Heavily pregnant Itto looks forward to a day of peace and quiet when she gets her affluent household mostly to herself after her husband Amine goes away on business. She’s quickly lost sight of her modest origins and has adapted to her new family’s detached opulence. But when a mysterious state of emergency is declared nationwide, Itto struggles to find help; meanwhile, increasingly ominous events and strange weather phenomena suggest a supernatural presence is nearing. While fran...

A Hemlock forest in Western Massachusetts that is dying due to the Woolly Adelgid beetle infestation tells a larger story about climate collapse and the interconnections between the natural and the built environments.

-HUBRIS is an experimental docu-narrative that chronicles three individual journeys intrepreted by dance and circus artists, exploring a powerful storyline about climate change. Blinded by ego, their journeys symbolize the collateral damage induced by a culture deeply rooted in individualism-serving as a metaphor for our environmental crisis and a need for a U-turn towards transformative change.

In the late 1960’s Bernie Krause was a prolific composer & a foley artist who pioneered synthesizers and worked with industry giants such as Francis Ford Coppola, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones, but after one chance encounter with the sounds of the wilderness, he chose to change his career path in life, setting out to gather wild field recordings to help battle the climate crisis using acoustic information. Over half a century later, his vast archive of captured soundscapes refle...

A symbolic and poetic interpretation of the life that grows in the womb of a mother-to-be.

2D animation clip assisted by artificial intelligence Directors: Ulysse Lefort, Martin Wiklund and Arthur Lemaître Duration: 2 minutes

Music : Kim Chapiron and Marco Casanova Produced by Miyu Productions and Viral Records

A wave born from a distant echo, as a premise for a fantastic explosion of forms and colors.

To create the image for the music o...

A surgical assistant robot spends his days making incisions and closing wounds with precise, AI accuracy. Longing for connection, he plays chess with nurses. This routine, lonely existence is upended with the arrival of a mysterious woman: his upgraded version. In Eno Swinnen’s sensuous and lyrical hand-drawn animation, the complexities of a relationship between two machines reveal a tender, nuanced humanity.

The title alone promises to reveal some inharmonious details within one’s own personality or self-image. Already in Anna Vasof’s work Amazon Woman (2021) she, as a performer, leaves the terrain of the conducting artist who demonstrates her ideas in animated sequences. The unpleasant loss of controllability of the body is mixed in with the pleasurable and imaginative transformation of everyday objects and processes in order to make tangible the illusion machine of cinema and our sl...

AI-animated avatars, bots and text-to-speech systems, typically used for corporate training, are spreading to other human-facing scenarios - from primary education and senior care to crowd management and border control. As it becomes possible to generate convincing ‘fake persons’, who have never existed outside of an algorithm, the question arises – when does it matter that there is no body behind?

This short film casts AI avatars generated from human actors to rel...

Lale gets cloned virtually! Now that our reality mainly takes place on the screen anyway, she sees a realistic chance to make her digital twin work for her.

The real Lale could do something different, could finally take a break from optimizing her self: More and more often she asks herself the question, who or what she would be if she would just stop working so hard.

To find out, Lale has her friend Vinzent duplicate her body and mimics in 3D. The result is a digital Lale ...

TerraForma is the story of the remote desert island of Ascension: for a million years entirely devoid of life, but which was engineered by process of 'terraforming' into a tropical paradise. It is also the story of what that transformation may mean for the fate of our planet, in a future when terraformed landscapes and human-engineered environments may come to warp our understanding of nature itself.

San Borondón is a mythical island that appears and disappears. It has appeared on maps throughout history in the vicinity of the Canary Island. The legend of the island of San Borondón became so pervasive that, during the XVI, XVI and XVIII centuries, expeditions were organized to find and conquer it. After centuries of oblivion, it has finally been found.

Artist Neil Harbisson was born colour blind, but an antenna drilled into his skull enables him to hear colours and today he is the world’s first officially recognised cyborg. Meet a man who may be the prototype of the human of the future.

There are no others like Neil Harbisson out there – at least not yet. As the world’s first officially recognised cyborg, he is a unique creature and on a dedicated mission for the right to design himself. Born colour-blind, a...

