Peng Zuqiang
"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). "
Afternoon Hearsay
Blending colours and textures, sound and voices, to recompose Chinese rural hearsays. A poetic and visual tribute to the 8.75mm celluloid, a filmmaking format developed and produced in China between the 1960s and 1980s.
3133 (Eric Lee)
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.
Expanded cinema work, utilising several filmmaking techniques and narrative tropes to understand Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI) as a strategy of disruption in the factories of Singapore.
Thom Anderson
‘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
Los Angeles Plays Itself
This landmark essay film uses hundreds of film clips to reveal how Los Angeles has been mythologized and distorted by Hollywood, reclaiming the city as both a real place and a cinematic protagonist.
Mon Dewulf
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.
Far from Beyrouth
From their Brussels apartment, Mon tries to support his partner Karim in besieged Beirut, watching from afar through WhatsApp messages, cell phone footage, and news broadcasting.
Deborah Stratman
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.
O'er the Land
A collage of American rituals and spectacles reveals the contradictions and costs behind the ideals of freedom, heroism, and patriotism.
In Order Not to Be Here
A night-time horror portrait of suburban America, where neon and artificial lighting carve out simulated safety and convenience, held together by hovering surveillance.
Hanwen Zhang
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.
Two channels trace a North Korean defector’s forty-day escape from imprisonment in Northeast China, showing us dense landscapes layered with historical and contemporary significance.
Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflânca
"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."
Shot Reverse Shot
Two archives meet and gaze back at each other in this film about American journalist Edward Serotta’s trip to 1980’s communist Romania to photograph daily life, and the state surveillance photographing him in return.
Cyan Bae
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.
Welcome to Set
A series of performances reconstructing the data collection processes behind AI models that detect emotions, even micro-expressions and deceptive attempts to conceal them.
Lana Daher
"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. "
Do You Love Me?
Through archival footage, the fragmented history of the last seventy years of Beirut— a nation without a national archive — is brought to life, serving both as a love letter to the city and a disorienting portrait of its collective memory.
Sara Rajaei
"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. "
A collage of personal archival footage reveals the history of a semi-utopian, metaphorical city, where all the streets are named after poets. When war begins, upheaval leads to confusion and residents find themselves lost amid the memories of the forgotten poets.
A visual and psychological investigation regarding the shooting down of an airplane in which digital artefacts sourced online by the artist are combined with audio recordings from the control tower and a poignant voice-over.
An image unfurls slowly and enigmatically. So too do childhood memories of women, loss and disappearance, narrated meditatively like a meandering river.
Lotte van Hulst
"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. "
A two-channel investigation into the alternative geopolitical framework constructed by the self-regulatory governing body of international football, the highly disputed FIFA.
Sarah-Rose Antoun
"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. "
How does one’s personal archive — including ammunition casings, WhatsApp exchanges, and a cassette tape — connect their owner and us viewers, to a distant Lebanon marked by war?
Esther van der Heijden
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.
A reflection on how early 20th century industrialization and capitalist expansion increased the pressure on sponge divers on the Greek island of Kalymnos to push their bodies to the limit.
Benjamin Christensen
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.
Häxan
The evolution of witchcraft through the ages is traced in this proto-essay film made over 100 years ago. Stunning monotone vignettes form a visionary blend of fictionalised documentary and horror film. This silent film will have live sound performed by members of Sticky Buttons Records.
Yannis Karpouzis
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.
Left Behind
Moving between memories of summer with a past relationship and political protests in the city of Athens, this diary film explores the urgency for collectiveness and the act of moving on.
Gabrielle Stemmer
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.
The Strike
“I’ve been on a sex strike now for almost four years.” A personal and political story of the cracks in the heterosexual model seen through a blend of film archives and found footage.
Stelios Bouziotis
"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. "
Stoker
How do you write a letter to a person you have never met? A moving image about family, reconciliation and the inevitability of death spanning from 1970s Greece to the present day.
Thanassis Vassiliou
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.
Lo
How do you trace the past? After his mother’s death, the filmmaker returns to his empty childhood home. While dealing with grief, the past, and memories he explores his father’s involvement in the Greek dictatorship of the late 1960s.
Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati
"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. "
An imageless film, sounds from a repatriated colonial archive are interrogated to construct an emancipatory relistening to sounds collected through colonial violence.
Joseph Kamaru
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.
A relistening and reinterpretation of colonial recordings of New Guinea made in 1961 by Michael Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil family.
