PhD Student Yuefei You Awarded the 2025 Best Student Film

PhD student Yuefei You has been awarded the 2025 Best Student Film by the Society for Visual Anthropology Festival of Film and Media, a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), for her film What Do Ghosts Think? 

What Do Ghosts Think? is a rhapsody of ghost stories set amid Indonesia’s relocation of its capital from Jakarta to the new city of Nusantara in Borneo. The film follows a Chinese-born anthropology student who collects supernatural tales from communities surrounding the construction site, encountering local ancestors, the spirit of Indonesia’s first president, and the unexpected ghosts of her own roots. Through these encounters, the film asks: Who are the specters haunting the construction? And what do the “ghosts” think? 

The film earlier received the Wiley Blackwell Student Film Competition Award at the RAI Film Festival 2025 in Bristol, UK. The award committee described the film as follows: “In this deeply personal and multilayered documentary, the director invites us on a powerful journey of reflection. Through intimate conversations with others and with her late mother, the filmmaker crafts a narrative that is at once poetic and political. The film draws connections between Indonesia’s ambitious plan to relocate its capital, the massive structures that arise from this development, and the human, spiritual, and moral costs that lie beneath. It is through these haunting yet grounded reflections that the film gives voice to Indigenous resistance, exposes global power dynamics, and asks us to consider what traces are left behind by megaprojects and the different actors involved. What Do Ghosts Think? moves fluidly between the personal and the political, ultimately offering a bold and evocative meditation on memory, land, and power.”