In the near future, there are no more animals or plants on Earth and the remaining humans are living under a plastic dome. The price for their continuing survival is very high: at the age of 50, they are implanted with a special seed that turns them into a tree which will provide oxygen and food for the community. A young man, Stefan, accepts this system – until the day his wife Nóra decides to give up her life and undergo voluntary implantation. Driven by his love for her, Stefa...

Like many 13-year-olds, Emi is a little embarrassed by his mildly quirky parents and grandfather – sometimes he wishes they were bankers like ordinary people instead of magicians preparing to launch Croma Kid, their own TV show. Having grown up with a TV studio in the basement, Emi is a total tech-head and very well-versed in all the hottest audio-visual technology that 1993 has to offer. One day, while he’s messing around with the chroma key machine that creates the effects of th...

In the film Stillness of Labor, Chris Larson replicates 12 full-scale rooms using objects extracted from an abandoned garment factory in Tennessee to mirror the environment of the laborers. When labor was outsourced in 1998, the rural community was left without work in a town centered around industry. Larson recreates the architecture of the factory as a study of the anthropogenic imprint humans leave behind in spaces of heavy repetition.

On this farm, cows are fed, milked, cleaned and massaged by robots, while human beings are conspicuously absent. In a Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam, robots have taken over the work of waiters. A quietly observational document of the latest stage of consumption-oriented industrialization, and the strange relationship of food, animals, labor and technology.

Logline: In the abandoned smart city of SimBeijing, a self-driving police car confronts their existential troubles with their built-in AI therapist.

Synopsis: Theta follows a self-driving police car as they confront their existential crisis while patrolling the streets of the abandoned smart city of SimBeijing. Left with nothing to do, but still under constant surveillance, the car discusses their troubles with their built-in therapist — a self-help AI called Guanyin. Not all ...

Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story. A voice from a tape recorder recalls the reality of a secret sleep-experiment during a pandemic. The film slowly reveals fragmentary glimpses of an entity inhabiting the dreams.

A man discovers there’s another meaning for “recycling” in this ingenious fusion of mock doc, workplace satire, and stop-motion animation by Trinidad Plass Caussade, Titouan Tillier, and Isaac Wenzek.

A mining town waits for economic recovery while physicists under their feet wait for answers from the universe.

A Peruvian father labours patiently, chipping at the white volcanic stone that forms an extraordinary landscape. His son is part of the modern world: he uses cameras and drones in order to create the digital model of a church on a computer. Separated by the mysterious death of the wife/mother figure in the family, these men do not connect. And yet their paths cross in a ghostly manner, as do their professions: each in their own way works with textures and volumes, sensations and perceptions. ...

An “afronaut” emerges from the wreckage of his spaceship in the volcanic crater of Mount Nyiragongo. As he encounters the people of present-day Goma in the city, he begins to understand how to change the future for his people.

Within the human struggle to live and work, and with the materials for survival available for exploitation, seemingly foreign worlds are intertwined in the modern battlefield of patents, ownership, and colonialism. Delving into labor and science practices, A Common Sequence examines who gets to work with the essentials of life — saving animals from extinction, researching medicine, harvesting food, coding the genome — in our modern world controlled by data.

Film...

A mystical sci-fi based on Saint Teresa de Avila's writings. Inside a ghostly mausoleum that is an artifact of both the past, and future, these nuns are being affected by a black hole. Ecstasy is an eerie exploration of pleasure.

The human race is old, but rocks are timeless. Weaving stunning imagery with evocative text and interviews, Last Things observes the history of all of us and this planet Earth through the most essential parts — evolution and extinction, from the POV of rocks. The immensity of our existence is hard to fathom, and we are obsessed with our past, looking for reasons. A huge journey we should take on a cinema screen.

In a distinctive style seen throughout her long career, ...

The inhabitants of a city awake one morning to find that never-before-seen trees, plants, and flowers suddenly erupted throughout the streets and in the squares. Strange and mysterious events start taking place as Camelia and Nahla investigate the origins of these new and peculiar creatures.

There she stands, confidently, like a goddess of technological junk, surrounded by endless mountains of rubbish, plastic, stench and rare earths. An angry appeal to the world to take responsibility for the consequences of capitalism, colonialism and environmental destruction in Africa.

For our land and bones. At the end of the world.
Technology and waste,
in our lands, our systems, our bones.
Wandering our spaces, she cannot help but wonder, where is the space f...

In the municipality of Villa Guerrero, State of Mexico, flower growers and their families live with the hope of better times; in the meantime, they live every day in a field that no longer smells of flowers...

