3rd International Experimental Film Festival
Redefining the Boundaries of Cinema
organized by +the Institute [for Experimental Arts]
October 16-17-18, 2025
Free Self-Managed Theater EMBROS, Riga Palamidi 2, Psyrri
Free admission
★ THURSDAY 16/10 ★ Start: 19:00
ᯓ★ EXISTENCE AND REALITY (19:00-20:30) KNIFE, CHOCOLATE – Hooshmand Varaei | Iran THE UNIMAGINED LIVES OF OUR NEIGHBORS: OCCUPATION DIARY – Jeffrey Skoller | USA THE FUTURE IS NOW FINALLY WEIRD AF – Silvia Dal Dosso | Austria, Italy 1Q89 – Mihai Grecu | Romania
ᯓ★ HUMAN CIVILIZATION (20:30-22:33) THE ADVENTURES OF ANGOSAT – Resem Verkron, Marc Serena | Angola, Spain MOI-MÊME – Mojo L Lorwin, Lee Breuer | USA THE COSMIC ATOMIC – Kanchan Avchare | India A WEAK & PANICKED ANIMAL – Jake Starr | Australia
★ FRIDAY 17/10 ★ Start: 19:00
✶⋆.˚ GREEK EXPERIMENTAL FILMS (19:00-21:00) THE FUTILITY OF QUITTING SMOKING – Sylvia Robyn Gionti WAVES – Katerina Athanasopoulou | Greece, England IN BETHLEHEM BEYOND – Kallirroi Kostikoglou LATERA – Dimitris Glyfos ΕΛΕFΘΕREE – Iliana Spirakis | Greece, Canada FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA – Elpiniki Voutsa Rentsepopoulou | Greece ZEN WHISPERS IN THE WASTELAND – Vasilis Konstantinou BEAUTY MANIFEST – Alexia Karapanos THE TEMPTATION OF AN ORDINARY THOUGHT – Thomas Pappas LEAKING VESSELS OR THE FEAR OF FEMININE-SOUNDING VOICES – Elke Auer, Yorgia Karidi | Austria, Greece
✶⋆.˚ STAND UP FOR GAZA (21:00-22:00) TAYTA – Jose Luis Benavides | USA THE MIRACLE OF LIFE – Sabrine Khoury | Palestine ORACLE – Youssef ElNahas, Leena Aboutaleb | Egypt FREE WORDS: A POET FROM GAZA – Abdullah Harun Ilhan | Turkey
✶⋆.˚ SPECIAL SCREENING (22:00-23:38) THE GLORIA OF YOUR IMAGINATION – Jennifer T Reeves | USA
★ SATURDAY 18/10 ★ Start: 16:30
✶⋆.˚ WORKSHOP: Into a Surreal Landscape of Feeling
(Somatic Maps and Authentic Writing as a Creative Approach to Filmmaking) | Evgenia Chetvertkova & Kayu Yeung Germany – 16.30 – 17.30
⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ LECTURE: “From Archive to Activism: Cinema as Historical Witness in the Struggle for Change” – Viktor Witkowski (Germany) (18:00-18:45)
⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ CEREMONIES (19:00-20:10) LOVE, FANTASY – Zeyu Peng | China BANAT AFKARI – Daleen Arab | Saudi Arabia AICHA – Sanaa El Alaoui | Morocco THE ETERNAL BOND – Kamila Delart | Czech Republic
⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ KALEIDOSCOPE (20:10-22:10) BLUE MOUNTAIN. WHITE CLOUD – Miglė Križinauskaitė | Lithuania ORIGIN – Marion Chuniaud-Lacau | Canada AUTOPSÍA – Philipp Kowalski | Germany CAFÉ KUBA: WHO DARED TO AWAKEN THE DEAD MEMORY – David Shongo | Congo IF THEY REALLY EXIST – Hio Lam Lei | Taiwan, Macau LIKE A SPIRAL – Lamia Chraibi | Canada, Morocco
⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ QUEER CINEMA + FLUID BODIES (22:10-23:45) WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? – Viktor Witkowski | USA ANARCHAFEMINIST DIVINATIONS – Işıl Karataş | Austria LEATHER GRAVES – Malic Amalya | USA I FEEL LIKE A PIECE OF MEAT – Yalın Çağdaş Eşsiz | Turkey YOU’RE NOT A REGULAR: A PORN MADE FOR ALMANS – Silicone Pussy | Germany BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO GRIEVE – Zora Arose Ritz, Evgenia Chetvertkova, Kayu Yeung | Germany, Hong Kong
˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗ VIDEO ART ZONE Continuous screening all 3 days (second floor, start 19:00)
MONUMENT – Jeremy Drummond | Canada, USA 2ND DAY & THE END OF THE WORLD – Sara Koppel | Denmark A FEW MOMENTS – Miodrag Manojlovic | Bosnia-Herzegovina [SUN]FILM – Derek Taylor | USA REMIXING INDUSTRIAL PASTS – Chiara Ligi, Mauro Macella | Italy, Luxembourg WHEREVER STREET PIECE – Panu Johansson | Finland SUNSPOTS – Abinadi Meza | Mexico
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3rd International Experimental Film Festival: Redefining the Boundaries of Cinema
The International Experimental Film Festival is a three-day festival organized by the Institute of Experimental Arts in Athens, presenting 47 films from 29 countries.
