The practice of 3133 (Eric Lee) falls somewhere in between the cracks of visual art, performance and cinema. Inspired by notions of “troublemaking”, he tends to find joy in projects that feed these curiosities/impulses.

Ariane Papillon is a film director and researcher in Film and Media Studies. In 2024, she completed her PhD at Paris 8 University under the supervision of Dork Zabunyan, with a dissertation entitled Sharing the Mise-en-scène: Delegating the Camera to Documentary Subjects in Contemporary Cinema. She directed the feature-length documentary Girls Through the Looking Glass / À nos amies (Vents Contraires, 2024), a film shot entirely on smartphones by four teenage girls. In 2025, she was an artist-in-residence with Ateliers Médicis. She is currently a Temporary Teaching and Research Associate in the Film Department at Gustave Eiffel University in Champs-sur-Marne, France.

Benjamin Christensen (1879–1959) was a Danish filmmaker and actor known for his exploration of the macabre and leaving a lasting influence on what would become the horror genre. His films often examined the boundary between rationality and fear, superstition and the supernatural. Christensen worked in both European and Hollywood cinema, and was the manager of a Copenhagen motion-picture theatre for the last 17 years of his life.

Chris Marker (1921–2012) was a visionary French filmmaker, photographer, and multimedia artist, best known for pioneering the ""essay film."" A master of blending personal reflection with political commentary, he explored themes of memory, time, and global history. A fiercely private intellectual and a committed leftist, Marker deeply influenced modern cinema while remaining largely hidden behind his art and his iconic cat avatars.

Cyan Bae (b. 1993, South Korea) is a visual artist and researcher based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Working primarily with moving image, Cyan explores felt experiences and embodied knowledge entangled with socio-technical systems.

Darya Andijan is a Netherlands-based artist from Central Asia. Working across film, performance, and expanded cinema, she uses critical fabulation to reimagine Uyghur cultural memory and forms of resistance. Her works have been presented at Sheffield DocFest, and art spaces such as Framer Framed and 99 Canal.

Artist Deborah Stratman makes work about power, experience, history and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and linearity to be a trap. Her projects and 40+ films have been exhibited and awarded widely, at festivals including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, TIFF, Cinéma du Réel, Locarno, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Yamagata, Jeonju and venues including MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Witte de With, Austrian Film Museum, Yerba Buena Center, MCA Chicago, Whitney Biennial, Mercer Union and Jeu de Paume. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

Ernst KAREL works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, image-sound collaboration, and post-production sound for nonfiction film. Lately, he works around the practice of actuality/location recording and composing with those recordings, with recent projects also taking up archival audio. At the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, he collaborated on sound for a number of films and developed and taught a practice-based course in ‘sonic ethnography.’ Veronika KUSUMARYATI is a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua, a self-identifying term referring to Papua and West Papua provinces of Indonesia. Her scholarship engages with the theories and historiography of colonialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality. She holds a doctoral degree from the department of anthropology at Harvard with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. She is an assistant professor of political anthropology, race and identities, digital media, Southeast Asia, and Melanesia at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Esther van der Heijden (NL, 1993) is a multimedia artist and filmmaker whose practice spans film, sculpture, installation, and performance-essay. Her work explores how environmental and economic pressures shape ecosystems and the human and non-human lives that depend on them. Focusing on specific places, species, and communities, she examines how these pressures unfold across ecological and social contexts. Her practice combines historical material, fieldwork, and associative, poetic forms of image-making.

Firat Yücel is a documentary producer and editor who lives and works in Amsterdam and Istanbul. He is also the curator behind the video series Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema, which is part of the Altyazı Cinema Association, dedicated to supporting political film and video makers at risk in Turkey and elsewhere. His work is centred around collective filmmaking and resistance against censorship, while his documentaries focus on topics like exile, surveillance and the right to the city – in forms including the video essay, desktop documentary and biopic, among others. Yücel is part of the BAK Cell, Utrecht, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.

Gabrielle Stemmer (1991, France) studied literature and film editing. Her work as documentary filmmaker is focused on exploring archival images, whether historical or contemporary. In 2019 she directed "Clean With Me (After Dark)", selected and awarded at numerous festivals, as well as the series "Femmes sous algorithms” in 2023. In 2025 her essay film "La Grève" (The Strike), an adaptation of Ovidie’s book "La Chair est triste hélas” (The Flesh is Sad, Alas), premiered at San Sebastian.

Geo Barcan is a filmmaker interested in the relationship between politics, technology, identity and history. Her films are based on the experiences of marginal subjects. Political, ecological, cosmological, and technological themes come to the surface through the experiences of beings familiar to the peripheries, at the edge of the world. She thinks of her moving-image practice as a cinema of invisibility, through which she attempts to trace forces that are both unseen and hyper-present, such as the internet, memory, migration, ideology, and long-term socio-political transformations. She is drawn to changes that unfold gradually over time, becoming so embedded in everyday life that their after-effects are difficult to locate or question. She is interested in what gets to be seen and what stays hidden in the urgent, present moment and in recent histories that continue to shape it. Her work has been screened internationally in film festivals and galleries such as IFFR, Go Short, Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Eye Museum, W139, V2_, The Grey Space in the Middle, Simultan (Timisoara) and many others. Her essays and talks were presented by Institute of Network Cultures, Perdu, Amsterdam; IFFR; Revista Arta, Bucharest and Onomatopee, Eindhoven.