An androgynous scientist lives confined to the ice of Antarctica, taking care of a closed artificial ecosystem for space colonization. Virtual relationships, artificial suns, and nutrients dissolved in the air are the core of a crystallised world pervaded by the emotional temperature of extreme isolation.
In the astonishing but hostile frozen desert, the antarctic gardener follow a strict routine to endure solitude. Their only companions are plants, growing enclosed in an uninterrupted...

A young anthropologist, Zdenka, moves with her husband and three sons to Svalbard, Norway, to study how life is changing in polar regions. She has received a prestigious two-year grant to carry out extensive research on the impact of globalizationglobalization on the inhabitants of the world's northernmost town, Longyearbyen. After falling in love with her new home, Zdenka discovers that more than icebergs and permafrost are vanishing in the Arctic. Through conducting interviews with resi...

Through moments in the lives of three groups of girls, images gleaned from the web and live streams of young women around the world, BLOOM delves into the world of today's teenage girls. We delicately observe a hyperconnected but lonely generation inhabited by great lucidity, an inner struggle with self-image obsession, and a need for self-affirmation in the face of a complex sense of alienation.

2048. Google owns most of the planet and is now run by Mark Zuckerberg. He finds a cure for death, through a digital immortality software that allows him to download himself into a hologram. While it is reserved for an elite group of rich and powerful men, a group of hackers seizes the source code of this program containing the antidote of immortality and makes it accessible to the whole world.

The tropical rainforest is disappearing, the Earth is warming up and gold miners are polluting rivers. Davi Kopenawa, shaman, chief and spokesperson for the Yanomami, has been always fighting these. He also escalates the fight with his son to an international level to defend their country against the invaders when Brazilian President Bolsonaro announces that industries can set up in the Amazon on Yanomami territory.

He travels the world defending his people against an endless coloni...

Jaime falls dead abruptly, while he works on his field in the Ecuadorian Andean paramo. He is the newest victim of a deadly and mysterious disease that has struck his Indigenous commune. As his body lies lifeless on the ground, his animal spirit emerges from his body. He wanders through the Andean moors until he meets the spirit of his wife and together, they begin their journey to the Land of the Dead.

Jaime cae muerto mientras trabaja en una comunidad del páramo andino ecua...

During a solar eclipse a girl decides to put her powers to the test in the northern wilderness. She takes on the ultimate challenge, a fierce and formidable musk ox.

Three women’s experiences of hormonal birth control are weaved into one collective piece, exploring the radical effects that hormones have on the brain and body.

At a young age, many women begin to take hormonal birth control. Although their benefits are widely discussed, we rarely hear about the side effects. In this unique hybrid film, a dancer embodies the voices of three women who share the effects they experienced, from loss of libido and energy to profound changes in the...

Newly orphaned and freshly wounded from a loss, a boy lends his companion a prosthetic arm for the day. The companion records the limb being exposed to textures and materials. What will become of the limb and the video recordings?

Holly Márie Parnell’s film Cabbage (2023) examines the complexities of bodily autonomy within an ableist paradigm. Parnell focuses on her brother, David, particularly his texts written with the assistance of eye-tracking technology – he comments his “eyes are his voice,” which is made visible through poetry. Parnell juxtaposes medical narratives with testimony from David and their mother, including memories and reflections on various topics, from the minutia of ...

The diagnosis of an eye disorder incited this meditation on fear and beauty. Glimpses of curious and creative souls peek out of countless hand-painted film frames. Infinite colors and textures burst, blend, and challenge the primacy of uniform vision.

In a world without food and overgrown with plastic, Zigle Clinic tests a new food re-education Method, which is coveted by many but granted to few. Giulia is one of the patients chosen by the Clinic. Even if she is fearful at first, she gets increasingly involved and joins the group sessions under the guidance of Isotta, the exuberant nurse. Nursery rhymes and deceiving words of encouragement hide an inconceivable truth.

It is Palestinian custom to harvest and forage for plants but they must do so illegally under Israeli law—a process documented in this visual feast, from field to kitchen. Under Israeli law, it is illegal to harvest wild plants that are traditionally used for cooking, such as za’atar (thyme) and akkoub (gundelia), though the practice has been an age-old tradition among Palestinians. In the occupied Golan Heights, Galilee and Jerusalem, locals show their resilience despite the proh...