Thursday 16 to Saturday 18 October 2025
Free admission – start time 19:00
Free Self-Managed Theater EMBROS | Riga Palamidi 2 / Psyrri – Athens
The International Experimental Film Festival aims to expand the possibilities of cinema beyond traditional forms, establishing an intercultural meeting point for cinema and visual arts, digital and analog image, cinematographic creation and critical thinking, history and research of contemporary social conditions.
Experimental cinema is a free, radical and targeted medium that responds to the aesthetic, political and philosophical need to see and explore cinematic horizons, away from big industries and hegemonic formulas of creation. Through experimental cinema we find authentic ways to create audiovisual art.
This is a cinema that breaks narrative conventions and expands the visual boundaries we are accustomed to. It exploits the medium to the fullest, including even the most extreme possibilities. As Peter Greenaway states: “Cinema has not yet been invented.” We seek a cinema that constantly redefines itself.
This year the festival presents seven thematic sections: Greek Experimental Cinema (10 films), Stand Up for Gaza (4 films), Existence and Reality (6 films), Human Civilization (4 films), Queer Cinema + Fluid Bodies (6 films), Ceremonies (4 films), Kaleidoscope (6 films), and a continuous Video Art Zone (7 films) on the second floor of the theater.
The program extends from Greece to five continents, with films addressing the complexity of our time through themes such as climate catastrophe, the digital age and artificial intelligence, queer identities and body fluidity, political resistance, memory and trauma, rituals and bonds that transcend death. The program also includes a special section dedicated to Palestine, highlighting art as a means of resistance and testimony, as well as a strong presence of contemporary Greek experimental cinema.
With participations from Europe, America, Asia, Oceania and Africa, the International Experimental Film Festival constitutes a living map of contemporary experimental expression, offering the audience a unique opportunity to discover new cinematic languages and participate in a dialogue about the future of our societies.
Organization: Institute of Experimental Arts http://theinstitute.info with the support of: http://www.filmpoetry.org
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DETAILED FILM PRESENTATIONS
DAY 1 – THURSDAY OCTOBER 16, 2025 Start: 19:00
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EXISTENCE AND REALITY
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Total duration: 1 hour 23 minutes
KNIFE, CHOCOLATE Hooshmand Varaei | Iran – 15′ The story of a family where the son is antisocial, suspicious and sexist. He judges women by the smell of their cosmetics. A surreal black comedy exploring violence, desire and patriarchal control.
THE UNIMAGINED LIVES OF OUR NEIGHBORS: OCCUPATION DIARY Jeffrey Skoller | United States – 40′ What are the experiences that shape the lives of those living around us? The film is part of a series of portraits of elderly people narrating personal experiences from historical events that changed the world, revealing the hidden stories of life under occupation of any kind.
THE FUTURE IS NOW FINALLY WEIRD AF Silvia Dal Dosso | Austria, Italy – 13′ Welcome to the meta-meta-meta-real world of artificial intelligence. You know nothing is real, but you will suffer the consequences. Humanoid robots are getting ready to fry your eggs, tech giants are investing everything in AGI, while the world around us burns. Through the synthetic voice of Adam Curtis, the film narrates how humanity can survive in a world that becomes increasingly stranger, harder and faster.
