INTERNATIONAL
EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL #4
68 films from 32 countries and 51 video art works from 22 countries
BIOS Urban Culture Center
Peiraios 84, Athens Greece
Free entrance, suggested donation
THUR. 15 | FR. 16
SAT. 17 | SUΝ. 18
OCTOBER 2026
Every day starts 18.00- ends at midnight
Organized by
+The Institute [for Experimental Arts]
Supported by
Film Poetry Digital Archive
★ New Ways
to See the World ★
The 4th International Experimental FILM Festival 2026 in Athens extends from Greece to five continents, with films addressing the complexity of our times through themes such as climate catastrophe, the digital age and artificial intelligence, queer identities and body fluidity, social resistance, immigration, memory and trauma, indigenous rituals and urban cultures. This extraordinary event invites us to look at the world in new ways. We are searching for stories from parts of everyday life that remain hidden, unknown images of our societies, new ideas and inspiration.
The festival seeks to expand the possibilities of film beyond traditional formats and spaces, creating a zone of creative contagions between analog and digital, establishing a meeting place for cinema and the visual arts, filmmaking and critical thinking, history and research of contemporary social conditions.
Experimental cinema is a free, radical and purposeful medium that responds to the aesthetic, political or philosophical need to see and explore cinematic horizons, away from large industries and hegemonic formulas of creation. It is through experimental cinema that we find authentic ways to create audiovisual art.
This is a cinema that breaks narrative conventions and opens visual bounds to which we’re accustomed. It elaborates the medium to its fullest, including even the most extreme possibilities. As John Cage aptly said: “An experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen.” The cinema we’re looking for is a cinema of the unpredictable.
Join us for this extraordinary showcase of cinematic artistry! Experience four days of thought-provoking, visually stunning, and emotionally resonant films that challenge conventional storytelling and open new horizons of imagination.
The Institute for Experimental Arts was established in 2008 as a dynamic collaboration between socially aware artists, scientists of humanities and art technicians from Europe, Americas, Asia, Oceania and Africa.
FILMS PROGRAMME
CINEMA ZONE
68 films from 32 countries
Thursday 15 October 2026
18.00 until 00.00 | 18 films
EXISTENCE AND REALITY
Starts at 18.00
UNORIGINAL 1 min
Laura Herman, USA
What if our dreams are not the product of our subconscious but are the residue of media we have yet to consume.
OVERFITTING 4 min
Taoyang Jiang, China
A near-future speculative short in which a neural system, Ego-OS, prunes human emotion into machine-readable perfection, until a suppressed variable forces the system, and reality itself, to collapse into entropy.
THE REAL THAT WAS 9 min
Nikolas Kerameus, Greece
A short film / media-based video installation exploring algorithmic comfort, consent, and spectatorship in a simulated luxury environment. A woman inhabits an AI-generated paradise designed to observe human behavior as entertainment, until a visual malfunction briefly reveals the physical reality beneath the illusion.
ORGANISING PRINCIPLES OF EXPERIENCE 13 min
Gabriela Tropia, Brazil
An experimental short in which an AI model, tuned to the writings and sensibilities of Maya Deren, collaborates with the filmmaker to imagine new films. It explores memory, possession, and the digital afterlife, questioning what remains when the past becomes data and how an artist might lay claim to her absent hero.
DREAMT BY ANOTHER 9 min
Vikki Bardot, Türkiye
An allegorical take on creating with artificial intelligence and a meditation on identity, memory, and love. Interweaving passages from Pinocchio (1883), The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), Frankenstein (1818), and Borges’s The Circular Ruins (1940), the film builds a single narrative about coming into existence.
FUTURE BONDS 9 min
Jonathan Lapalme, Canada
A short practical utopia about the future of solidarity finance.
THE POWER OF DATA 19 min
Marco Milone, Italy
Every click leaves a trace. But who owns it? It traces the arc of our digital lives, from ARPANET to the IoT, from cybercrime to blockchain, asking not just how these systems work, but who they ultimately serve. And what remains of privacy when the answer is uncomfortable.
LITTLE BROTHER 10 min
Yuan GAO, China, Hong Kong
In a prison bathed in cold blue light, Inmate 004 tightens screws on an endless assembly line, day after day. His only connection to the outside world is a small hole in the wall – through it, he sees a woman trapped in the same mechanical loop.
THE ERA OF FLESH IS OVER 25 min
RICHARD KROEHLING, USA
Portraying a decaying world on the cusp of great transformation. A few years from now, the daughter and first techno-human creation of an eccentric scientist commits a murder, hoping to prove that the era of the flesh is over — that even “death is dead”.
HUMAN CIVILIZATION
Starts at 20.15
CLARITIES 2 min
Isaac Kerns, USA
A man delivers a confident argument in a dimly lit room, only to reveal he’s speaking to his own reflection. As his certainty intensifies, the mirror fractures, exposing the instability beneath his beliefs. Through controlled visuals and symbolism, the film explores how conviction can mask bias, and how we construct the realities we defend.
