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.