Meet The Filmmaker #4: “Relentless Melt” – Max Hattler & A World Of Sublime Abstraction

Max Hattler is a filmmaker whose work has turned up in successive MIAF’s. An innovator and experimenter par-excellence, his personal films have charted unique journeys into the animation landscape. From his Hong Kong base, he established “Relentless Melt,” a kind of ‘abstractheque’ that draws from incredible work within both his teaching and curating realms, to present to the converted and the curious. This is a unique and expert window into an avenue of animation incredibly dear to MIAF’s heart. This program is curated by Max specifically for MIAF 2026, and it will open with a video introduction by Max outlining his curatorial approach and offering insights into the chosen works in the line-up.

Relentless Melt No. 46: A World Of Sublime Abstraction

Curated and introduced by Max Hattler

Great Day Today
Bian Ning, Wang Yuchen, Xing Xiangyi, Zhou Xuanfu
Hong Kong, 1’00, 2026
Transformation of calendar imagery exploring traditional ideas of time, fate, and natural order.

_ImEdge
Huang Xiaowen
Hong Kong, 4’13, 2018
An exploration of various landforms and conditions of uncertainty through edge-detection processes.

Where’s My Stress Ball
Or Chun Yiu
Hong Kong, 1’15, 2020
A music-synchronised abstract animation turning stress into something playful and positive through lively bouncing balls and flashes of colour.

Invade
Wong Man-sze
Hong Kong, 5’33, 2020
An animated music video using hands-on, instinctive mark-making to generate ethereal abstract imagery that shimmers between line, shade, and pulse made largely with powdered and compressed charcoal.

Estrella Distante
Tang Jingcheng, Xing Xiangyi, Zhou Xuanfu
Hong Kong, 3’11, 2026
A cross-dimensional metamorphosis: hazy light transforms into sharp prisms, mutates into holographic polygons, and ultimately bursts into a boundless universe, blurring reality and illusion, micro and macro.

Fly Train
Ria Zhang Riwen
Hong Kong, 3’42, 2025
Through shadow play and the transformation of everyday silhouettes into surreal imagery, a poetic reflection on fading memory and time’s relentless flow emerges.

Linear Bloom
Chen Wai Lam, Ng Kwan Yi, Wang Lok Sze, Wong Sui Kei
Hong Kong, 3’57, 2026
Using a hybrid of scanography and AI-generated image boiling animation, abstract structures collide with organic textures, mirroring the music’s mechanical rhythms and emotional vocal samples.

Squint Your Eyes To Get A Better Picture
Jonathan Kan
Hong Kong, 4’24, 2025
An exquisitely hand-drawn charcoal animation observing the shifting of attention and interruptions in perception during everyday movement, transforming what is small and momentary into visible rhythms and layered structures.

Elements
Wing Yi Quinn Wong
Hong Kong, 3’17, 2026
An immersion in vibrant, dreamy colours, creating illusional visuals that enable true interaction between the abstract, music, and an essence of the surreal.

The Interval Between
Chen Wai Lam, Ng Kwan Yi, Wang Lok Sze, Wong Sui Kei
Hong Kong, 1’00, 2026
A tactile exploration of form in motion, exploring the transient space where one form dissolves and another begins utilising soft pastel hand-drawings, kinestasis stop-motion, and optical sound.

Time Was Wasted
Bian Ning, Wang Yuchen
Hong Kong, 3’04, 2026
A reworking of discarded, time-damaged film through montage and direct intervention, including scratching and painting on the material.

Curatorial Statement by Max Hattler

This programme brings together a selection of abstract and experimental animations connected to the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong, drawn across different years in order to show both continuity and transformation within the work emerging from the courses I teach and supervise. The films are diverse in method, mood, and thematic emphasis, but they share a commitment to abstraction as a mode of thinking through motion, sound, material, and perception.

The more recent films, especially those from 2025 and 2026, are shaped by the conceptual terrain of analogue digitals / digital analogues. In these works, analogue materials and procedures are not treated as residues of an earlier medium, but as active agents within contemporary moving-image practice: charcoal, pastel, paper, hand-drawn marks, shadow play, scanography, refilming, optical sound, and tactile stop-motion processes are brought into dialogue with digital compositing, Gen AI, editing, synchronisation, and transformation. What emerges is not a simple opposition between old and new media, but a productive oscillation in which physical textures survive digitisation, and digital systems, in turn, simulate or amplify the instability, grain, and friction of material processes.

Within that framework, abstraction becomes a method for investigating mediation itself. These films explore how touch translates into image, how image generates rhythm, how rhythm might carry traces of gesture, decay, or memory. The Interval Between foregrounds this through optical sound, which turns drawn pastel marks into both visual and sonic material. Elsewhere, works pursue transformation through boiling and looping effects; others set graphic precision against organic chaos, or pit tight musical structures against the unpredictability of handmade materials.

The older films open this out towards visual music more broadly. Across the programme, the works engage synchronisation, pulse, pattern, and the correspondence between sound and image, but they do so in quite different registers. Some are playful, others meditative or intensely textural; some work within the music video format, others push beyond it. What emerges is not a single style but a broad territory in which sound-image relations unfold through rhythm, texture, graphic wit, sensory pressure, and temporal flow.

For me as curator, teacher, and filmmaker, this programme is also a way of making visible the pedagogical and research dimensions of abstract animation. The works presented here are not simply student exercises, but ambitious attempts to test what moving images can do when freed from conventional narrative obligation and opened instead to rhythm, texture, structure, sensation, and perceptual transformation. The programme therefore reflects a shared space of inquiry in which teaching, artistic practice, and research feed directly into one another.

This session is classified: Unclassified (M) Mature, not recommended for viewers under 15 years.

Please note that Backlot is NOT fully accessible. There are stairs with handrails, but no lift to the second floor where the cinema is located.