Hanwen Zhang is an artist and filmmaker originally from Changchun, China, and currently based in Göttingen, Germany. Drawing from artistic research and fieldwork, his work employs on-site filming and visual studies to examine specific landscapes, infrastructures, and mundane human activities reflecting on the intertwined dimensions of individual conditions, stories, memories, collective narratives, archives, and identity within local, transnational, historical, or ideological contexts. His recent research revolves around the exile of marginalized individuals, the treatment of difficult heritage, and the activities of secret societies within the modern and contemporary East Asian historical framework.

Herman Asselberghs (1962, Mechelen, BE) is a Belgian artist whose work focuses on the questioning of border areas between sound and image, world and media, poetics and politics. He has published extensively on film and visual culture, teaches at the film department of LUCA School of Arts Campus Brussels/Sint-Lukas. His films and installations have been shown at Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou Paris, documenta X Kassel, Deitch Projects New York, CGAC Santiago de Compostela, hartware, Dortmund, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netwerk, Aalst, M HKA, Antwerp, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, International Film Festival Rotterdam; Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, FIDMarseille, EMAF Osnabrück, Medien- und ArchitecturBiennale Graz, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid. In 2007 he won the Transmediale Award in Berlin. Herman Asselberghs lives and works in Brussels.

Jeroen Kooijmans (1967, Schijndel, NL) is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker whose work moves between visual art, architecture, and cinema. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where he met his wife, the artist Elspeth Diederix. His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern in London, PS1/MoMA and The New Museum in New York, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Centraal Museum Utrecht. In 1998, he received the NPS Culture Prize.

Jocelyne Saab (1948–2019, Beirut) was a Lebanese journalist, war reporter, filmmaker, photographer, visual artist and cultural activist. She began her career as a war reporter in 1973 and made almost thirty documentaries during the Lebanese Civil War, including Beyrouth, ma ville and Lettre de Beyrouth. Her films combine first-hand observation of war with a deeply personal engagement with Beirut and its history. She also made films in Egypt, Iran and Vietnam. In 1985, she directed her first fiction feature, A Suspended Life, selected for Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Her later films, including Once Upon a Time, Beirut: Story of a Star and Dunia, moved freely between documentary, fiction and archival cinema. From 2007 onwards, she increasingly worked in contemporary art, creating video installations and photography. She also helped rebuild the Lebanese Film Archive and, in 2013, founded the International Festival of Cultural Resistance. Throughout her career, Saab explored war, memory, displacement and the possibility of peace across film and visual art.

John Smith was born in Walthamstow, east London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art. Inspired during his formative years by conceptual art and structural film, but also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, he has developed a body of work that deftly subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary, fiction, representation and abstraction. Often rooted in everyday life and personal experience, his meticulously crafted films playfully explore and expose the language of cinema.

Berlin-based sound artist KMRU (Joseph Kamaru – Nairobi, Kenya) works with field recordings, ambient sound, and experimental techniques to explore listening cultures beyond dominant perceptual norms. He produces compositions, installations, and performances internationally and has released multiple albums, including with his own label, OFNOT.

Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, media artist, and critic. He has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format, was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound and screened in many festivals including Berlin Critics Week, Rotterdam International Film Festival and Viennale International Film Festival. Through Bottled Songs, his collaborative project with Chloé Galibert-Laîné, he was awarded the 2018 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Grant, the 2018 European Media Artist Platform Residency, and the 2019 Eurimages Lab Project Award at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. He was 2017 Artist in Residence of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. In 2019 he produced “Learning Farocki”, a series of video essays on Harun Farocki, commissioned by the Goethe Institut. In 2020 he is co-curating the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist with Will DiGravio and Cydnii Wilde Harris. He was Founding Editor and Chief Video Essayist at Fandor from 2011-2016, supervising producer at Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, and has written for The New York Times, Sight & Sound, Slate and Indiewire. He is Professor of the Future of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano in corporation with the Locarno Film Festival.

Lana Daher is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Beirut, Lebanon. With a background in fine arts and graphic design (BFA, American University of Beirut) as well as filmmaking (MA, Goldsmiths, University of London), she has long been active in Beirut’s vibrant art and music scenes, working across sound, image, and archival practices. Her work is grounded in deep research and intuitive storytelling, exploring the space between documentary and fiction by bringing different time periods and emotional landscapes into dialogue. Do You Love Me is her debut feature, an archive-based essay film built from Lebanon’s rich but fragmented audiovisual history. Alongside the film, she created a website a curated index of the resources and materials behind the project, aimed at reconnecting Lebanese film heritage with both local and wider audiences: doyouloveme.film. An IDFAcademy alumna, Lana also co-produced the film through her company, My Little Films, founded in 2024.