PALE PEOPLE OF CORRUPTION 5 min
Anastasia Mamontenko, Ukraine
A surreal outlook on the historical problem of hunger and corruption in Ukraine.
BETON 13 min
Anna Gronostayskaya, Linda Stockfleth, Germany
A brutalist “fairy tale”: In the cold clutches of the concrete office, modern humans collide with their own isolation. Absurd dialogues and forced closeness characterize the grotesque everyday life in which the boundaries between work and private life become blurred.
HANSEL AND GRETEL GET KICKED OUT 11 min
MilleFeuille, Canada
A found-footage détournement of retail-theft surveillance, in which the criminalizing gaze of the surveillance footage is subverted by recasting capitalism as an abusive, carceral parent. Quotes transcribed from YouTube creators who were kicked out of their homes as teens are repurposed to ‘speak back’, buttressed by ‘poor’ low-resolution videos of stealing.
OF ROBOTS AND REDNECKS 17 min
Kevin Davis, USA
Dark Cloud Nebraska, a town ashamed of its past and petrified of its future, is about to receive a wake up call, when a stranger comes to town.
DE-ESCALATION TACTICS 12 min
Tommy Becker, USA
We are a species at war with our own narratives. The stories and structures we inherit – political, cultural and ecological have become traps, cycling us through conflict rather than carrying us forward. A thematic-visual-song-cycle that sits inside this tension, contemplating alternative pathways.
WITNESS TO A FARCE 20 min
Fran Forman, USA
A 20-minute film that examines the insidious nature of totalitarian regimes. Drawing on the historical realities of pre- and post-World War II Eastern Europe, it reflects on our contemporary political landscape, where echoes of authoritarianism continue to reappear. The film integrates photography, montage, AI image morphing, and digital painting.
MUZUNGU SWEETS 30 min
Caterina De Angelis, Matteo Carosi, Italy
Two white eco-activists buy a camera and set off for the Ugandan savannah of BBC documentaries, Jane Goodall, and The Lion King. But this part of the Global South is above all a land devastated by the colonialism of the past and of the present, and they soon come to understand it.
SPECIAL SCREENING:
Starts at 22.45
PUNK STATE 73 min
Loris Di Pasquale, Italy
Seven guests are invited to an exclusive night of “entertainment” inside a remote theater. What appears to be a prestigious performance quickly reveals itself as a carefully orchestrated experiment. Throughout the night, the guests are pushed through a series of rituals that force them to confront what they’ve spent their lives hiding.
Friday 16 October 2026
18.00 until 00.00 | 17 films
GREEK EXPERIMENTAL FILMS
Starts at 18.00
ASPHYXIA 3 min
Yiannis Diassakis, Eleftheria Stefanouri, Greece
Asphyxiated in a body that doesn’t suit you. Sudden realisation of the present that leads to a violent transformation. The horrifying feeling to be trapped in a cage that you created. A dark experimental micro film about something you don’t feel comfortable in.
THE PRISONERS 9 min
Paola Diamantea, Greece
A cinematic descent into the underground body of contemporary Athens becomes a modern return to Plato’s Cave. Beneath the Kifisos River, inside shelters and under a church built upon the remains of an ancient temple, layers of history, faith, and oblivion coexist in the same darkness.
EVEN IF CAUSES EXIST, THEY DON’T MATTER OR VERTICAL LINES 16 min
Polydoros Kalaitzis, Greece
A telephone operator tries to redefine her life when she begins to lose her hearing.
IN THE WILD 19 min
Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, Greece, United States
Borrowing its title from Human–Robot Interaction, where “in the wild” describes activity outside controlled conditions, the film drifts from the robotics laboratory, unfolding a media archaeology of the robotic imaginary, toward wetlands and the wilderness of a softer world.
WITH A VIEW OF THE SEA 60 min
Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, Greece
Two young women live happily as a couple in a camper van by the sea. But when one of them suddenly dies, the other is left to confront the unbearable void left behind by the loss of her beloved.
QUEER CINEMA + FLUID BODIES
Starts at 20.15
MY BODY IS SACRED 5 min
Layla El Khadri, Indonesia
A short film at the intersection of art and activism, exploring how the censorship of the human body shapes identity and consciousness. Developed through a year-long movement laboratory, the film invites real performers to confront internalized shame and reclaim embodied truth. Blending somatic inquiry with raw expression, it questions the cultural narratives that disconnect us from our own nature.
TWO 3 min
Bo Nawacharee, Thailand
Between memory and reality, two people share a conversation that may belong to only one of them. A quiet encounter with doubt, longing, and the difficult process of learning to embrace oneself.
EXPLANT / IMPLANT 3 min
Josh Weissbach, USA
A lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.
(I) MISS AMERICA 5 min
Hannah Ballou, Peter Case, United Kingdom
(I) Miss America evokes the central hypocrisy & dystopian present of Post-Roe, gun-loving America in solidarity with people fighting for abortion rights across the globe. Girls are safe in the U.S.A… until they’re born. The views the performer expresses are candid and unscripted.