1Q89 Mihai Grecu | Romania – 6′ Pyongyang, winter 1989. Kim Jong II watches via satellite television the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and is shocked by the collapse of yet another authoritarian regime. An experimental film combining AI and animation, exploring a turning point that reshaped strategies, borders and ideologies.
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HUMAN CIVILIZATION
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Start: 20:30 Total duration: 2 hours and 10 minutes
THE ADVENTURES OF ANGOSAT Resem Verkron, Marc Serena | Angola, Spain – 34′ Man Ré dreams of traveling to space — and what if this became reality? In 2017, Angola launched its first satellite… which was lost. The film re-narrates this dream, bringing together new artists from the streets of Cazenga (Luanda) in a unique single-shot indie film.
MOI-MÊME Mojo L Lorwin, Lee Breuer | USA – 65′ Moi-même is the only feature film by legendary director Lee Breuer (1937–2021). Shot in 1968 in Paris, the work was revived decades later by his son, Mojo Lorwin, who restored and redesigned it.
THE COSMIC ATOMIC Kanchan Avchare | India – 20′ An experimental short film that follows the course of human civilization from the moment we discovered fire. “It shouldn’t have happened, yet it did.” A surreal comment on the absurdity of existence and the uncertainty of the universe.
A WEAK & PANICKED ANIMAL Jake Starr | Australia – 12′ Human civilization is deeply based on denial — of vulnerability, interdependence, uncertainty. No matter how much we fortify our cities, we remain in a chaotic planetary ecosystem.
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DAY 2 – FRIDAY OCTOBER 17, 2025 Start: 19:00
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GREEK EXPERIMENTAL FILMS
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Total duration: 2 hours
THE FUTILITY OF QUITTING SMOKING Sylvia Robyn Gionti | Greece – 2′ In this interview, Cigar talks about his attempts to quit smoking. Incidentally, Cigar is… a cigarette. A dark humorous comedy that personifies addiction through the perspective of the very substance being consumed.
WAVES Katerina Athanasopoulou | Greece, England – 5′ An alien woman responds to a half-forgotten message of interplanetary friendship. A film about communication and the digital world, exploring memory and displacement.
IN BETHLEHEM BEYOND Kallirroi Kostikoglou | Greece – 20′ In this documentary, we meet two women whose work and experience gradually lead them to re-approach an everyday but deliberately unseen topic. Death is constantly present. The soil, the last bastion between life and death, becomes a reflection on mortality and meaning.
LATERA Dimitris Glyfos | Greece – 12′ A father who killed his own child struggles with grief. The sea is their common place. An exploration of pain, guilt and landscapes that host our deepest traumas.
ΕΛΕFΘΕREE Iliana Spirakis | Greece, Canada – 8′ ΕΛΕFΘΕREE is a short film about a girl living in Afissos, Magnesia who dreams of a world where she becomes fully accepted. A film about self-esteem and accepting our body.
FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA Elpiniki Voutsa Rentsepopoulou | Greece – 5′ How can the absurdity of war ever be rendered through any organized form of art or discourse? The writing of history by the powerful leaves behind only injustice and wounds. It silences lived experience and creates massive collective trauma that passes from generation to generation.
ZEN WHISPERS IN THE WASTELAND Vasilis Konstantinou | Greece – 5′ The director invites the audience to a post-apocalyptic landscape — half dream, half ruin — where traces of human presence flicker like distant beacons. Through carefully structured images, the work reflects on resilience, memory and the silent persistence of hope.
BEAUTY MANIFEST Alexia Karapanos | Greece – 10′ From the forests of Romanticism to a kitsch afternoon tea party, four women and… one more take a strange journey into the true meaning of beauty and makeup. What is the price of beauty? Is Nature a force we should listen to or has Woman already carved her own path?
THE TEMPTATION OF AN ORDINARY THOUGHT Thomas Pappas | Greece – 6′ A young man lives between restriction and anxiety of the coming summer. A philosophical search on the seductive power of simplicity, where everyday thought patterns reveal their extraordinary complexity.
LEAKING VESSELS OR THE FEAR OF FEMININE-SOUNDING VOICES Elke Auer, Yorgia Karidi | Austria, Greece – 37′ Images of women as “leaking vessels,” wet, unstable and unable to contain themselves, appear again and again in Greek literature – in contrast to the “dry stability” and verbal continence of men. However, a dry clay vessel, filled with water, eventually cracks and melts again into wet dirt. A lesson in deconstructing rigid forms.