Lindsay McIntyre is a process-based Inuk filmmaker. Rooted in analogue processes, she employs handmade emulsions and deep material research in her autoethnographic explorations, forging visceral, place-based connections. She has created more than 45 films and several expanded cinema performances. Her short NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ garnered the Oscar-qualifying Best Short Award at imagineNATIVE, and her most recent film, Tuktuit:Caribou, which screened at Sundance, Hotdocs, RIDM, and DOXA (Best Short Documentary), considers the enduring connections between caribou, lichens and Inuit, and uses caribou-gelatin handmade emulsion. A fellow of Forge Project, Sundance, MacDowell, and COUSIN, Lindsay’s films have screened around the world and can be found in several permanent collections.

Lotte van Hulst (b.2000, EN/NL; based in London and Rotterdam) is a researcher, filmmaker and spatial designer. Her work combines spatial, audiovisual, and investigative methods to visualise and critique systemic inequalities and the mechanisms through which sovereignty and control are enacted. Working across counter-mapping, digital reconstruction, and open-source research, she considers space as a site of political negotiation and critical inquiry. Van Hulst is currently completing an MA at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is part of AAFO (Across A Flock’s Orbit), the 2025 Geo-Design (Design Academy Eindhoven) graduation cohort collective.

Masao Adachi is a Japanese filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor whose work has been central to Japan’s radical experimental and political cinema since the 1960s. He began making films while studying at Nihon University and collaborated closely with Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu. His films, including Female Convict 701: Scorpion and Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, challenge conventional forms of narrative and documentary filmmaking, linking cinema with political struggle. After decades away from filmmaking, Adachi returned with The Prisoner (2006) and has continued to make politically engaged work, including Escape (2025).

Michal Kosakowski is a Polish-German filmmaker and media artist whose work explores the boundaries between documentary, fiction, and experimental cinema. His oeuvre challenges societal and moral limits, blending theoretical inquiry with innovative narrative forms. He studied film at Fabrica, the Benetton Research Center for Communication in Italy, where he collaborated with renowned photographer Oliviero Toscani on a range of film and media projects addressing cultural, political, and humanitarian issues. His short film Just Like the Movies (2006), which received the Best Short Film award at the Milano Film Festival, is widely used in academic contexts and serves as teaching material at universities and colleges worldwide. From 2008 to 2011, he taught experimental film and film theory at Media Design University in Munich. He has also served on juries at international film festivals and curated film programs. Kosakowski’s work spans award-winning experimental films, documentaries, video installations, and genre cinema. His video installation Fortynine (2007), involving more than 160 participants from 23 countries, formed the basis for his feature-length documentary Zero Killed (2012), which received the Best Documentary award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. He is also co-director and producer of the internationally acclaimed horror anthology German Angst (2015), which screened at more than 40 festivals, including Rotterdam and Sitges. The film reflects his continued interest in exploring the narrative and aesthetic potential of genre cinema. His latest film, Holofiction, is a 102-minute experimental work and part of the ten-part multimedia art project Dark Tourism, which investigates contemporary forms of remembrance culture through film, photography, and installation.

Mon Dewulf (1997, West Flanders) studied Clinical Psychology at Ghent University and Audiovisual Arts at KASK School of Arts. Based in Brussels, his work often draws on personal experiences exploring queer identity, intimacy, and rural ways of living. His work moves between documentary and fiction. Far from Beyrouth is his graduation film from KASK.

Nicolas Gourault is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris (FR) with a background in visual arts and visual studies. He has worked with Forensic Architecture before graduating from Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts. His work navigates between online open-source investigations and the critical use of new media as documentary tools.

Onyeka Igwe is a London born & based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories . The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound. Onyeka’s video works have been screened internationally at MoMA, ICA London, Dhaka Art Summit, and festivals including London Film Festival, Open City Documentary Film Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Peng Zuqiang (b.1992, Changsha) works with film, video and installations. He is interested in the histories of media and mediums—from obsolete film formats to downtempo in Mandopop—attending to their affective resonances and dissenting associations. Recent solo presentations include Rockbund Art Museum (2025) , The Common Guild (2025), Fondazione Sandretto (2023), Kevin Space (2023), Cell Project Space (2022), E-Flux screening room (2022). Group exhibitions and screenings include videobrasil, UCCA Beijing, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Times Museum, Eye Film Museum, The Physics Room, IFFR,IDFA, 25FPS, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. He is a recipient of the Present Future prize at Artissima (2022), and the Dialog Award at EMAF (2023, 2024). He was a resident at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2022-2024).

Rabih Mroué was born in Beirut and lives in Berlin. Actor, director, visual artist and playwright, he has written and directed several plays, including Looking for a missing employee (2003), Who’s afraid of representation (2005), The pixelated revolution (2012), So little time (2016), Sunny Sunday (2020) Hartaqāt (2023), Four walls and a roof (2024) in collaboration with Lina Majdalanie. His work, at the crossroads of theater, performance and visual arts, blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, using videos, photographs and historical documents to challenge the hegemony of archives. Rabih Mroué is co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC) and was a member of the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universitat in Berlin in 2013-2015.