THE PAINTER 5 min
Julia Agnieszka Hadlo, United Kingdom
Alice, a struggling young adult, gets caught in a spiral of societal pressures surrounding her body image, relationships and career path. She is not the only one suffering as other youths face the same fate, being forced into careers they don’t enjoy for the sake of their family’s approval.
REBELLION IN THE DEPTHS 4 min
Lisa Haefner, Germany
Rebellion in the Depths is a poetic manifesto about the radical act of self-acceptance: using the metaphor of diving, the film tells of a courageous descent into fear, pain, and uncertainty—and of the liberating power of shedding external attributions, transforming vulnerability into strength, and reclaiming one’s own truth as an indestructible light.
THE HAWWA ROAD 8 min
Sachin Dass, India
Inspired by the Adam and Eve myth, The Hawwa Road reimagines Hawwa as a woman who refuses the offered fruit and remains unmoving in the middle of a forgotten road, a silent act of defiance against authority, imposed rules, and the inevitability of obedience.
THE QUEER IMAGINATION 7 min
Katia Noyes, USA
A lyrical portrait of artist and scholar Courtney Desiree Morris asks what the queer imagination makes possible in the face of erasure. Moving through intimate studio footage, photographic montage, and large-scale performance, the film explores queerness as a source of creativity, resilience, and hope.
PORTRAIT OF DESIRE 16 min
Nina Degraeve, Belgium
For one night, artist Romina Remmo invites us to experience the sensation of her suggestive work, imbued with eroticism and femininity. Exploring the imagination and the hidden side of the artist, the film takes us into a labyrinth of thoughts and fantasies where desire brushes up against violence and where seduction borders on suffering.
VOICE MESSAGES FROM A GODDESS 16 min
Martino Cossu Rocca
Self-produced in collaboration with the Barcelona film school Nou Prodigi, this film explores BDSM, Femdom, art, and philosophy through the eyes of the Divine Domina Kass, polish Mistress and artist living in the Catalan capital and founder and owner of the prominent BDSM club La Órbita de IO.
THE REBELLION OF THE LESBIAN JACOBINES 28 min
Mária Takács, Hungary
The idyllic life of the enlightened Jacobine women of 18th century Hungarian countryside is unexpectedly disrupted by the arrival of the emperor, Donald Trump, and his entourage. The Jacobines call on the help of the celestials and Melania Trump to drive out the intruder.
SPECIAL SCREENING:
Starts at 22.45
NEVER STOP THE ACTION 70 min
Paul Rowley, Ireland
A supernova in a single New York City subway carriage. A kaleidoscopic journey through time and space. We begin our trip in The Bronx, catching a 5am D train with our guides TESHI and CASEY, two old friends recently reunited at an all night dance party.
Saturday 17 October 2026
16.00 until 00.00 | Open Workshop + 21 films
16.00 Workshop – Yannis Raouzeios (film critic) in English:
Experimental Cinema: Past, present, future- A Genealogy of Seeing
A workshop devoted to a form of cinema that refused to take the image for granted, or to subordinate narrative to a single mode of unfolding—drawing on the ideas and positions of the classical avant-garde.
From the historical avant-gardes, Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas to Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Structural Film and Expanded Cinema; from film as material to the contemporary digital, hybrid and intermedial image.
In this introduction, we will explore the past, present and future of an art form that continues to challenge the ways in which we see the world—and the ways in which we think.
Our aim is not to offer yet another history of experimental cinema. Rather, we will explore together a range of ideas, perspectives and approaches towards a deeply cinematic account of the experience of seeing itself: an act that can be radical and transformative within the body of the Seventh Art.
The workshop will be presented in English by Yannis Raouzeios, film critic and member of the Panhellenic Union of Film Critics and FIPRESCI (The International Federation of Film Critics).
FILM SHOWS
RESISTANCE AND WITNESS
Starts at 18.00
BREAK ALL THE VASES, STEAL ALL THE FLOWERS 4 min
Michael Alexander Morris, USA
Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,
You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,
Come back – And scream as you want,
And break all the vases, Steal all the flowers, Come back, Just come back…
— Khalid Juma
AN AKOON 7 min
Jawad Jabado, Lebanon
Logline: I want to be as I was before I became.
Synopsis: An Akoon means “To be.” An Akoon is a poetic, experimental, and intuitive film that confronts the weight of existence, a yearning to return to a state before becoming, before the weight of consciousness. In the depths of inner turmoil, the film dives into war, grief, anger, fear, and remorse, rooted in the profound bond between mother and child.
TIGHRIST – THREADS OF EXILE 3 min
Samia Dzaïr, Algeria, Saudi Arabia
Drawing inspiration from traditional weaving techniques, oral storytelling, and contemporary modes of production, Tiɣrist – The Threads of Exile invites reflection on textile as a language of resistance and a vessel of memory – a sensitive archive.
BEFORE AND ABOVE US 4 min
Mario Mu, Croatia
A cinematic reconstruction of the fractured landscapes of conflict, reinterpreted within virtual space. Working with historical sound sequences taken from different police and military recordings, real events are displaced into simulation to confront a permanent state of alert.