Early films of Patagonia show a land that no longer exists, pine trees have replaced the ancient Araucaria trees. Near my new home in Brussels, Araucarias adorn front yards. How have they become a petty bourgeois fad here? What do these representations tell us about our times?

At the Natural History Museum in Vienna, everything that is found on earth and in outer space and that humans can get their hands on, is collected, archived, and studied in the name of evolutionary research. Archiv der Zukunft captures the aesthetic appeal of the natural-history collection and its working process, illuminating the mammoth project of knowledge preservation and production hidden behind the building’s imperial façade.

As an excursion to the work of botanical and film preservation, "Herbaria" explores in its invisible processes the artistic and political derivations that connect them.
Sustained in a narration where times and spaces seem to merge, the records invite us to the fascinating universe of preserving the beauty and memory of a world that insists on disappearing.

A young Pribumi woman confronts the realities of how she is valued by her society in an imagined scenario of post-New Order Indonesia.

Jani lives in a dystopian world of nuclear reactors and military curfews. After getting beaten up in a fight, she is telepathically contacted by a hovering lapdog whose people entrust her with a talking catfish rescued from a research laboratory. A turbulent fever dream of surreal phantasms which sees the 14-year-old getting ready to fight back and break free of her oppressively indifferent surroundings.

Leo, a shy eighth grader at the cusp of understanding their trans identity, pursues a crush on a boy bunkmate, but is plagued by a frog. Meanwhile, Leo's eager, gay teacher-in-training Brad tries to connect with his students, but oversteps boundaries in the eyes of a coworker. It is only in nature, among marshes and maritime forests, that Leo and Brad find an unspoken connection.

Light Needs is an experimental documentary about houseplants who cohabitate with people and the surprisingly intimate and complex relationships that can develop between them.

Containing footage collected from many different domestic and professional spaces over several years, each home/site evidences the different ways people cohabitate with and relate to plants. Yet, this film is ardently not a document of houseplants but rather a consideration of the benefits and losses accrued th...

A father finds shelter in the memories he created together with his daughter to whom he hasn't spoken in years. The film transforms into a go-between in an attempt to unite them through images, sounds, and letters.

Between ethnography and reverie, the film enters the in-between spaces of dreams to explore how human and nonhuman social cartographies arise through dreaming alongside a Mapuche family in the south of Chile.

The Night Visitors is a movie about moths. In large and small fragments, looking both inward and out, through a critical lens that is by turns social and personal, the film closely examines these underknown creatures. While The Night Visitors is interested in moths as organisms, with fascinating life histories, staggering biodiversity, and a functional importance as indicators of climate change and habitat degradation, its engagement with them is not primarily entomological. Instead, the film...

After the largest mining dam breaks in history, further dam collapses threaten millions in Brazil. A state counselor confronts the government's modus operandi, while dam refugees resist the mining companies' abuses in their threatened communities.

Synopsis:

"It's a bird in the air, a bird that lands (...)
The deep mystery, the promise of life (...)
It's nothing at all."
- Jobim/Moustaki -

Note of intent:

At once simple, profound and light-hearted, this film is a play on words; a deliberative game and puzzle.

BATSIES is a short, experimental doc that examines a woman’s tender relationship with an animal that’s quintessentially feared and loathed – the bat.

Our protagonists, Sara Weaver and Sarah Fritts, are best friends and high-level bat researchers at Texas State University. These ladies have a wicked sense of humor, they curse like sailors, they’re covered in tattoos, and consider themselves outliers within a male-dominated field.

We follow their jour...

The Newt Congress takes place at a conference building surrounded by nature where participants have come together to optimize the exploitation of giant talking newts. Adapted from the novel War with the Newts by Karel Čapek.

Silent extinction is a video portrait of the coral species Fungia undergoing a complete transformation as an immediate response to an ongoing heat stress. The video shows the coral's instantly response to rising water temperature in a way that hasn't been visually detected an captured in real time before.

Strangers in the dark is an experimental film showing how light pollution makes a glow-worm's love life a living hell. Combining different techniques from animation to archive material the film follows glow worm's attempts to find a partner in an environment that is no longer dark at night. The story about light and darkness moves from the scale of planetary to microscopic, from the calmness of nature to a hectic city and from artificial light to the green shimmer of glow-worm's b...