Radu Jude is a Romanian film director and screenwriter known for his incisive and unconventional explorations of history, memory, and social identity. His feature debut, The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), premiered to wide acclaim and was selected for more than 50 international film festivals. He went on to direct a series of highly praised films, including Everybody in Our Family (2012), Aferim! (2015), Scarred Hearts (2016), I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), and Uppercase Print (2020). In 2021, his satire Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. His following film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), received the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival. His feature Kontinental ’25, a low-budget independent production, was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 2025 Berlinale, while his most recent film, Dracula, won the Second Prize of the Junior Jury Award at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival. Born in Piatra Neamț, Romania, in 1974, Adrian Cioflâncă is a historian whose work focuses primarily on the Holocaust, communism, and political violence. He is director of the “Wilhelm Filderman” Center for the Study of Jewish History in Romania and a member of the Collegium of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. Cioflâncă has worked as a consultant on several films and theatre productions and has co-authored several short documentaries for Romanian Public Television. Two of his films, co-directed with Radu Jude—The Exit of the Trains (2020) and Memories from the Eastern Front (2022)—had their world premieres at the Berlinale.

Ricardo Ruales Eguiguren was born in Quito, Ecuador. He directed the short documentary The Silence of Time, which participated in several festivals around the world. Since 2017, he has been a member of INCUBADORA S.A. The Broken R is his first feature documentary, made with the support of funds from Ecuador, Ibermedia, Sundance, and the IDFA Bertha Fund. Ricardo holds a Master’s degree in Filmmaking from Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastián Film School).

Ross McElwee is an American documentary filmmaker whose work blends autobiography, cultural observation, and humor. His breakthrough film Sherman’s March won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. McElwee has made ten feature-length documentaries, which have premiered at such festivals as Berlin, Cannes, and Venice three times. He has received numerous career honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pennebaker Award. In 2005, MoMA presented a full retrospective of his work, later shown in Paris, Seoul, Quito, Madrid, and Moscow.

The artist Sammy Baloji (b. 1978, Lubumbashi, DR Congo) lives and works between Lubumbashi and Brussels. Since 2005 he has been exploring the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work is an ongoing investigation into the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the Katanga region, as well as questioning the impact of Belgian colonisation. His critical view of contemporary societies serves as a warning of the ways in which cultural clichés continue to shape collective memory, allowing social and political power games to continue to dictate human behaviour.

Sara Rajaei is an Iranian-Dutch video artist and filmmaker based in the Netherlands. Her work centers on time, exploring the absence of imagery, memory, oral history, narrative techniques, and the interplay of physical and psychological space. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2002, Rajaei attended a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten Amsterdam. In 2009, she was shortlisted for the Prix de Rome. Her work has been exhibited and screened at art venues and festivals worldwide, including de Appel Arts Center, Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, Hong Kong International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Art Brussels, Kunsthall 3.14 Bergen, World Museum Amsterdam, and many more. Her short film City of Poets premiered at Berlinale Shorts 2024, screened at festivals worldwide, and won numerous awards, including the European Short Film- Prix Vimeo at the European Film Awards 2026, the Gouden Kalf for best short documentary at the Netherlands film festival, Fidan’s best Iranian short film of the year, Best Short Documentary Film at Sole Luna Doc Film Festival, Silver Lynx Award for Best Short Documentary Film at Fest-New Directors New Films Festival, and the International Fugas award at Documenta Madrid, all in 2024.

Sarah-Rose Antoun is a French-Lebanese and Moroccan visual artist and journalist. She traces what images carry across borders, conflicts, and private conversations, and what they cost the people who make them. Her practice moves across photography, archival research, installation, and performance. She holds a BA in Journalism from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MA in Photography & Society from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She is part of the FOTODOK Lighthouse 2025–26 talent programme.

Sari Lluch Dalena is an award-winning Filipino filmmaker and professor at the University of the Philippines Film Institute. She studied film at New York University, where she made experimental short films, and later directed Memories of a Forgotten War (2001), which screened as the closing film of a documentary series at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Her thesis film, Rigodon (2005), co-directed with filmmaker Keith Sicat, premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival. Dalena has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the CCP 13 Artists Award and the Asian Cultural Fellowship. Her films include Ka Oryang, The Guerilla Is a Poet, Dahling Nick, Guerrera, and Cinemartyrs, for which she won Best Director at the 21st Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival in 2025.

Stelios Bouziotis was born in Athens in 1981 and holds a degree in Music Technology and Acoustics Engineering by the University of Crete. His first feature-length documentary, ""Stoker,"" premiered and competed at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in March 2023. The same month competed at International film festival L'Europe Autour de l'Europe Film Festival in Paris. Stoker has won the 1st prize at DocFest and the journey continues since the next destination. Stelios Bouziotis has directed and edited three short films, with his latest work, ""Two First Days,"" being screened at the 2nd short film festival organized by Onassis Foundation in 2014. Since 2011, he has collaborated with the director Menelaos Karamaghiolis on the documentary series ""Meeting with remarkable people,"" which currently consists of 24 films and is ongoing. He has also worked as director of photography, camera operator, sound recorder and editor on 180 additional films for the same director's series for the interactive platform ""Meetings with Remarkable People,"" in collaboration with the Onassis Foundation. He was director of photography and editor for the feature film ""Love, Love, Love"" directed by Costas Zappas, while in 2019 they completed filming ""Frankestein REC"" with an international co-production and distribution. He has worked on various collaborative projects, including the project ""Human Flow"" by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in Idomeni in 2016, and filmed and edited the interview of Marina Abramovic for the ERT (Greek National Tv) show ""Age of Images'' at Onassis Foundation. Additionally, he has collaborated with the KEY FRAME company on award-winning documentaries ""Giannena of thoughts and legends"" and ""Byzantine Kavafis,"". Finally, he worked together with Maria Papadimitriou (and Menelaos Karamaghiolis) taking over the sound design for the video project ""AGRIMIKA,"" which represented Greece at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015.