TIME DETECTIVE SHOW. EPISODE 1: GIRLS AGAINST DEATH 14 min
Tam Do, Vietnam
A grandchild travels backward through archival images, trying to alter the wartime plot in which their grandmother appears. Moving between family memory, historical footage, fiction, and intervention, the investigation unfolds as an episode of “The Time Detective Show”.
BALL LIGHTNING 13 min
Catriona Trina Baker, USA
The true story of a refugee who fled the personal and social effects of Soviet run East Germany after the end of WWII and immigrated to the United States in the 1960s.
D!SORD3RED 9 min
Corey Allen, USA
In a wasteland of rubble and ruin, J. Doe, a Black Patient Zero, navigates the wreckage of a nation haunted by its own reflection. Pursued by histories of violence, erasure, and resistance, he confronts the ghosts of an unfinished reckoning.
SURPLUS 14:30 min
Paloma Schnitzer, Argentina, Germany
An essay film that reflects on how inherited visual and narrative codes shape our perception of contemporary images, particularly those depicting the ongoing live-transmitted massacres.
BLUE 5 min
Andrea Nevi, Italy
A community displaced by a climate disaster settles in a new habitat, where memories of their former way of life slowly begin to resurface. BLUE is an experimental climate fiction short film made entirely from Super 8mm found footage recovered from a flea market.
WHEN IMAGES NO LONGER CARRY TIME NATURALLY 4 min
Shuning Zhao, Ireland
Arriving in West Cork, I encountered the place first through archival footage rather than lived experience. Fragments of everyday life, recorded decades ago, felt both distant and strangely familiar. Working with these images alongside my own recordings, the film explores the tension between presence and mediation through projection, grain, and pixelation.
LIFE FORGOTTEN 50 min
Zoe Beloff, USA
Evocative yet playful, Life Forgotten asks, how does everyday entertainment bring people together and act as a catalyst for social change?Situating archival film in parallel with reenactment, Life Forgotten conjures up New York’s Lower East Side immigrant neighborhood in the early years of the 20th century, bringing together the sewing machine and the film projector, the garment worker, and the showman, Karl Marx and slapstick comedy.
CEREMONIES
Starts at 20.15
AT THE ZOO 2 min
Jana Radičević, Montenegro
At the zoo is a poetry film that questions how memories take shape, edited as multi-channel projection.
CHANGGWI 4 min
Yena Gim, South Korea
On a city street suspended between dream and afterlife, a woman discovers that the monster consuming her has always been herself.
LIKE DEW BEFORE A THUNDERBOLT VOL.1 6 min
Benjamin Poumey, Switzerland
1st volume of a collection of shorts films shot on Super 8 in Geneva, inspired by Jiseiku (farewell poems) written by Samurais in the 16th and 17th centuries. I was touched by these texts, and furthermore by this concept of ‘writing a last poem before dying’.
STONE SKIN 12 min
Rachel Gray, Canada
A woman learns how to become stone and journeys through the memory of the earth. As she moves through time, history, and other buried things, she is drawn towards a final, irreversible choice.
OUR HANDS WERE TIED 7 min
David Stout, USA
A common excuse to avoid culpability. The film is an unsettling rumination on the secrets we keep, the traumas we hold and the masks that we wear.
AN ALTERNATE POND 11 min
C Thomas Lewis, USA
A man takes his boat out on a pond. A conversation with a fish becomes a meditation on the lives we didn’t live. Surreal imagery blurs the line between waking and dream as the film explores regret, aging, and the search for peace within the only life we have.
THE TEMPLE IN THE DARK 18 min
Alberto Bogo, Italy
A man in crisis, Adrian, lives isolated in an apartment where reality and hallucination blur. Following the end of a relationship and a mysterious inner blackout, he begins to receive signs and photographs, while female presences emerge appearing to be fragments of a single entity watching and judging him. Through three symbolic women: Eveline (Memory), Mara (Desire), and Lucia (Threshold), Adrian is forced to confront his own dark side, guided in a ritual descent into his unconscious mind.
THE IRONING WOMAN 23 min
Omi McCurdie, Australia
The Ironing Woman is a single-channel video work exploring death, grief, female labour, and domesticity through a fragmented bricolage aesthetic. Drawing on the rituals and repetition of housework, the film considers how grief is carried through the body and expressed through everyday acts of care.
Blending dark humour, absurdity, and moments of beauty, the work rejects grief as a linear or purely solemn experience. Instead, the mundane, ridiculous, painful, and profound coexist as domestic rituals become a space for navigating memory, absence, and the reconstruction of meaning after loss.
THE STARS WATCH FROM LONG AGO 24 min
Stacey Steers, USA
A tiny farmhouse spins through the cosmos, carrying silent film icon Lillian Gish into the vast unknown. Meticulously crafted from thousands of handmade collages, this dreamlike, uncanny epic evokes wonder, loss, and longing against the shadow of wildfire.
