Being seen, mis-seen, or not seen at all. Who gets to belong, and what happens when they don’t? These are the questions that thread through the seven films in Mint Chinese Film Festival’s Short Film Competition 1.

In A Little Regret in Helsinki, belonging is filtered through the slippery idea of home. Told through a tender narration of a father and daughter and set against nostalgic 8mm images, the film resists easy definition. Home becomes less a place than a feeling shaped by distance, expectation, and regret.

Children’s Day and Myopia observe young girls navigating unstable domestic worlds. In Children’s Day, Xuan’s search for the perfect outfit unfolds against sibling tension and parental distance, with emotional weight carried in small gestures – a glance, a moment of silence, the fragile beginnings of a friendship. Myopia similarly centres a daughter longing for attention from a neglectful mother who notices her only in moments of necessity. Both films speak to the quiet loneliness of wanting but failing to be seen by the people closest to us.

Change and transformation surface in films Innocent Flesh and I Cancel Myself. The former moves between myth and reality, tracing a pregnancy entangled with memory, folklore, and the reappearance of a sick ex-husband. But, where Innocent Flesh looks toward beginnings, I Cancel Myself considers what it means to move beyond them. Following a woman navigating menopause, it reflects on the strange dissonance of ageing in a world that both perceives and overlooks older women; a world where freedom and solitude sit side by side.

In Rooftop Lempicka, connection emerges through an unlikely friendship between a young girl and a sex worker. As their bond grows, the girl’s quiet curiosity about the adult world is sparked by a stolen art book of Tamara de Lempicka’s nudes. Rather than being sensational, the book is a quiet mirror to the messy, lived reality around her and a way of seeing womanhood that feels controlled, yet strangely illuminating. 

It’s left to 2024: A Swiss Odyssey to bring humour to the programme’s wider exploration of belonging. Framed as a mockumentary, the film follows a Chinese researcher investigating a link between a Swiss carnival and extraterrestrials. Her suggestion, that costumes invite aliens by helping them feel less like outsiders, evolves into a sharp reflection on belief, belonging and the unknown.

Across the programme, belonging remains uncertain, shaped by visibility, closeness, and the uneasy vulnerability of being human. These seven films dwell in the insecure moments, the need for connection, the ache of loneliness and the quiet hope of recognition –– asking not just who belongs, but what it means to be seen at all.