John Smith
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.
Being John Smith
Through his characteristic deadpan humour and a deceivingly simple premise, the director reflects on how having the most generic name in the English language has impacted on his sense of self.
Sammy Baloji
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.
In the Congo Basin, two scientists and an unlikely third voice reveal colonialism's enduring legacy through the intertwined exploitation of individuals and the environment.
Firat Yücel
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.
Night after night, an activist in Amsterdam cannot sleep, kept awake by sixteen hours of screen time and an endless barrage of violent images from around the world.
Chris Marker
"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."
Far from Vietnam
In 1967, seven famous directors co-directed this film to support the Vietnamese struggle against American forces, offering different perspectives on a conflict pitting the rich against the poor.
Jeroen Kooijmans
"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."
Love-22-Love
Driven by the desire to defeat his demons, artist Jeroen Kooijmans pays tribute in Love-22-Love to art, his love for his wife, and the dark corners of his psyche. At the lowest point of his life, love serves as a remedy.
Herman Asselberghs
"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."
Leçons d'objet
In the ambiguous space between fiction, documentary, and essay, this film presents a reflection on image-making, our relationship with the camera, film school, and the question of attention.
Nicolas Gourault
"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."
Their Eyes
Behind the vision of self-driving cars lies a hidden, exploited workforce from the Global South who analyse, tag, and map a world which they themselves are excluded from.
Jocelyne Saab
"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."
When Israel besieges Beirut in 1982, Jocelyne Saab watches her family home go up in flames, taking 150 years of family history with it. Amid the ruins of the city, she searches for the origins and consequences of the tragedy. Every place becomes a history, every name a memory.
Rabih Mroué
"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."
A reproduction of an American leaflet is mistakenly taken for a bomb threat at an exhibition by Rabih Mroué. In his lecture-performance, he reflects on the unstable relationship between images, politics and reality.
Tusharr Madhavv
"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."
Roohrangi
Wandering through labyrinths of desire and memory in a gay-cruising forest, a filmmaker searches for traces of his grandfather's forest-face, reimagining kinship and ways of seeing through the more-than-human world.
Ariane Papillon
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.
Peer into the lives of tech workers, and their perspectives on big tech and data, through a personal tour of their phones.
Darya Andijan
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.
A docu-fiction that explores the erasure of female history in the Uyghur region of China through a conversation between the director and Gülem, a forgotten goddess of carpet weaving.
Geo Barcan
"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. "
A hypnotic essay film examining the arrival of the internet in the small Romanian town of Buhuși. How do the residents navigate the gap between polished online imaginaries and the post-industrial realities of everyday life?
Kevin B. Lee
"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."
leff's opening lecture asks how the essay film can respond to the invisual — the hidden systems of data, algorithms, and labour that shape how images are produced, processed, seen, and unseen.
Sari Lluch Dalena
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.
Cinemartyrs
As a filmmaker retraces erased histories of violence in the south of the Philippines, the act of making a film becomes an encounter with buried trauma, revealing cinema itself as a battleground between remembrance and forgetting, and transforming the filmmaking process into a meta-cinematic essay about the ethics of representation.
Ross McElwee
"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."
Remake
The celebrated filmmaker revisits decades of personal footage after the sudden death of his son, weaving suddenly tragic family archives withan ongoing attempt to realize a Hollywood remake of his classic 1985 essay film Sherman’s March.
Ricardo Ruales Eguiguren
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).
The Broken R
A young filmmaker uses film diaries of everyday encounters, most importantly with his own family to construct a deeply personal essay film about belonging and self-acceptance, while confronting a hereditary facial condition with his own queer identity.
Michal Kosakowski
"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. "
Holofiction
Through a vast montage of Holocaust imagery drawn from decades of cinema, an interrogation on how moving images shape collective memory, exposing the blurred boundaries between historical record, fiction, trauma, and cultural mythmaking.
Onyeka Igwe
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.
Penkelemes
A rebellious remembering and reclamation of The University of Ibadan, a former institution of British colonial rule in Nigeria.
Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre
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.
Tuktuit: Caribou
Interconnected relationships between the Inuit, caribou, and lichen challenges the boundaries between human, animal, land, and image-making.
Masao Adachi
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).
A landmark essay film in which director Masao Adachi reconstructs the life of a teenage murderer through the spaces he once traversed, rejecting sensationalism and using landscapes as his primary subject, offering meditations on violence and the political forces embedded in everyday life.