SPECIAL SCREENING:
Starts at 22.15
INITIATION INTO THE EIGHTH DIMENSION 90 min
Lucas Silva, Colombia
Five Afro-Colombian characters in the middle of Bogotá, five disparate destinies in a city that is hostile to them.
Sunday 18 October 2026
16.00 until 00.00 | WORKSHOP + 12 films
16:00 Performance Lecture + Participatory Workshop
The Body as a Landscape: Intimacy, Sexuality and the Gaze
Smiljka Jovanović, Serbia (in English)
Smiljka Jovanović explores the female body as a landscape where intimacy, desire, power and spirituality meet. Through spoken text, images and performance, the artist reflects on sexuality and the gaze in her work. The lecture opens into a conversation with the audience, which may evolve into a collective text or a short live performance.
FILM SHOWS
FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGIES
Starts at 18.00
MOVING FEELINGS 5 min
Rendro Aryo, Indonesia
Experimental poetry film shot using a super 8 mm camera from 1975’s. A film that play with poetry through poetic images. A man and a woman searching and questioning the meaning of youth.
OYA, DANCE! 5 min
Naomi Soneye-Thomas, United Kingdom
A young girl who lives in a tower block in East London, finds a way to connect to her Yoruba culture through music.
I’D RATHER BE A CONCORDE 8 min
Javier Fabregas, Colombia, Finland
The story of an immigrant and his companion guide Wizard saying ·“Hello” to new unknown lands. In this experimental film that recreates old fantasy video games through irony, the characters face strange situations and places that allude to the absurd nature of the immigrant’s journey: its ideas of achievement, monotony, and expectation.
SYMPATHETIC FLUIDS 14 min
Matthew Pagoaga, USA
A film about communication methods. A film about psychic snail sex. A film about the internet. Using layered chroma key visualizations in combination with original and stock footage, the film relays a shadow play narrative of wireless connection, snail slime, and embodiment.
KWATYE URREWE 15 min
Kieran Satour, Australia
Kwatye urrewe is a collaboration between GARUWA and Running Water Community Press, tracing the stories of five poets: Marie Elena Ellis (Arrernte and Warlpiri) Theresa Penangke Alice (Arrernte), Tisha Perrurle Carter (Anmatjere), Maureen Nampijinpa O’Keefe (Kaytetye) and Frank Byrne (Arrernte) through the voices of his grandsons.
SUNLESS 16 min
Claudia E. Rodríguez-Lozano, Spain
Filmed in Denmark by a Spanish filmmaker in 2022, at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a lyrical, philosophical documentary that dives into the intimate emotions of a young woman from southern Europe living in the north.
A MAN OF A THOUSAND HANDS 17 min
Shomir Faruk, Bangladesh
Some people in the world are born with disabilities. Others become disabled after birth due to accidents or other reasons. Many of these disabled people were able to overcome their obstacles. One of them was Jagannath Shil.
ELEVEN FACES 32 min
Giuseppe Onelia, Italy
A hybrid essay film, a constellation of voices and faces orbiting the figure of Jeanne de La Motte, known for her role in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. An anonymous letter becomes the starting point for an inquiry into time, memory and historical projection.
DADA AND SUREALISM
Starts at 20.30
BECOMING HANNAH HÖCH 8 min
David Rushton, United Kingdom
Through the use of montage, stop motion, and AI, this short animation explores the life of Dada artist Hannah Höch. Dismissed by her male peers as a “charming amateur”, Höch has become one of the most influential artists of her day, weaving both the grotesque and the absurd.
MANIFESTO 11 min
Jesse Lerner, USA / Mexico
The contemporary film manifestos, read by their authors.
BEAUTIFUL PRISON: MAN RAY’S DECADE IN HOLLYWOOD 44 min
Milly Iatrou, R.A. Morgan, USA
An experimental art history documentary inspired by the decade Man Ray spent in Hollywood after fleeing Paris during World War II. The film imagines the legendary Surrealist recording his memoirs, reliving his memories through a microphone as he pursues a lifelong dream: to be recognized not just as a photographer, but as a respected painter.
SPECIAL SCREENING:
Starts at 21.45
LA GRAN HISTORIA DE LA FILOSOFÍA OCCIDENTAL 73 min
Aria COVAMONAS, Mexico
A cosmic animator is hired by the Central Committee of the People’s Republic to realize a philosophical film under the gaze of Chairman Mao who is displeased and sentences them to death right at the start. Be relieved that the sentence didn’t stick being refuted by Monkey and Pigsy from Journey to the West.
VIDEO ART ZONE
Every day during all festival
18.00 until 24.00, non-stop show | 51 films from 22 countries
Thursday 15 October 2026
15 films, 3 hours per loop
BODY AS LANDSCAPE
45 min
SALTED MILK FROM THE BLACK SUN 17 min
Charlotte Searle, United Kingdom
An oneiric portal where the body becomes landscape and language begins to melt. Drifting between the digital and the organic, the film traces fragments of dream and decay, exploring intimacies that are both tender and estranged. Figures appear and dissolve; ghosts chatter in the static; desire is consumed, regurgitated, and transformed.
