52nd edition of New Directors/New Films
Festival&Award
SightNotSeeing
能見度頗高
Hongkong, UK｜2026｜Drama｜11min
Director: Sheungman YIM
Screenwriter: Sheungman YIM
Producer: Whitney Ka Wan YIU, Sheungman YIM
Cinematographer: Desmond CHAN
Editor: Sheungman YIM
Art Directors: Ka Yue Trista MA
Sound: Yiu Tong Vincent FUNG
Music: Isseki NICHŌ
Starring: Ka Yue Trista, Kwun Sang AU, Ellis YIP, Yiu Tong Vincent FUNG, Salman KHANZADA, Ehitshaw KHANZADA, Pirzada Muhammad HASNAIN
导演: Sheungman YIM
编剧: Sheungman YIM
制片: Whitney Ka Wan YIU, Sheungman YIM
摄影指导: Desmond CHAN
剪辑: Sheungman YIM
美术指导: Ka Yue Trista MA
声音: Yiu Tong Vincent FUNG
音乐: Isseki NICHŌ
主演: Ka Yue Trista, Kwun Sang AU, Ellis YIP, Yiu Tong Vincent FUNG, Salman KHANZADA, Ehitshaw KHANZADA, Pirzada Muhammad HASNAIN
Synopsis
In Kowloon City, Hong Kong, a cultural tour begins, tracing the outline of a walled city that no longer exists. But the group slips out of frame soon enough. In its place, a different kind of cultural tour emerges—less about heritage, more about human nature.
Festival&Award
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026
East Asia Film Festival Ireland 2026
Director's Note
We might believe that the camera sees more than we do—that the image is a neutral witness, and that the news, the documentary, the evidence will show us the truth. Yet the more we look, the less we understand.
This film began from this disbelief: the idea that vision itself has become authoritarian, that the act of watching is inseparable from the wish to control.
SightNotSeeing is a single-take reenactment of a familiar Hong Kong street episode, built to observe how people respond—recording, aligning, accusing— within a post-colonial urban setting. We set out to blend performers into the crowd, but the crowd blends into the performance. The film isn’t about exposing a lie; its about how “truth now behaves like a style”. The long take promises authenticity, the high angle implies neutrality, and the viewer mistakes surveillance for knowledge. The illusion plays out in real time until it implodes.
Sheungm Yiman
Sheungman Yim is a British writer-director and translator from Hong Kong. He earned his MFA in Film Directing from the California Institute of the Arts and is an alumnus of the BIFAN Fantastic Film School (NAFF, Korea) and the International Filmmaking Academy in Italy, where he studied under Abbas Kiarostami and Bernardo Bertolucci. His films trace the shifting boundaries between seeing and believing—and the displacements of diasporic identity.
His latest short, SightNotSeeing, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2026, among other international film festivals. His earlier works have been screened at the Gotëborg, Clermont-Ferrand, HKIFF, IFVA, among others, with The Tide winning the Fresh Wave Award in the Freshwave International Short Film Festival. His 2019 short film, I Come Empty-handed, which received a Fresh Wave Special Mention Award, is archived at Newcastle University's Chinese Independent Film Archive.