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STAND UP FOR GAZA
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Start: 21:00 Total duration: 1 hour
TAYTA Jose Luis Benavides | USA – 10′ A video portrait presenting the collages and paintings of Palestinian-American artist Ali El-Chaer. Through art, he shares his experiences, his relationship with the body, the land and the genocide in Gaza.
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE Sabrine Khoury | Palestine – 8′ A Palestinian expectant mother in the Netherlands faces physical and emotional challenges during pregnancy. Between her personal difficulties and the ongoing destruction in Gaza, she tries to redefine motherhood.
ORACLE Youssef ElNahas, Leena Aboutaleb | Egypt – 9′ A cinematic invitation to get to know the Mediterranean, Palestine and Egypt, our relationships with neighboring regions, as they stand between myths, poetry, pirate stories and prophecies.
FREE WORDS: A POET FROM GAZA Abdullah Harun Ilhan | Turkey – 24′ The documentary follows Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet who was arrested and tortured by the Israeli army, but his art became a weapon of resistance and hope for the whole world.
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SPECIAL SCREENING
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Start: 22:00 Total duration: 1 hour 38 minutes
THE GLORIA OF YOUR IMAGINATION Jennifer T Reeves | USA – 98′ Sixty years ago, a 30-year-old waitress and single mother was convinced to participate in psychotherapy sessions that were recorded on film, with three of the most influential psychoanalysts of the 20th century. The film plunges the audience into a shamelessly patriarchal and nationalist era, which many American conservatives wish to revive. The social and legal constraints of that period — which shaped Gloria and the difficulties of her generation — remain unanswered, while even discussion of contraceptives was taboo. Real footage based on true story.
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DAY 3 – SATURDAY OCTOBER 18, 2025 Start: 16:30
✶⋆.˚ WORKSHOP: Into a Surreal Landscape of Feeling
(Somatic Maps and Authentic Writing as a Creative Approach to Filmmaking) | Evgenia Chetvertkova & Kayu Yeung | Germany – 16.30 – 17.30
A 1-hour workshop that explores ways to develop somatic imagination and transform inner emotions and sensations into external, imaginative worlds. Through guided writing exercises, participants discover how personal and even traumatic experiences can become sources of creative inspiration. The workshop combines performance, scriptwriting and directing into one integrated experience, providing participants with practical tools for developing embodied and authentic approaches to filmmaking.
18:00 – LECTURE & DISCUSSION – 45′ From Archive to Activism: Cinema as Historical Witness in the Struggle for Change Speaker: Viktor Witkowski | Germany
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CEREMONIES
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Start: 19:00
Total duration: 1 hour 10 minutes
LOVE, FANTASY Zeyu Peng | China – 8′ When love doesn’t respond to an extreme act of devotion, a woman sinks into a labyrinth of obsessive fantasies, forced to confront reality. A tender journey between fantasy and experience.
BANAT AFKARI Daleen Arab | Saudi Arabia – 5′ A visual diary, a retrospective of mental states through the eyes of a character. An attempt to observe the small details of life, without being carried away by the weight of thoughts.
AICHA Sanaa El Alaoui | Morocco – 26′ A 17-year-old teenager struggles with the distance from her mother, until a tragedy overturns everything. The mother turns to a mystical ceremony to deal with the grief and loss of their relationship.
THE ETERNAL BOND Kamila Delart | Czech Republic – 32′ Death doesn’t mean end but sacred coexistence. A reflective film about the unbreakable connection beyond time and space, but also about our own relationship with memory, loss and presence.
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KALEIDOSCOPE
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Start: 20:10 Total duration: 1 hour 55 minutes
BLUE MOUNTAIN. WHITE CLOUD Miglė Križinauskaitė | Lithuania – 11′ A Buddhist myth about two types of monks: those who stay forever in the monastery, the “blue mountains,” and those who wander constantly, the “white clouds.” A poetic study on stillness and movement.
ORIGIN Marion Chuniaud-Lacau | Canada – 18′ Inspired by the work of choreographer Yesenia Fuentes, the film travels in the traces of her memory, from 1990s Colombia to a new, internal space of self-knowledge and liberation.
