.
"The current climate is quite complex, and we feel it immediately in short film production," he told RFI.
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Despite having received more than 8,000 entries this year, he says armed conflicts have meant a lower number of entries - especially from Ukraine, Russia and the Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, inflation in Latin America has affected the number of entries from that part of the world.
However, he notes a rise in entries from China, which has invested heavily in the film industry in recent years, particularly in film schools.
This year's special focus at the festival is South East Asia, a region Redford says is booming with activity.
"You can sense that there's a [new] generation of filmmakers who are very free, very inventive in the way they talk about their society, politics and also intimate matters, pushing the boundaries of censorship a little," he explains.
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New technology
African Perspectives, now in its 36th edition, remains one of the highlights of the festival.
"It's great because it often provides a first step into an international festival," Redford says, noting the immense diversity he sees in the African entries - whether from Cap Verde, Nigeria, Chad or Tunisia.
"There is the use of social media and experimental forms... there is a transformation, a use of more hybrid forms than there were a few years ago. It's a type of cinema that fascinates me, and every year I see wonderful things happening."
Sousou's TikTok is one of two Egyptian films in this year's African Perspectives section.
Directed by Sondos Shabayek, this dark comedy introduces us to Sarah, a beautiful woman who sells beauty products on TikTok - but when her husband arrives home, she reverts to an oppressed housewife.
"That's the problem with the online world, with all these women we see online and all these facades they create. I was very curious to explore what lies behind all that," Shabayek told RFI.
With a low budget, the film was shot vertically, just like the videos seen on TikTok. On the right side of the screen is the livestream, on the left are the "likes" and readers' comments can be seen.
"For me, the film is about a woman seeking her freedom. Her presence on TikTok is an expression of her desire to be seen and heard. Her attempt to sell products on TikTok is an attempt to achieve financial independence, which is generally very threatening to men," the director says.
"I wanted to give the impression that we are the audience and question my point of view as a viewer... I wanted to portray the audience's complacency, their negligence. In a way, they contribute to the environment in which this violence occurs."
Redford says an increasing number of films "play with genres or blur the boundaries between fiction and documentary, reality and staging" as well as dealing with new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
He points to examples of how AI helps creators fill in gaps in images, and to those who use AI as a character - such as in the French film Curiosity On Planet Mars by Tommy Baron, in which a young man has an emotional relationship with a conversational AI tool.
"[AI] is beginning to revolutionise creation, film-making, writing, editing, imagery... and it certainly raises new questions about short films."
While he says AI is "here to stay", he admits to being concerned about its potential to replace human film crews.
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Parallels with the past
But the focus is not all on the future. Franco-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb, a veteran of the festival, this year presents his film Boomerang Atomic, which uses archives to shine a light on little-known colonial history.
This 22-minute documentary delves into the long-lasting consequences of the 17 atomic bomb tests carried out by France in Algeria in the early 1960s.
Bouchareb is pleased to be back, 30 years after his first time at Clermont-Ferrand.
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The award-winning director, of both short and long films, often turns his eye to historical events. His film Indigènes, about African soldiers in the Second World War, won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 - awarded collectively to all five of the film's leads.
Boomerang Atomic focuses on the lead-up to the first atomic detonation in Reggane, a town in the centre of the Sahara, which took place on 13 February, 1960, under the initiative of General Charles de Gaulle.
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For Bouchareb - there are parallels between those events and the threat of nuclear war in today's world.
"We thought that many things had been debated sufficiently so that we could no longer go back on them," he says. "But in the end, we realise that with human beings, anything is possible. Dropping another atomic bomb on a country is possible today, and even more so tomorrow. I can't keep up with this world anymore. Everything is moving so fast. The presence of war... it's always there."
This article was based on interviews in French by Sigfried Forster. The International Short Film Festival runs until 7 February.
