THE TEAM

DIRECTOR | aaaaafin

Trained at the Met Film School, Ealing Studios (London), Arifin Ajib is a Malaysian filmmaker fascinated by how imagination lives in ordinary spaces—in family rooms, inherited objects, the stories grandmothers carry in their dreams.

His award-winning short film My Lor Bak has journeyed through Raindance, Busan, and Nevada, earning recognition for direction and cinematography. But what drives him isn’t accolades—it’s a quiet conviction that Malaysian stories deserve to be told with the imaginative seriousness of sci fi fantasy.

Mimpi Kita: Castle In The Air, his feature directorial debut, is an exploration of this belief. He made this film because he saw young Malaysian wanting to see their world transformed by imagination. That possibility—that hunger—felt worth dedicating years to understand.

CHAIR | Hannah Nazri

Hannah Nazri trained as an obstetrics and gynaecology doctor, and continues to work across medicine, research, and storytelling. She has never been satisfied with simply applying treatments, and remains drawn to the questions beneath them. Why do certain interventions exist. Why do some conditions still have no cure. Why is women’s health so often shaped by what remains unknown.

That curiosity led her into academia, where she learned to question assumptions, to sit with uncertainty, and to use the scientific method as a way of understanding the world. Over time, she also came to see its limits. Much of what is discovered remains distant from the people it is meant to serve, contained within journals or never shared at all.

She wanted knowledge to move. To reach beyond institutions and into lived experience. This led her into entrepreneurship, where she learned how ideas take form in the world. Change requires both speed and structure, but also something less tangible. It requires resonance.

Policy became a natural continuation. Systems shape lives, and if those systems do not reflect reality, they cannot create meaningful change. But policy alone cannot transform how people see themselves. It cannot reach the quieter layers where belief and identity are formed.

This is what drew her to film.

Film allows entry into those inner spaces. It moves through memory, perception, and emotion. It gives form to what is often unseen or unspoken. Where science seeks to explain, film can help us feel. Where policy sets direction, film can shift perspective.

Her work sits at this intersection. It brings knowledge closer to experience, and explores how understanding begins not only with evidence, but with attention, feeling, and story.

PRODUCER |

Tan Chui Mui

Tan Chui Mui is a foundational producer of the Malaysian New Wave, renowned for her ability to transform limited resources into globally recognised cinema. In 2004, she co-founded Da Huang Pictures, a collective that pioneered a sustainable independent production model in ASEAN. As producer, she was the driving force behind seminal Malaysian titles including Liew Seng Tat’s Flower in the Pocket (Rotterdam Tiger Award), Jiang Xiaoxuan’s To Kill a Mongolian Horse (Giornate degli Autori 2024), and ‘The Fox King’ (Toronto, 2025) by Woo Ming Jin.

Mui’s production philosophy emphasizes “Low Cost, High Quality,” a strategy she formalised through the Next New Wave initiative and the SeaShorts Film Festival. Her recent work, the meta-action feature Barbarian Invasion (2021), showcases her expertise in navigating international co-productions and grants. Mui’s blueprint has shown regional producers how to bridge local stories and global festivals via artistic rigor and collective regional support.

Filmography as Producer includes:

‘Flower in the Pocket’ (Rotterdam, 2007) by Liew Seng Tat

‘Letters from the South’ (2013), an omnibus short film by Tsai Ming-liang, Aditya Assarat, Royston Tan, Midi Z, Sun Koh and Tan Chui Mui

‘Sometime, Sometime’ (Shanghai, 2020) by Jacky Yeap

‘The Wind Will Say’ (Busan, 2022) by Renai Wei Yongyao

‘This Woman’ (Visions du Réel, 2023) by Alan Zhang

‘To Kill a Mongolian Horse’ (Giornate degli Autori 2024 ) by Jiang Xiaoxuan

‘The Fox King’ (Toronto, 2025) by Woo Ming Jin