ICON GOLDEN SKY 4 min
Smiljka Jovanovic, Serbia
The work Icon Golden Sky explores the relationship between the corporeal, the spiritual, and artistic creation through ritualized gestures of painting and gilding. The female body in the video becomes a canvas for a sky motif, while the artist’s gestures evoke Byzantine iconographic techniques, recontextualized within the contemporary body and sexuality.
THE PORNOGRAPHER 4 min
Milla Cummings, Marie-Josee Saint-Pierre, Canada
It traces a woman’s sexual sensations through a poetic, fragmentary sensory arc: from the awakening of desire via an abstract nature that comes alive, through geode-like vulvas that glow and swell, to an orgasm of luminous petals in full bloom.
A HAIR SHORT 1 min
Stelios Georgallides, United Kingdom
A lensless exploration of hair on 35mm film.
TOPSOIL 3 min
Levent Pinarci, Switzerland
A dead stag beetle (Lucanus cervus) lies suspended within a stroboscopic field. Not buried, not preserved, but held in suspension. Around it, hands enter and withdraw. Their fingernails are extended with pinecone petals, forming surfaces that are both ornamental and invasive. They touch soil, reposition organic and digital matter.
INNER WEATHER
45 min
SEARCHING FOR NOTHING 2 min
Shenyijie Song, China
An experimental video exploring the desire for appreciation and the fear of judgment. Through fragmented imagery and layered visual distortions, the work traces a cycle of self-observation, anxiety, and the search for validation that ultimately leads back to the self.
GLUTTONY 14 min
Nenad Katic, Chloe Charles, Canada
A poetic short film rooted in an original poem and musical composition by ECHLO, the beating heart of the project. The film explores consumption not as moral failure, but as an existential condition: a human impulse to reach outward when the inner world feels empty.
SYMBOL OF THE SOLAR SOUL 3 min
ZHAO HE, Italy
The work originates from my tendency to sleep for long hours and, through the recording of real-life scenes and 3D environments, expresses my constant passage between reality and dream. In the dream, I search for emotional balance and explore the connection between myself and the external world.
IN THE WOODS 7 min
Chen Wang, United States
An experimental video work that explores the paralysis of being simultaneously swept into and trapped as a witness within a chaotic world. Set inside a shifting digital forest, a vivid yet uncanny scene unfolds in a continuous loop.
PURGATORY BROOK AND POND 3 min
Maya Luz Bague, United States
A girl in the woods is stuck inside a song.
L I V 11 min
Nicole Edensbo, Sweden
In the silence of space, a flicker of life drifts, weightless, unbound. What seems like an object reveals itself as a living presence, curled in stillness. Slowly it awakens. Subtle movements stir, fragile at first, then growing into gestures of awareness. The being unfurls, reaching outward, daring to touch the edges of the unknown.
RITUAL AND TRANCE
2 hours
PAINTING CATHEDRAL ROCK 3 min
Mel Day, Canada & United States
A meditative experimental work in which painting, performance, and film converge to explore landscape, ritual, colonialism, and the fragile boundaries between spectacle, spirituality, and perception. A silhouetted figure washes and paints the iconic view of Cathedral Rock, a sacred Indigenous site and popular “vortex” destination in Sedona, using the surrounding red earth.
ULAKKA 14 min
Toni, Germany
It shows a glimpse of the daily life of the witch Ulakka. She lives in a golden tent at the edge of the forest, cooks soup, prepares rituals, and buries a bird caught by the cat. Sometimes she also spends time watching the stream, gazing at the water until she herself seems to flow.
SEA OF FIRE 13 min – EUROPEAN PREMIERE
Iasonas Psarakis, Greece, India, United States
The Daughter of the Moon leaves her celestial home, young and anxious, seeking the unknown. Drawn by a mystical spiral at the Sea of Fire, she embarks on a journey to the bottom of the ocean, enters a crystal cave, and, guided by sounds and images, crosses into a dreamlike realm where everything becomes music.
THREE DAYS IN FEBRUARY 75 min
Serena Giovanna Stevenson, New Zealand
An award winning avant garde feature film, and live cinematic multi-genre music experience. A poetic, dialogue-free documentary observing three days of a diverse outdoor dance floor culture set at a remote New Zealand, (Aotearoa) music festival.
Friday 16 October 2026
12 films, 2 hours per loop
GLITCH AND FEEDBACK
30 min
PINS AND NEEDLES 4 min
Gregg Biermann, United States
An abstract computer animation in which certain animation parameters (size, position) are linked to certain aspects of the sound of my own electronic composition (volume, pitch).
THE MACHINES POSSESSED ME (ABSTRACT V2) PART 1 8 min
Michael Bohacz, United States
Footage from Michael’s Bohascz experimental TV show “Abductions with the Alter Boy” from the 90s improvised with accidental instrument at length.
FEEDBACK 4 min
Hüseyin Mert Erverdi, Türkiye
An audiovisual work shaped by recursive image processing and layered sound. Emerging from streams of abstraction, each frame folds into itself to generate striations, distortions, and drifting textures, evoking a sense of continuous movement and transformation.
