OCTOPUSS | OverJK | Machine Cinema GenJam™ Directors Cup 2026 | South Korea vs Indonesia

OCTOPUSS is my four-hour entry for the South Korea 🇰🇷 vs Indonesia 🇮🇩 round of the Machine Cinema GenJam™ Directors Cup 2026 by OpenArt. Global fisheries count octopuses in tonnes, not as individual lives. In 2021, almost 375,000 tonnes were landed worldwide, representing tens or possibly hundreds of millions of animals. Yet an octopus is far more than an ingredient. It has around 500 million neurons, can learn, solve problems and remember, and research indicates that it experiences pain. Set at a crowded Seoul street-food stall beneath rain and neon, OCTOPUSS follows an exhausted cat chef who prepares octopus after octopus for an endless stream of customers. When the stall closes, he is left alone with one last living octopus. A dark counterpart to My Octopus Teacher, the film replaces intimacy with routine, labour and consumption. With no customer left to serve, the chef must face the life behind the meal. The film was created from scratch in four hours. This is OCTOPUSS.