A man is summoned from Mumbai to his village to deal with a termite infestation threatening to destroy his childhood home.

"The Arc of Oblivion" explores a quirk of humankind: in a universe that erases its tracks, we humans are hellbent on leaving a trace. Set against the backdrop of the filmmaker's quixotic quest to build an ark in a field in Maine, the film heads far afield - to salt mines in the Alps, fjords in the Arctic, and ancient libraries in the Sahara - to illuminate the strange world of archives, record-keeping, and memory.

A portrait of my mother, my tortoise, and mild winters: In 2009, I moved from my home in Salzburg, Austria, to the United States. The care of my pet tortoise, Tony, fell upon my mother, Kathleen. Tony’s species, native to the Mediterranean, hibernate several months each winter at a predictable temperature. Our family’s garage used to provide these conditions, but recent erratic winters forced my mother to find a more reliable, future-facing solution. What’s revealed is an in...

Marina’s face suddenly changed. As in a Kafka-esque nightmare, one day around her thirties her face ceased to be what it was. Who is she now? Through Marina’s story, the film delves into a reflection around the meaning of the face, emblem of our identity and nerve center of how we connect with others, human or non-human. Can we be somebody beyond our face, beyond our image?

Holly Márie Parnell’s film Cabbage (2023) examines the complexities of bodily autonomy within an ableist paradigm. Parnell focuses on her brother, David, particularly his texts written with the assistance of eye-tracking technology – he comments his “eyes are his voice,” which is made visible through poetry. Parnell juxtaposes medical narratives with testimony from David and their mother, including memories and reflections on various topics, from the minutia of ...

In a world without food and overgrown with plastic, Zigle Clinic tests a new food re-education Method, which is coveted by many but granted to few. Giulia is one of the patients chosen by the Clinic. Even if she is fearful at first, she gets increasingly involved and joins the group sessions under the guidance of Isotta, the exuberant nurse. Nursery rhymes and deceiving words of encouragement hide an inconceivable truth.

Within the human struggle to live and work, and with the materials for survival available for exploitation, seemingly foreign worlds are intertwined in the modern battlefield of patents, ownership, and colonialism. Delving into labor and science practices, A Common Sequence examines who gets to work with the essentials of life — saving animals from extinction, researching medicine, harvesting food, coding the genome — in our modern world controlled by data.

Film...

In the municipality of Villa Guerrero, State of Mexico, flower growers and their families live with the hope of better times; in the meantime, they live every day in a field that no longer smells of flowers...

During a solar eclipse a girl decides to put her powers to the test in the northern wilderness. She takes on the ultimate challenge, a fierce and formidable musk ox.

At the Natural History Museum in Vienna, everything that is found on earth and in outer space and that humans can get their hands on, is collected, archived, and studied in the name of evolutionary research. Archiv der Zukunft captures the aesthetic appeal of the natural-history collection and its working process, illuminating the mammoth project of knowledge preservation and production hidden behind the building’s imperial façade.

BATSIES is a short, experimental doc that examines a woman’s tender relationship with an animal that’s quintessentially feared and loathed – the bat.

Our protagonists, Sara Weaver and Sarah Fritts, are best friends and high-level bat researchers at Texas State University. These ladies have a wicked sense of humor, they curse like sailors, they’re covered in tattoos, and consider themselves outliers within a male-dominated field.

We follow their jour...

Thoughts ripple over the pages of a personal notebook, kept during a stay at different science labs in Zürich. They float from one to another, like a mind map of unfinished ideas on memory, medical imaging, cells, and aging.

Through moments in the lives of three groups of girls, images gleaned from the web and live streams of young women around the world, BLOOM delves into the world of today's teenage girls. We delicately observe a hyperconnected but lonely generation inhabited by great lucidity, an inner struggle with self-image obsession, and a need for self-affirmation in the face of a complex sense of alienation.

A symbolic and poetic interpretation of the life that grows in the womb of a mother-to-be.

2D animation clip assisted by artificial intelligence Directors: Ulysse Lefort, Martin Wiklund and Arthur Lemaître Duration: 2 minutes

Music : Kim Chapiron and Marco Casanova Produced by Miyu Productions and Viral Records

A wave born from a distant echo, as a premise for a fantastic explosion of forms and colors.

To create the image for the music o...