SOON IT WOULD BE TOO HOT 12 min
Les LeVeque, United States
“The sun, from the human point of view is the most elevated conception. It is also the most abstract object, since it is impossible to look at it fixedly at that time of day.” (Georges Bataille) This film is an assembly of waves, disturbances traveling through mediums, a speculation of metabolic relations.
SYNTHETIC VISIONS
30 min
PANTA RHEI 1 min
Simon Renfer, Switzerland
This experimental animated film pays homage to transformation as a fundamental condition of life. Drawing on Heraclitus’ panta rhei, everything exists only temporarily in an incessantly flowing, circular process. Designed as a seamless loop, the film reflects the continuous cycle of life as an ‘eternal recurrence of the same’.
COLD AND DIM 3 min
Piero Fragola, Italy
This music video emerges from a creative project that blends artificial intelligence with traditional analog film techniques, resulting in a unique experiment within today’s audiovisual landscape. The experimental encounter between artificial and natural aims at questioning the ideas of craft and artistic research.
EXPERIMENTS IN AWAKENING 3 min
Marina Fomenko, Russian Federation
Several years ago, I photographed young fern shoots as they were emerging. For a long time, these photographs remained still images, preserving a state before movement, before the unfolding of form. In Experiments in Awakening, I return to these photographs and, with the help of AI, set an imaginary life in motion within them.
CREAM CITY- AN ODE TO MILWAUKEE 5 min
Dusan Harminc, United States
“Cream City” is a moody vibes experimental short that explores the multiverse concept by applying mirror and symmetry effects on aerial footage of the Milwaukee skyline. The project was shot over a period of six years and features music by the David Roy Collective
THE PERPETUAL TAPESTRY 10 min
SIMONE MARIA HOOYMANS, Norway
An experimental animation about a collapsing world in transformation, where everything is tied together by the threads in a woven tapestry.
PORTALS
1.15 hours
POSTMODERN ROMANCE 5 min
Wheeler Winston Dixon, United States
“Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.” (Gilbert Adair)
IN PAINTINGS, ALL EMOTIONS 8 min
Will VanKoughnett, United States
A reenactment of the birth of color photography, from within the birth of landscape as a site of recreation: a conversation between technologies at the dawn of imagery.
YOU REIMAGINED 54 min
Vickie Gould, United States
An enlightening and entertaining cinematic masterpiece that invites us to step away from the noise of the world, reconnect with ourselves, and remember the frequency that has been within us all along. This 54-minute 3D immersive experience is a sacred journey through seven energetic portals, inspired by nature, ancient wisdom, and the unseen world that lives in and around us.
Saturday 17 October 2026
11 films, 2.30 hours per loop
CITIES IN REVOLT
45 min
IN THE ROUND 3 min
Mario Mu, Croatia
It gathers the many voices of protest and dissent, restaging historical events in a virtual environment. Figures warm up at the centre, then break across a grass field of bright yellows and reds. As chants drift through layered archival sound, cracked loudspeakers flicker and sirens stretch into melodic lines.
DETOURS 23 min
Vida Guzmić, Croatia
Filmed in Lebanon between 2019 and 2021 detours constructs a narrative based on sensory impressions amidst a state of constant disorientation. As it wanders through the urban landscape, the gaze remains caught between tangible experience and dissolving recollection.
RESISTOR 6 min
Kit Young,
Statements made by presidents of the United States of America on glitched repeat, projected onto my face or hand as I work to make the video.
FAMILY ARCHIVES
45 min
SECONDARY CHARACTER 4 min
Elena Calvo Polo, Spain, France
Personaje secundario is a short film that reflects on the figure of women in domestic documents and archives. The film decontextualises the images from their original subject and setting to construct a narrative and a dialogue between different women. Through animation and the manipulation of the images themselves, the filmmaker blurs the presence of the male figure by stripping him of his face and body, thereby focusing attention on the women who accompany them.
COLOR SEPARATION 5 min
Diane Nerwen, United States
My father David Nerwen was a visual artist and graphic designer. He created hand stitched abstract wool designs on canvas and worked in the printing industry. Color Separation weaves together found and shot footage to reflect on my father’s creative work, his decline in health and the disorientation of losing a parent.
FLOW 6 min
Hannu Nieminen, Finland
An experimental film about inspiration, freedom, movement and the flow of time and memories. A found-footage film, where old 16mm film clips come to life and dancers merge with nature.
TO BE 9 min
Ryan Buyssens, United States
A story of an end of ages. This 16mm short film was primarily filmed during the years 1999 & 2000 and was left unfinished until 2025. It presents an impression of the potential doom of ever looming “progress” – a topic that is now more relevant than ever.
A DAY OF DAYS 21 min
HASSAN ILDARI, United States
Life’s fleeting instances that rush by like speeding tracks from the window of a train.
