What's next?

While the soundscape soothingly lulls the brain, What's Next? begins in a paradisical visual state. Soft images full of sweetness. Figures luxuriate in kitsch landscapes with psychedelic dancing vegetables – until the AI-generated images begin to show their teeth. They drift into dark dystopias, filled with male demons. In her montage of clichés, director Cao Yiwen allows whatever’s being addressed – whether gender, the environment or capitalism – to run hot in critical terms.

The film confronts the audience with congealed visual statistics of its own visual expectations and takes them to their logical consequence. Dark depths don’t just yawn forth in the glitches in how the AI-images are displayed. The hideous face of evil hallucinated by machines and the pseudo realism of human suffering make the limits of our imagination visible while the human-machine loop circulates ever quicker. An opulent ride through hell that carries us from the world we inhabit together towards images of the world we collectively have produced. There’s no overlooking the need to escape this flow in order to grapple with the question the title has raised: what’s next? (Fabian Tietke)

Cao Yiwen is a female filmmaker from China Hong Kong, who in her own words “wants to heal the audience and give them mental power”. Her previous short films were selected, amongst others, by Venice and Cannes’ Animation Days. In her films, she proposes that it is not the first time that humans exist on the planet and that previous generations died from selfishness and greed. Nowadays, she suggests, people are threatened by many crises: “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you. To avoid future tragedies, we should do everything for human's common profits.”

Director Cao Yiwen. Screenplay Cao Yiwen. Cinematography CAO YIWEN. Editing Cao Yiwen. Music Cao Yiwen. Sound Design Cao Yiwen. Sound CAO YIWEN. Production Design CAO YIWEN. Animation Cao Yiwen. Producer Cao Yiwen. Executive Producer CAO YIWEN. Production company Lucky Even Film Company Limited (Hong Kong, China).

Films: 2023: Graduation (short film), Invader and Defender (short film). 2024: A Normal Life (short film), “Release” Nuclear Contaminated Water (short film), Invisible War (short film). 2025: What’s next?.