A Peruvian father labours patiently, chipping at the white volcanic stone that forms an extraordinary landscape. His son is part of the modern world: he uses cameras and drones in order to create the digital model of a church on a computer. Separated by the mysterious death of the wife/mother figure in the family, these men do not connect. And yet their paths cross in a ghostly manner, as do their professions: each in their own way works with textures and volumes, sensations and perceptions. ...

Artist Neil Harbisson was born colour blind, but an antenna drilled into his skull enables him to hear colours and today he is the world’s first officially recognised cyborg. Meet a man who may be the prototype of the human of the future.

There are no others like Neil Harbisson out there – at least not yet. As the world’s first officially recognised cyborg, he is a unique creature and on a dedicated mission for the right to design himself. Born colour-blind, a...

A surgical assistant robot spends his days making incisions and closing wounds with precise, AI accuracy. Longing for connection, he plays chess with nurses. This routine, lonely existence is upended with the arrival of a mysterious woman: his upgraded version. In Eno Swinnen’s sensuous and lyrical hand-drawn animation, the complexities of a relationship between two machines reveal a tender, nuanced humanity.

A mystical sci-fi based on Saint Teresa de Avila's writings. Inside a ghostly mausoleum that is an artifact of both the past, and future, these nuns are being affected by a black hole. Ecstasy is an eerie exploration of pleasure.

Marina’s face suddenly changed. As in a Kafka-esque nightmare, one day around her thirties her face ceased to be what it was. Who is she now? Through Marina’s story, the film delves into a reflection around the meaning of the face, emblem of our identity and nerve center of how we connect with others, human or non-human. Can we be somebody beyond our face, beyond our image?

It is Palestinian custom to harvest and forage for plants but they must do so illegally under Israeli law—a process documented in this visual feast, from field to kitchen. Under Israeli law, it is illegal to harvest wild plants that are traditionally used for cooking, such as za’atar (thyme) and akkoub (gundelia), though the practice has been an age-old tradition among Palestinians. In the occupied Golan Heights, Galilee and Jerusalem, locals show their resilience despite the proh...

Three women’s experiences of hormonal birth control are weaved into one collective piece, exploring the radical effects that hormones have on the brain and body.

At a young age, many women begin to take hormonal birth control. Although their benefits are widely discussed, we rarely hear about the side effects. In this unique hybrid film, a dancer embodies the voices of three women who share the effects they experienced, from loss of libido and energy to profound changes in the...

-HUBRIS is an experimental docu-narrative that chronicles three individual journeys intrepreted by dance and circus artists, exploring a powerful storyline about climate change. Blinded by ego, their journeys symbolize the collateral damage induced by a culture deeply rooted in individualism-serving as a metaphor for our environmental crisis and a need for a U-turn towards transformative change.

AI-animated avatars, bots and text-to-speech systems, typically used for corporate training, are spreading to other human-facing scenarios - from primary education and senior care to crowd management and border control. As it becomes possible to generate convincing ‘fake persons’, who have never existed outside of an algorithm, the question arises – when does it matter that there is no body behind?

This short film casts AI avatars generated from human actors to rel...

The title alone promises to reveal some inharmonious details within one’s own personality or self-image. Already in Anna Vasof’s work Amazon Woman (2021) she, as a performer, leaves the terrain of the conducting artist who demonstrates her ideas in animated sequences. The unpleasant loss of controllability of the body is mixed in with the pleasurable and imaginative transformation of everyday objects and processes in order to make tangible the illusion machine of cinema and our sl...

The human race is old, but rocks are timeless. Weaving stunning imagery with evocative text and interviews, Last Things observes the history of all of us and this planet Earth through the most essential parts — evolution and extinction, from the POV of rocks. The immensity of our existence is hard to fathom, and we are obsessed with our past, looking for reasons. A huge journey we should take on a cinema screen.

In a distinctive style seen throughout her long career, ...

On this farm, cows are fed, milked, cleaned and massaged by robots, while human beings are conspicuously absent. In a Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam, robots have taken over the work of waiters. A quietly observational document of the latest stage of consumption-oriented industrialization, and the strange relationship of food, animals, labor and technology.

Synopsis:

"It's a bird in the air, a bird that lands (...)
The deep mystery, the promise of life (...)
It's nothing at all."
- Jobim/Moustaki -

Note of intent:

At once simple, profound and light-hearted, this film is a play on words; a deliberative game and puzzle.