Thanassis Vassiliou is a director and screenwriter based in Poitiers, France, where he teaches film theory and practice as an Associate Professor of Film Studies (University of Poitiers). His short films Traces (2017) and Our Last Week (2016) have been screened and awarded at numerous international film festivals, while LO is his first feature-length film. LO premiered at the 27th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (2025), where it received the EKKOMED Newcomer's Award (Greek Programme). It went on to win the Golden Wreath of Megisti (Grand Prix) and the "Odysseus" Award for Best Documentary by a Greek Filmmaker of the Diaspora at the 10th Beyond Borders – Kastellorizo International Documentary Festival (2025), and received a Special Mention at the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival (Doc, 2026). In June 2026, the film was also honoured with the IRIS Award for Best Documentary by the Hellenic Film Academy.

Thom Andersen (b. 1943) is an American filmmaker celebrated for his erudite, penetrating and refreshingly offbeat essay films. A patient historian and fervent cinephile, Andersen mined an unpredictable termite path deep into film history with two impressively researched and revelatory documentaries, Red Hollywood (co-directed with Noël Burch) and Los Angeles Plays Itself, which together embody the resolute yet subtle mode of politically engaged cinema that he has defined across his larger oeuvre. Both Red Hollywood and Los Angeles Plays Itself are compilation films, dense mosaics of scenes and shots culled from Hollywood films and transformed by voiceover narratives, written but not spoken by Andersen, detailing the suppressed histories of the American cinema decipherable within the moving images. The two films make clear Andersen’s profound understanding of popular cinema as both a dangerously amnesic form of cultural memory—an ideological filter that willfully distorts the world it purports to represent—and a uniquely insightful lens through which to critically engage written, and unwritten, history. -Dennis Cooper

Tusharr Madhavv (b. India) is an artist-filmmaker based in the Netherlands. Engaging with marginalised and contested histories, his work explores relationships between people, landscapes, memory, and lived experience. Through oral-history accounts, personal narratives, and archival materials, he examines how individual and collective histories are remembered, transmitted, and inhabited. His films A Ballad of Maladies (2017), Detour (2024), and Roohrangi (2025) have been presented internationally at film festivals, museums, and cultural institutions. A former resident artist at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, he received the 64th National Film Award of India for his debut film. He also designs storytelling workshops and teaches at art academies.

Yannis Karpouzis (1984) is an Athens-based filmmaker and visual artist. In 2016, he co-funded the production collective Empty Square. His feature documentary “Poems on the Tape Recorder” (2021) got the Newcomer Filmmaker Award at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. Since 2025 he is an alumnus of Berlinale and Sarajevo Talents (Pack & Pitch award). His projects explore political identities, time travel, and melancholy.

Alexander Horwath (b. 1964, Vienna) is an Austrian author, curator, film historian, critic, and director. He led the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) from 1992 to 1997 and served as director of the Austrian Film Museum between 2002 and 2017. His 2024 debut feature Henry Fonda for President reflects decades of engagement with film history, cinematic politics, and the interplay between political narratives and cultural experience. His curatorial work includes co‑ordinating the film programme for Documenta 12 in 2007.

Andrew Norman Wilson (b. 1983, USA) is a New York–based conceptual artist and filmmaker whose multimedia practice includes video, installation, performance lectures and written essays. Wilson critically probes Silicon Valley’s labor structures, corporate mythologies, image cultures, automation and inequality. His early video Workers Leaving the Googleplex went viral in 2011. His work has shown internationally at Sundance, the New York and Rotterdam Film Festivals, and is held in MoMA, the Whitney and Centre Pompidou.

Aura Satz (b. 1974, Barcelona; lives in London) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer whose interdisciplinary work combines film, sound, performance and sculpture. Her research investigates voice technologies, ventriloquism, acoustic machines, notation systems and human–machine relations. Recent projects such as Preemptive Listening (2024) collapse time, sound, machine and gender, shaping a poetic and conceptual sonic cinema.

Bahar Noorizadeh (b. 1988, Iran; based in London/Beirut) is an artist, writer, filmmaker, platform designer and researcher. She founded the platform Weird Economies and leads research into speculation, cybernetic socialism, economic imaginaries and justice futures through film, performance, installation and writing. Currently completing a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, she teaches at the RCA and Design Academy Eindhoven, engaging with pedagogy as farming of alternative economic narratives.

