IMA Film student wins Best Film at MDFF Selects Student Showcase 2025

One of Film’s most recent graduates, Zoe Zhou (IMA‘25),won big at the 2025 MDFF Selects Student Showcase, held at TIFF, taking home the prize for Best Film.

Zhou is the writer, director and composer of the short film, We Are Happy Fish, which came about as a part of her final year thesis project in the film program.

The short film follows Nine, a robot, and Kiko, a girl from an abusive family, who form a connection and escape to revive Nine’s fish. Zhou said the film tackles themes like childhood trauma in a creative way and was her way of exploring pure human emotions.

Over the course of roughly seven months, Zhou worked with a team of 15 to 20 people — her classmates, who made up her crew — to put the film together. When it was selected to be screened at the MDFF Selects Student Showcase, Zhou was really happy — and excited to see the nine other student films from across Canada that would make it to TIFF’s big screen.

When the MDFF Selects jury announced that We Are Happy Fish won Best Film, Zhou felt shocked and grateful.

“I just feel…finally, there’s something that I worked on hard that’s being awarded,” Zhou said. She said none of this project could have been possible without her fellow film students, who helped things run smoothly from pre-production into post-production.

The first time Zhou wrote a script was at Toronto Metropolitan University during her Film degree. She said her time in the program allowed her to practice many skills and taught her how to wear many hats during a production, while giving the freedom to experiment and explore the boundaries of their creativity.

Right now, Zhou is searching for grants to fund her next project, a short film about a teenage girl exploring the world — and again, a piece of art that will probe the purest emotions.