An “afronaut” emerges from the wreckage of his spaceship in the volcanic crater of Mount Nyiragongo. As he encounters the people of present-day Goma in the city, he begins to understand how to change the future for his people.

The diagnosis of an eye disorder incited this meditation on fear and beauty. Glimpses of curious and creative souls peek out of countless hand-painted film frames. Infinite colors and textures burst, blend, and challenge the primacy of uniform vision.

After the largest mining dam breaks in history, further dam collapses threaten millions in Brazil. A state counselor confronts the government's modus operandi, while dam refugees resist the mining companies' abuses in their threatened communities.

Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story. A voice from a tape recorder recalls the reality of a secret sleep-experiment during a pandemic. The film slowly reveals fragmentary glimpses of an entity inhabiting the dreams.

Silent extinction is a video portrait of the coral species Fungia undergoing a complete transformation as an immediate response to an ongoing heat stress. The video shows the coral's instantly response to rising water temperature in a way that hasn't been visually detected an captured in real time before.

Leo, a shy eighth grader at the cusp of understanding their trans identity, pursues a crush on a boy bunkmate, but is plagued by a frog. Meanwhile, Leo's eager, gay teacher-in-training Brad tries to connect with his students, but oversteps boundaries in the eyes of a coworker. It is only in nature, among marshes and maritime forests, that Leo and Brad find an unspoken connection.

Strangers in the dark is an experimental film showing how light pollution makes a glow-worm's love life a living hell. Combining different techniques from animation to archive material the film follows glow worm's attempts to find a partner in an environment that is no longer dark at night. The story about light and darkness moves from the scale of planetary to microscopic, from the calmness of nature to a hectic city and from artificial light to the green shimmer of glow-worm's b...

There she stands, confidently, like a goddess of technological junk, surrounded by endless mountains of rubbish, plastic, stench and rare earths. An angry appeal to the world to take responsibility for the consequences of capitalism, colonialism and environmental destruction in Africa.

For our land and bones. At the end of the world.
Technology and waste,
in our lands, our systems, our bones.
Wandering our spaces, she cannot help but wonder, where is the space f...

A portrait of my mother, my tortoise, and mild winters: In 2009, I moved from my home in Salzburg, Austria, to the United States. The care of my pet tortoise, Tony, fell upon my mother, Kathleen. Tony’s species, native to the Mediterranean, hibernate several months each winter at a predictable temperature. Our family’s garage used to provide these conditions, but recent erratic winters forced my mother to find a more reliable, future-facing solution. What’s revealed is an in...

An androgynous scientist lives confined to the ice of Antarctica, taking care of a closed artificial ecosystem for space colonization. Virtual relationships, artificial suns, and nutrients dissolved in the air are the core of a crystallised world pervaded by the emotional temperature of extreme isolation.
In the astonishing but hostile frozen desert, the antarctic gardener follow a strict routine to endure solitude. Their only companions are plants, growing enclosed in an uninterrupted...

"The Arc of Oblivion" explores a quirk of humankind: in a universe that erases its tracks, we humans are hellbent on leaving a trace. Set against the backdrop of the filmmaker's quixotic quest to build an ark in a field in Maine, the film heads far afield - to salt mines in the Alps, fjords in the Arctic, and ancient libraries in the Sahara - to illuminate the strange world of archives, record-keeping, and memory.

Between ethnography and reverie, the film enters the in-between spaces of dreams to explore how human and nonhuman social cartographies arise through dreaming alongside a Mapuche family in the south of Chile.

Early films of Patagonia show a land that no longer exists, pine trees have replaced the ancient Araucaria trees. Near my new home in Brussels, Araucarias adorn front yards. How have they become a petty bourgeois fad here? What do these representations tell us about our times?

In the late 1960’s Bernie Krause was a prolific composer & a foley artist who pioneered synthesizers and worked with industry giants such as Francis Ford Coppola, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones, but after one chance encounter with the sounds of the wilderness, he chose to change his career path in life, setting out to gather wild field recordings to help battle the climate crisis using acoustic information. Over half a century later, his vast archive of captured soundscapes refle...

A father finds shelter in the memories he created together with his daughter to whom he hasn't spoken in years. The film transforms into a go-between in an attempt to unite them through images, sounds, and letters.