Bertrand Bonello (b. 1968, Nice) is a French filmmaker, composer, screenwriter and occasional actor. Trained as a musician, he brings a formal precision and density to films such as The Pornographer, House of Tolerance, Nocturama and Coma. Often blurring fiction with archival and essayistic modes, Bonello explores themes of desire, power, youth and the spectral traces of history. Coma (2022) is a hybrid essay film that fuses dream states, online media and philosophical voiceover into a reflection on confinement and the erosion of reality. His films have screened at Cannes, Venice and Locarno, and reflect a singular voice in contemporary European cinema.

Bo Wang (b. 1982, Chongqing; based in Amsterdam) is a filmmaker, visual artist and researcher with a background in physics (Tsinghua University) and fine arts (MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York). His award‑winning works, such as An Asian Ghost Story, examine power structures, trauma, ideology, spectrality and displacement in contemporary Asia. Exhibited internationally at MoMA (New York), Guggenheim, IFFR, CPH:DOX (New Vision award), DOKLeipzig (Golden Dove) and Visions du Réel. He is a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam, and currently teaches at LUCAS, Leiden University.

Chantal Akerman (1950–2015, Brussels/Paris) was a Belgian filmmaker, installation artist and writer whose radical feminist and minimalist approach reshaped cinema. Her breakthrough Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) deconstructed domestic routine through extended takes and stillness, while films like News from Home, Je Tu Il Elle and D’Est deeply engaged themes of identity, exile, Jewish heritage and space. Over forty films and installations defined a legacy of formal rigor, emotional depth and feminist poetics.

Chris Marker (1921–2012, France) was a pioneering filmmaker, writer and multimedia artist whose work shaped the cinematic essay as a form of philosophical inquiry. Best known for La Jetée and Sans Soleil, he explored memory, revolution and technology through montage, voiceover and archival fragments. His films, often elliptical and reflective, traverse time and space to interrogate personal and political histories.

Elysa Wendi is a filmmaker and artist-curator whose practice spans the intersection of performance and the moving image. Based between Hong Kong and Singapore, she co-founded Cinemovement, a platform that incubates interdisciplinary films through collaborative laboratories across Asia. She has served as festival curator for the Jumping Frames Hong Kong International Movement-image Festival since 2021.

Franzis Kabisch is a German-Austrian artistic researcher, filmmaker, writer, educator, and PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her 2023 desktop-essay short getty abortions deconstructs the mediated image of abortion in mainstream stock photography and teen media, earning awards at Dok Leipzig, Kassel, Hamburg, Vienna Shorts, and Regensburg. Her work combines queer‑feminist film critique, body politics, and archival intervention, and she frequently writes essays and gives talks on reproductive justice, situated gaze, and visual culture

Graeme Arnfield (b. 1991, UK) is an artist‑filmmaker, curator, composer, and writer whose essay films weave together networked imagery, archival materials, and sound to probe technology, ecology, and history. His work, ranging from shorts like Sitting in Darkness (2015) and Colossal Cave (2016), to feature-length essays such as Home Invasion (2023), uses investigative storytelling to interrogate digital networks, the circulation of ecological matter (like peat and asbestos), and the layered trajectories of local and global histories.

Harun Farocki (1944–2014, born in Czech Republic) was a German filmmaker, media artist, writer and critic. He studied at the Deutsche Film‑ und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB) between 1966 and 1968 and produced over 120 films, essays and installations. Farocki’s work frequently dissects the mechanisms of images, exploring themes such as the militarization of vision, labor under capitalism, automation and propaganda. His precise, essayistic filmmaking makes visible the structures behind perception and power.

Hicham Gardaf (b. 1989, Tangier, Morocco; lives in London) is a Moroccan filmmaker, visual artist, photographer and researcher whose cross-disciplinary work interrogates urban transformation, labored landscapes and sonic memory. Educated through self-directed study and prize-supported fellowships (such as the Fondazione MAST Photography Grant), his practice has taken shape through image, sound and installation. In Praise of Slowness (2023) has been screened within Forum Expanded at Berlinale 2024 and featured at festivals including Glasgow Short Film Festival and Open City Documentary Festival, London.

Ho Rui An (b. 1990, Singapore) is an artist, filmmaker, writer and educator whose research‑based practice spans film, performance, essay, lecture and theory. His work addresses labor, technology, governance and pedagogy in globalised Asia, often through durational, speculative works such as Student Bodies (2023). Ho’s interdisciplinary projects have been shown at venues like Centre Pompidou, and he actively contributes to debates in art and theory internationally.

Johan van der Keuken (1938–2001, Amsterdam) was a Dutch photographer, documentary filmmaker and author. Launching his first photo book at age 17, he published nine books and created 55 documentaries over a four‑decade career, many of which focused on outsiders, disability, labor and daily life. Van der Keuken’s work, defined by a poetic essayistic style, blurs the boundaries between artistic expression social documentary.

Johannes Binotto (b. 1977, Switzerland; based in Lucerne and Zurich) is an experimental filmmaker, video essayist and media theorist whose academic practice interrogates perception, spatiality and the uncanny in contemporary image culture. A professor of Film and Media Studies at the Lucerne School of Design and Art and senior lecturer at the University of Zurich, he leads the Swiss National Science Foundation project “VideoEssay. Futures of Audiovisual Research and Teaching,” and publishes on cinema, psychoanalysis, literature and architecture.