AUTOPSÍA Philipp Kowalski | Germany – 5′ A video essay exploring what remains when bodies are lost, but their presence continues to hover.
CAFÉ KUBA: WHO DARED TO AWAKEN THE DEAD MEMORY David Shongo | Congo – 28′ Through the silent walk of a street coffee vendor in the streets of Kinshasa, the film narrates a city on the edge of conflict, after the capture of Goma by M23 rebels.
IF THEY REALLY EXIST Hio Lam Lei | Taiwan, Macau – 25′ Inspired by field research around the Ghost Festival in Taiwan, the film examines the relationship of Chinese folk belief with the anxiety of oblivion and the disappearance of memory from the collective unconscious.
LIKE A SPIRAL Lamia Chraibi | Canada, Morocco – 28′ Five women, immigrants, domestic workers. A poetic journey through Beirut that brings to the surface the authoritarian Kafala system in the Middle East, which binds migrant women to a specific boss, under very bad conditions. Movement becomes meditation, form becomes content.
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QUEER CINEMA + FLUID BODIES
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Start: 22:10 Total duration: 1 hour 30 minutes
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? Viktor Witkowski | USA – 19′ The 20th and 21st centuries in the USA are characterized by inequality, violence and broken promises. Through archival material, the film focuses on social protest movements and the role of music as a catalyst for change.
ANARCHAFEMINIST DIVINATIONS Işıl Karataş | Austria – 16′ An experimental documentary that reinvents the traditional Eastern art of divination with coffee grounds, combining it with the photochemical process of chemigramm. The film transforms a heteronormative practice into a tool for collective thinking about possible queer futures.
LEATHER GRAVES Malic Amalya | USA – 12′ Queer identity and death are woven together in a torn shroud. Through its cracks we see LGBTQ+ people who were expelled from their families and communities, facing health inequalities, social exclusion and abandonment by institutions.
I FEEL LIKE A PIECE OF MEAT Yalın Çağdaş Eşsiz | Turkey – 5′ The film narrates the feelings of a woman who has been raped, connecting feminism, violence and the consumption of the female body with the culture of animal slaughter. A work about objectification, power and patriarchy.
YOU’RE NOT A REGULAR: A PORN MADE FOR ALMANS Silicone Pussy | Germany – 25′ “Berlin is hard. Do you want to see my XXX?” A transgender transmasc sex worker leads us through the dark streets of the city, in a dreamlike narrative where the personal meets collective trauma.
BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO GRIEVE Zora Arose Ritz, Evgenia Chetvertkova, Kayu Yeung | Germany, Hong Kong – 15′ A collective experimental film/essay — fragment of a surreal interior landscape. Two performers are tortured in sand and mud, while a narrator from Hong Kong tries to rename a trauma that has been linguistically severed.
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VIDEO ART ZONE
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Second floor Continuous screening from 19:00
Total duration: 1 hour 30 minutes
MONUMENT Jeremy Drummond | Canada, USA 17′ Starting from abstract, spectral images, the film evolves into an audiovisual experience of meditation on memory, resistance and recovery.
2ND DAY & THE END OF THE WORLD Sara Koppel | Denmark 13′ A colorful super-narrative about family dysfunction, powerlessness and loneliness, in a world of natural disasters and increasing authoritarianism.
A FEW MOMENTS Miodrag Manojlovic | Bosnia-Herzegovina – 13′ Just a few moments within the landscape. The film records fleeting encounters that reveal deep truths about the connection between people.
[SUN]FILM Derek Taylor | USA – 3′ Through image sources from the 16th century to today, the film maps the change in visual representation of the sun — mirror of human curiosity and symbol of mystery.
REMIXING INDUSTRIAL PASTS Chiara Ligi, Mauro Macella | Italy, Luxembourg – 22′ An experimental documentary exploring the identity of the Minett region, heart of Luxembourg’s steel industry, through archival material and found footage.
WHEREVER STREET PIECE Panu Johansson | Finland – 9′ A found footage film that speaks of memory fragments without a clear subject, reconstructing forgotten realities and erased lives.
SUNSPOTS Abinadi Meza | Mexico – 6′ Solar spots dissolve within the fragile architecture of ocular veins. Blood drops transform into celestial bodies, while cracks in the film radiate like distant stars.
