The Hong Kong International Film Festival Association has finalized the program for the 24th Hong Kong-Asia Film Finance Forum (HAF), adding 13 projects featuring McDull creator Brian Tse, Sundance Prize winner Alireza Ghasemi and Turkish filmmaker Tayfun Pilselimoglu, completing the lineup of 42 titles scheduled to screen at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center from March 17 to 19.
The final batch consists of seven animated features and six genre titles in various stages of development and production, joining 29 previously announced projects in development and in progress. All titles will be on display alongside FilMart at the now 30th HKIFF Industry Project Market.
Three of the newly announced projects are in production or post-production: Brian Tse’s The Excreman – On the Road, Abid Liongoren’s Zsazsa Zaturnnah, and Ching Yuchi’s suspense thriller What My Bones Know. The trio will participate in the WIP Open Pitch Session on March 17th, along with 12 previously announced in-development titles.
HAF’s dedicated animation section was launched last year and has quickly established a track record of festival success. Xu Zao’s “Light Pillar” will be premiered at the Berlinale’s Perspectives section this month, while Toe Yuen’s “A Mighty Adventure” won the Golden Horse Award for Best Sound Effects last November. Both projects appeared in the first installment of this section.
The animation slate features The Excretion Man – On the Road, directed by McDull series creator Tse, about a mass of excrement that defeats a plumber sent to cleanse a sewer community, then assumes the plumber’s identity and begins a new human life.
Jun Yong-deok, co-director of “The Tiger’s Apprentice,” helms “Fishball,” which depicts a ruthless general who is reincarnated as a sardine and leads an underwater army to fight predators using military tactics.
Director Alireza Ghassemi, who won the Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Competition Best Director award in 2024 for In the Land of Brothers, directed the animated/live-action hybrid Rainy Dreams, which follows six displaced children in Calais as they overcome their fears and aspirations through their nightly dreams.
Director Chen Shudong makes his feature debut with Roxanne, a stop-motion monster movie set in a post-apocalyptic ocean that follows a boy born at sea searching for humanity’s last hope. The project is produced by Lu Xiaowei, who screened “Light Pillar” at this year’s Berlinale Perspective.
Karl Josep E. Papa, whose film The Missing won Best Animated Film at the 2024 Asia Pacific Screen Awards, is directing Sentinel, a multi-perspective drama centered around a transfer student, editor-in-chief, and school principal who come into conflict after a campus newspaper article exposes violence in their school’s military training program.
Producer Isabel Grachant reunites with director Ray Ray for Tooth and Tales, a fairy tale about a boy who searches for a story to cure his toothache. Ray’s “Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish” competed in the Tiger Competition in Rotterdam in 2022.
Lion Goreng from “Hayopuka!” The 2020 Annecy contestant directed Zaza Zaturna, about a shy gay hairdresser who swallows a space stone and transforms into a flashy female superhero, forcing him to fight zombies and aliens.
Genres span a variety of international settings, including psychological thrillers, body horror, and action dramas. Zhou Jinghao, whose film The Girl on Edge screened at the 2025 Cannes Directors Fortnight, is directing In the Name of Right, a suspense drama about a maintenance worker whose decision to help a struggling employee causes a fatal accident. Produced by Leste Chen.
Tayfun Pilselimoglu, director of Turkey’s 2023 Academy Award nominee Car, is directing The Power Plant, a crime thriller about the dangerous relationship between a married meatball vendor and an excavator operator during a mutilation murder in a snowy mining town.
Park Ki-young, director of 2021’s “Gangwon-do,” helmed the action drama “The Searchers: Blood in the Grass,” which follows a South Korean apple farmer who teams up with his reluctant Mongolian father-in-law to rescue his pregnant wife from a powerful political dynasty involved in international fentanyl trafficking.
Lam Lee Hsuen, co-director of The Birth of the Yam, which will be screened at the Berlinale Forum Expanded this year, is also the director of the mythical physical horror Strange Roots, set in 11th-century Singapore, about a demigod born from a yam who is driven to violent and erotic confrontations after being abandoned.
Gabriel Motta makes his feature debut with supernatural horror The Veil, which explores faith and family violence through a religious cult based on a fake possession ritual that descends into darkness when a vengeful entity truly possesses a pastor’s daughter. Motta’s short film “The Veil” was shown in Toronto in 2025.
Chin’s directorial debut, What My Bones Know, is set in a frozen, doomed mining town, and intertwines a college graduate, a terminally ill miner, and an escaped accountant drawn to a local tavern by the discovery of a severed ear.
All ongoing projects will be unveiled on March 17 at the Starlight Theater at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Center, with each team giving a 10-minute first look to industry attendees including distributors, producers, investors, festival programmers, and funders.