Judith Westerveld (b. 1985, South Africa / Netherlands; lives between Amsterdam and Cape Town) is an audiovisual artist, filmmaker and artistic researcher whose moving‑image work engages colonial archives, oral histories and linguistic erasure. Trained at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and University of Amsterdam (MA Artistic Research, cum laude), her video-installations and film essays—distributed by LIMA and ARGOS—navigate memory, language and postcolonial transformation in works such as The Sending of the Crows and A Few Common Phrases.

Kamal Aljafari (b. 1972, Ramla, Palestine; based in Berlin) is a pioneering Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist whose formally nuanced work reconstructs memory and dispossession. A graduate of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, his poetic cinema spans feature films (The Roof, Port of Memory, Recollection) and installations such as The Camera of the Dispossessed. His films have been screened at Berlinale, Rotterdam, Locarno and CPH:DOX and at institutions including MoMA and Tate Modern.

Lea Hartlaub (b. 1981, Frankfurt, Germany) is a self‑taught photographer, filmmaker and visual essayist whose work investigates myth, ecology, post‑socialist histories and the poetics of representation. Her essay documentaries—including Sunny Night (2017) and sr (2024)—employ found footage and poetic montage to explore cultural memory and the symbolic resonance of mythic figures in collective imagination.

Lena Windisch (b. 1991, Germany; based in Switzerland) is a visual researcher and filmmaker grounded in communication and information design. Educated at Burg Giebichenstein and Design Academy Eindhoven, her moving-image work, including Searching for the Perfect Gentleman (2019), combines typographic sensibilities and documentary enquiry to explore global visual forms, agency and informal aesthetics.

Lis Rhodes (b. 1942, UK; based in London) is a seminal figure in feminist and experimental film whose multidisciplinary practice reshapes the political and poetic potential of image, sound and notation. Co-founder of the women’s distribution network Circles (later Cinenova), curator at the London Filmmakers’ Coop and longtime Slade lecturer, her landmark works—such as Dresden Dynamo (1972), Light Music (1975) and Whitehall (2012)—employ minimal imagery, immersive sound and political poetics to dissolve conventions of cinematic spectatorship.

Ethnographers Lucia Nimcova and David Petráš work together on audiovisual research in the Carpathian Mountains since 2020. They established the foundation nohami.com which creates sustainable conditions for preserving and sharing knowledge of people living in remote villages in the border-zone of Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania.
“We collect songs from older women with lyrics closely tied to their life stories. We volunteer with their needs. We learn to sing and play the instruments from local musicians. We experiment with when and how certain existences could be documented and shared with a wider public, understanding the importance of the specific contexts.”
Lucia Nimcová is an award-winning photographer and visual artist, David Petráš is a musician and sound artist. They work and live in Brussels.

Manthia Diawara (b. 1953, Bamako, Mali; based in New York) is a writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist and University Professor of Comparative Literature and Film at NYU, where he directs the Institute of African American Affairs. Educated in France and the U.S., his books (African Cinema: Politics and Culture, We Won’t Budge) and films (Sembène: The Making of African Cinema, AI: African Intelligence, Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom) critically weave diasporic history, anti‑colonial thought and cinematic narrative.

Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo are artists and filmmakers. Favouring a collaborative praxis and long-term research, their recent projects engage with past and present global mobilities. Their films manifest unheard voices, diasporic experiences and resistant subjectivities. They have created film programmes and exhibitions that revisit the historiography of moving image practices and ‘minor cinemas’. Their work has been presented in various exhibitions and film festivals, including Documenta 14, Courtisane, DOK Leipzig, Visions du Réel – where their film Chronicles of that time was awarded the Special Jury Award.

Maryam Jafri (b. 1972, Karachi, Pakistan; based in Copenhagen and New York) is a research-driven multimedia artist and educator whose films, photographic tableaux, performance and sculptural installations examine the visual culture of political economy, capital and colonial imaginaries. Her projects such as Independence Day 1934–1975 and Automatic Negative Thought deploy archival triggers, conceptual tableaux and filmic montage to expose systems of representation shaping labor, identity and capital.

Mattijs van de Port (b. 1966, the Netherlands) is a visual anthropologist, writer and filmmaker whose cinematic practice emerges from fieldwork in Serbia, the Netherlands and Brazil. Professor at the University of Amsterdam with a PhD in cultural anthropology, his cinematic works —including Saborear Frutas Brasileiras (2013), The Possibility of Spirits (2016), Knots and Holes (2018) and The Body Won’t Close (2021)—are ethnographic essay films that explore sensual encounters, cultural visuality and temporal thresholds. His monographs and films interrogate how everyday material infrastructures and religious practices shape the lived real.

Michela Meliddo (b. 1999, Gravina in Puglia, Italy) is graphic designer and filmmaker based in The Hague (NL). Through field research and narrative fiction she investigates contemporary issues that involve human relationships with nature and technology. Her research specifically addresses the objectification of the natural world through technological processes that have produced a dichotomy between the ‘human’ and ‘natural’.