Logline: In the abandoned smart city of SimBeijing, a self-driving police car confronts their existential troubles with their built-in AI therapist.

Synopsis: Theta follows a self-driving police car as they confront their existential crisis while patrolling the streets of the abandoned smart city of SimBeijing. Left with nothing to do, but still under constant surveillance, the car discusses their troubles with their built-in therapist — a self-help AI called Guanyin. Not all ...

A mining town waits for economic recovery while physicists under their feet wait for answers from the universe.

2048. Google owns most of the planet and is now run by Mark Zuckerberg. He finds a cure for death, through a digital immortality software that allows him to download himself into a hologram. While it is reserved for an elite group of rich and powerful men, a group of hackers seizes the source code of this program containing the antidote of immortality and makes it accessible to the whole world.

Jaime falls dead abruptly, while he works on his field in the Ecuadorian Andean paramo. He is the newest victim of a deadly and mysterious disease that has struck his Indigenous commune. As his body lies lifeless on the ground, his animal spirit emerges from his body. He wanders through the Andean moors until he meets the spirit of his wife and together, they begin their journey to the Land of the Dead.

Jaime cae muerto mientras trabaja en una comunidad del páramo andino ecua...

A Hemlock forest in Western Massachusetts that is dying due to the Woolly Adelgid beetle infestation tells a larger story about climate collapse and the interconnections between the natural and the built environments.

A young anthropologist, Zdenka, moves with her husband and three sons to Svalbard, Norway, to study how life is changing in polar regions. She has received a prestigious two-year grant to carry out extensive research on the impact of globalizationglobalization on the inhabitants of the world's northernmost town, Longyearbyen. After falling in love with her new home, Zdenka discovers that more than icebergs and permafrost are vanishing in the Arctic. Through conducting interviews with resi...

The tropical rainforest is disappearing, the Earth is warming up and gold miners are polluting rivers. Davi Kopenawa, shaman, chief and spokesperson for the Yanomami, has been always fighting these. He also escalates the fight with his son to an international level to defend their country against the invaders when Brazilian President Bolsonaro announces that industries can set up in the Amazon on Yanomami territory.

He travels the world defending his people against an endless coloni...

Like many 13-year-olds, Emi is a little embarrassed by his mildly quirky parents and grandfather – sometimes he wishes they were bankers like ordinary people instead of magicians preparing to launch Croma Kid, their own TV show. Having grown up with a TV studio in the basement, Emi is a total tech-head and very well-versed in all the hottest audio-visual technology that 1993 has to offer. One day, while he’s messing around with the chroma key machine that creates the effects of th...

Jani lives in a dystopian world of nuclear reactors and military curfews. After getting beaten up in a fight, she is telepathically contacted by a hovering lapdog whose people entrust her with a talking catfish rescued from a research laboratory. A turbulent fever dream of surreal phantasms which sees the 14-year-old getting ready to fight back and break free of her oppressively indifferent surroundings.

Newly orphaned and freshly wounded from a loss, a boy lends his companion a prosthetic arm for the day. The companion records the limb being exposed to textures and materials. What will become of the limb and the video recordings?

Rift is a visual and sonic simultaneous telling of ancient and present-day ecological stories. The film depicts the formation of the Connecticut Rift Valley through geological time by following a modern-day Red maple (Acer rubrum) seedling’s experience in this unique terrain.

Through sounds of rumbling and crushing, Rift tells the story of the region’s shifting tectonic plates and the formation and melting of the glaciers which covered and carved its surface. The film&rs...

Our memories make up the foundation of who we are, but they are constantly changing. Like a living organism with its own personality, memory can be loyal and reliable, sneaky and surprising, or capricious and cruel. Shot primarily in 16mm film, this creature called Memory is made from museum objects, neuroscience data, and the filmmakers’ personal memories.

By Gavati Wad and Lauren Vetere

Brain sounds by Chris Eldridge and Zoé Christenson Wick

Specia...

Female masturbation - essential experience, subject of scientific research, and a multibillion-dollar industry. “Pinky NAcc” explores the absence of faces, voices, and rodents that are at the center of the quest to understand the importance of self-pleasure in our brains, bodies, and beliefs.

Directors: G. Anthony Svatek, Anastasia-Maria Zavitsanou, Sound Design: Kaija Siirala Illustration: Matteo Farinella

This film was made as part of the 2023 Symbiosis i...