STAGES OF RUIN
1 hour
MIRAGE BLUE 6 min
Wendy Fredriksson, South Africa
Mirage Blue was written and directed by Fredriksson in collaboration with artist Rowan Smith. It incorporates the artworks and extends the critical inquiries of Smith’s sculptural exhibition A Deixis in Folds (2024). The film centres around a fictitious board game as image economies are playfully stretched across alternate realities and the threads of aesthetic regimes are pulled through space and time unraveling like a web of plastic spaghetti.
BICENTENNIAL 23 min
Jeremiah Lee McVay, United States
Through a stream of evocative images and an original ambient score, it is a 23 minute experimental short film that takes inspiration from 3 of the best films ever made, which all happen to have been released in 1976.
PICNIC 30 min
Kawon Lee, South Korea
When you enter the theatre, a huge diorama enters your dream. A mock stage set implemented by a ruin emulator. Your dear friend HYRA is supposed to show you the place you must return and face, but the place is set as a ruin, and this is your destiny.
Sunday 18 October 2026
13 films, 2 hours per loop
VOICES OF THE SEA
45 min
MESSAGES FROM THE MARSH – PARTS 1-3, MIXED WITH A RUMBLE INSIDE 3 min
Amy Kaczur, United States
“Messages from the Marsh” is a work in progress for an immersive experience featuring video projections, sound art, and mapping. The project showcases marsh locations along the US East Coast that are projected to be underwater by 2050 due to sea level rise, tides, and storm surges.
PRAYER OF THE SEA 6 min
Martin Gerigk, Germany
A composer recounts a dream from his youth that inspired the slow movement of his first string quartet, Prayer of the Sea. The dream, depicting a peaceful dissolution into the sea and wind, symbolized his future death.
ODE (AN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF SEA COUNTRY) 6 min
Kirsten Hudson, Australia
A speculative cameraless animation created from handmade, biodegradable macroalgae celluloid and seaweed. Developed through a research collaboration with scientists from CSIRO and the Indian Ocean Marine Research Centre in Western Australia, the work reimagines cinema as a post-petrochemical, ocean-responsive process.
SEA VOICE 7 min
Natalia Dobrzhanskaya, Czechia
A poetic experimental short film where animation, documentary footage, and ceramic sculptures intertwine into a single visual fabric. The film explores emotions, memories, and the interconnectedness of humans, the sea, and all living things, showing that everything around us is part of one unified world.
DELUGE 15 min
Laurel Sigfúsdóttir Jóhannesson, Canada
An experimental film that explores the unstable entanglement of the human body and the natural world amid accelerating climate transformation. Through a shifting visual language of immersion, erosion, and emergence, the film dissolves distinctions between flesh and landscape, sensing the body as porous matter… responsive to the same elemental forces that shape land, water, and atmosphere.
LAND AND LIGHT
1 hour
SERENE HUES 4 min
Rita Tse, Canada
Hand-processed, solarized, tinted, and toned, Serene Hues is a meditative journey into the tranquility and vibrant beauty of nature. The surprising and unexpected images created through process-driven filmmaking, which is improvisational and interactive, embody the wabi-sabi aesthetic of impermanence, incompleteness, and imperfection, emphasizing the creative process of producing the work.
EPOQUE 11 min
Diana Chem, Greece
Epoque strongly contrasts the city and nature. Life starts in the smoky, polluted city, moves through different seasons, and ends by returning to the pure waters of nature, where God is found.
FIRST LIGHT 15 min
John Woodman, United Kingdom
Filmed through mist directly into the sun at dawn just after sunrise on a winters morning. It is a reflection on light, duration and visual transformation.
EAGLE EYE 26 min
Eamon Wyss, Australia
A poetic documentary that transforms the salt lakes of Wamba Wamba Country into a cinematic meditation on colour, rhythm and culture. Filmed from the perspective of a soaring eagle, it merges aerial cinematography, sound design and Aboriginal storytelling to create an immersive sensory experience.
OTHER LIVES, OTHER WORLDS
30 min
A CAT’S EYE 4 min
Florence Audet, Canada
A day in the garden through the eye of a cat.
PRALAYA 5 min
Sandeep Ashwath, India
This film is based on an Indian text from the 3rd century CE where the world is a grey sea. One old man remains as witness to cosmic dissolution and the cycle of life. In choosing a woman as the witness, the film critiques patriarchal metaphysical escapism and embraces the demise of the earth as a real tragedy, albeit a melodramatic one.
LAMENT 4 min
Jeffrey Langille, Canada
This film offers a lament for a troubled world by means of a cardboard model of the Earth as seen from space. (16 mm film, including plant-based, hand-processing, transferred to 4K video, colour and black-and-white, sound, 2025.)
BENETH THE PLANT MOON 14 min
Petri Tapani Eskelinen, Finland
A silent time lapse film created with real growing plants and timed electromechanical sets, which move and transform in the same temporality as the plants grow. Each scene has a dramatic starting point and a set which plants then shape, guiding the scene to a next one.
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Organized by
+The Institute [for Experimental Arts]
Supported by
Film Poetry Digital Archive
