We are honoured to open the festival with a lecture by our main guest Laura Rascaroli (University College Cork), whose seminal books The Personal Camera (2009) and How the Essay Film Thinks (2017) have shaped contemporary understanding of the essay film. In her talk, Rascaroli will reflect on the historical and aesthetic continuities of the genre, with reference to and fragments of many notable essay "films.
Undead Voices (2019–2021) explores the remnants of 1970s Italian feminist activism through a decaying Super 8 film. Blending archival fragments, personal memory, and sound collaborations, it reimagines how lost histories can speak.
Widely considered the foundational essay film, Sans Soleil is a contemplative journey through memory, time, and distant lands – Japan, Guinea-Bissau, and the Cape Verde islands – blending personal reflections with observations on modern existence.
Juste un mouvement by Vincent Meessen revisits Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise through the story of Omar Blondin Diop, blending essay, biography, and political cinema into a layered recontextualization.
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An investigation of a factory gate in China leads to an in depth reflection on the history of cinema and capitalism.
A surreal investigation into hidden labour at Google, where access, surveillance, and exclusion expose the deeper hierarchies shaping the digital economy and corporate power.
The very first ever film shown in public. The film has cast a lasting influence on filmmakers, specifically essayists, mainly for https://book.kijkhuis.bioscopenleiden.nl/en/#/book/118517
A spiritual sequel to the Lumière brothers’ iconic 1895 film, Harun Farocki’s Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik traces how the image of workers exiting factories has persisted—and evolved—through cinema’s history.
In Was ist los? Harun Farocki dissects media narratives and televised imagery in reunified Germany, exposing how everyday broadcasts shape public perception, ideology, and the construction of “reality.”
Gegen-Musik, originally intended as a two-screen installation, sees Harun Farocki examine surveillance footage, exposing how the interplay of image and sound structures perception, authority, and control.
How do the media portray the images we associate with abortion? And how do these affect women who want to have one? An impressive blend between desktop and personal aesthetics.
What's a siren? What has it been? What can it be? An exploration of the siren in a myriad of forms.
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What happens when our homes and our dreams have been invaded? An exploration of the history of the doorbell and the implications of surveillance footage.
Blending animation and live action to tell the story of a teenage girl trapped in her home. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, a surreal, nightmarish world unfolds. Perhaps only an essay film could capture to confusion of these years?
A speculative sci-fi journey through neoliberalism’s promises and failures, where time travel becomes a metaphor for credit, access, and the cost of economic freedom.
A haunting meditation on Hong Kong’s role in Cold War trade, where human hair becomes a ghostly link between imperial histories, migration, and spectral memory.
ERROR: ROOM 404 A POTENTIAL THREAT – the courage and doubt of artists continuing to create in uncertain times, resisting the rising media control in Hong Kong.
Looking at archival footage of the British targeting of German civilians during WWII, moral ambiguities and the silence surrounding these actions are explored.
Traversing global landscapes and human activities through a recurring giraffe motif, themes of power, culture and perception are explored.
Explores the erasure of indigenous Cham culture amid Vietnam’s nuclear power plans through a letter exchange between a man and a woman.
Do you trust sound or image more? Listen closely to the sounds and images of the Indigenous peoples in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.
Wanderers of all paths of life gather through the lens of the anthropological filmmaker, in search of a world larger than the one they know.
Zooming into a disturbing image of detained Gazans circulating on social media, our passive consumption and complicity of the genocide is questioned.
Exploring boundless space for meaning-making. This essay film opens our eyes to the interplay of images, memory, and personal interpretation.
Red silhouettes draw an alternative future in looted Palestinian archival footage. A compelling film re-interpreting a past and possible future.
A meditation on Henry Fonda’s screen legacy and the stories America tells about itself — idealism, doubt, and the distance between image and reality.
Johan van der Keuken’s formally distinct essay film navigates the politics of vision across Europe, but also experiments with cinematic portraiture in wild ways. Through a mosaic of vignettes—of faces, places, and voices—this classic essay film explores the desire and fear of being seen, the struggle for self-perception, and the tensions within shifting cultural landscapes. A prescient film in many ways.
A poetic and philosophical reflection on (un)ethical digestion, revealing the interdependence of the human body on its surroundings, for “all that you change changes you”.
A poetic reflection on artificial light and the disappearance of night. In this imagined future, nature flickers in pink and black – disrupted, studied, and slowly fading.
“The enduring material bond between soil and soul”; entanglement of the earth’s materiality and the inner world, poetically reflected upon by a young Czechian artist.
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Mariam Jafri vs. Maryam Jafri explores identity and authorship through a sculptural work that shifts from object to photo to video, each stage marked by superimposed watermarks. Jafri's self-reflection questions the commodification of art and the fluidity of value in a global context.
Exploring industrial decline’s lingering impact through past trauma – Haunted, the Hollow reflects on memory, community, and the uncertainty of the future.
How can one travel the world by still staying put? The journey of discovering the story behind a poster hanging at an African barbershop’s window.
The Southern Thruway weaves a personal story about housing precarity with the political idea of belonging, exploring themes of uncertainty, forced collectivity, transcience, and unconventional love.
The ears tell the eyes where to look.” An exploration of how waiting and listening creates stillness, in an effort to reverse the speed of capitalist rhythms.
A reflective portrait of life in a Senegalese coastal town, where shifting landscapes prompt conversations about the environment, labour, and our shared place in it.
An emotional exploration on border politics, relevant now more than ever. Personal, plural and captivating in its ability to make us listen and watch carefully.
Exploring the memory of Okinawan islander Yogi-San and his experiences sheltering from the 1945 US Naval bombardment, the resonant space of the cave turns war memory into a way of listening.
Rather than documentary or naturalistic, sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda’s field recordings explores the relation between space and cognition, the depth of the landscape and the vital breathing of things.
Practices of witchcraft and healing rituals in folk songs and stories of survival from older women living in remote locations on the border zone of Slovakia, Ukraine, and Romania become transition zones to a mythical, unknown world.
Through a multilingual response to a sound recording from a man called Mukalap, in the no longer living language !ora, colonial legacies echo through.
An audiovisual meditation of a language and culture from a colonial past, “moving through time, reflecting on the truth of the people forgotten”.
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Nowhere Near by Miko Revereza is a poignant essay film that explores displacement and the immigrant experience. Through personal meditations and striking visuals, Revereza reflects on the complexities of belonging and the struggle to bridge cultural gaps.
Revered essay filmmaker Lis Rhodes' latest work opens with a haunting reference to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, setting the tone for an essay film that explores the intersections of sound, power, and history. Through fragmented imagery and often jarring audio, Rhodes incites us to reflect on the lingering impacts of violence and the structures of control in modern life.