Miko Revereza (b. Philippines; based in the USA) is an experimental filmmaker whose deeply personal practice reflects undocumented migration, digital infrastructure and colonial legacies. His acclaimed essay films No Data Plan (2019) and Nowhere Near (2020) use on‑call phone dialogue, train travel and hybrid narrative structures to evoke familial displacement and geopolitical awakening. His work, recognized by the Criterion Collection and the Vilcek Creative Promise Prize, is both intimate and structurally urgent.

Miranda Pennell (b. 1963, UK; based in London) is a London-based artist-filmmaker whose work engages archival imagery from British colonial contexts to meditate on memory, imagination and imperial legacies. Initially trained as a dancer, she shifted to essayistic filmmaking, exploring choreography in everyday life before studying visual anthropology (MA Goldsmiths, PhD Westminster). Her award-winning films—including Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed and The Host—interrogate how historical documents shape present-day imaginaries and colonial histories.

Nguyễn Trinh Thi (b. 1973, Vietnam; lives in Hanoi) is a pioneering independent filmmaker and media artist whose films and installations interrogate memory, archival silence and social trauma in post‑war Vietnam. Educated in journalism, photography and international studies (in the U.S.), she creates investigative video essays and documentary experiments that deploy found footage, sound and narrative to uncover marginalized histories and alternative imaginaries.

Nika Pećarina (b. 1992) lives in Zagreb where he is busy with audiovisual and performing arts, ceramics, poetry, and an interest towards gastronomy. He takes notice of sex, thingness, and the transformation of matter, ie. the relation of work and the physical, followed by the distinctiveness and effects of media, measure, form, and the visible, delicacy, smoothness, and smallness.

Angus Carlyle and Rupert Cox are UK‑based collaborators working across experimental film, sound art, anthropology and landscape. Notable projects include Air Pressure (2017) and Zawawa: the sound of sugar cane in the wind, which uses field recordings, oral testimony, and sonic environments to explore wartime memory, ecology, acoustics and the impact of US military bases on Okinawa’s residents over a decade of research.

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner collaborate as filmmakers, writers and media researchers whose work explores the intersections of media, ecology, science history and epistemology. Litvintseva (b. 1989, Murmansk; PhD Goldsmiths, senior lecturer at Queen Mary University) and Wagner (b. 1985, Berlin; Bard College, Jan van Eyck fellow) have co-created a trilogy of short films—A Demonstration (2020), Constant (2022) and My Want of You Partakes of Me (2023)—that trace the political histories of monsters, measurement standards and digestion. Their practice spans cinema, writing (as in All Thoughts Fly and Geological Filmmaking) and conceptual research.

Sergei Loznitsa (b. 1964, Belarus; raised in Kyiv) is a Ukrainian director of Belarusian origin known for both documentary and fiction films. A former applied‑mathematician who worked on AI research, he studied cinema at Moscow’s VGIK before turning to filmmaking in the mid‑1990s. His documentaries (Maidan, Austerlitz) and features (My Joy, In the Fog, The History of Natural Destruction) offer nuanced, often bleak examinations of post‑Soviet politics, memory, collective history and the erosion of truth in contemporary society.

Susanna Tomassini is an Italian visual designer based in the Netherlands. Through her practice she seeks new narratives within seemingly mundane subjects. Her work is multidisciplinary, merging and alternating between digital and printed media. Trained as a graphic designer, she is now expanding her practice by exploring video as an artistic medium.

Toyisha Tsunoda (b. 1964, Kanagawa, Japan) is a pioneering sound artist whose field recordings, acoustic collages and vibrational sculptures explore the phenomenology of perception and landscape. Trained originally in oil painting at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tsunoda approaches field recording not as documentation but as subjective depiction—an immersive method of hearing place as alive, impermanent and in flux. Works such as Landscape and Voice and the Extract from Field Recording Archive series map vibrations and voice across spaces, drawing attention to the physical and poetic experience of listening.

Karin Nakajima, Sara Ouljour, and Veronica Munteau are filmmakers and students whose practices converge around the essay film as a space for reimagining politics, memory, and belonging. Nakajima approaches the form through its affinity with the unconventional, embracing strangeness as a way to probe how remembrance and identity take shape. Ouljour, based in Rotterdam and born in Morocco, turns to both film and writing to address questions of migration and anti-imperialism. Munteau, a Moldovan filmmaker and writer, moves fluidly between poetry, prose, and experimental cinema, her work unfolding through an intuitive process of noticing, questioning, and remembering. Together, their practices highlight the essay film’s potential as both a tool of inquiry and a mode of poetic and political expression.

Vincent Meessen (b. 1971, Baltimore, USA; lives in Brussels) is an artist, filmmaker, curator and researcher whose transdisciplinary practice reorients narration around colonial histories and multiple gazes. A founding member of collectives like Universal Embassy and Jubilee, he represented Belgium at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with Personne et les autres. His work, including films such as Juste un mouvement, uses archival gestures, institutional critique and polyphonic strategies to destabilise fixed historiographies and foreground collective subjectivities.