Block Schedule | Leiden Essay Film Festival

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Saturday 19 September 1 block

Lakenhal

Programme

Opening Event Kevin B. Lee
- Firat Yücel
  
  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.
  Film page
- Ariane Papillon
  
  Peer into the lives of tech workers, and their perspectives on big tech and data, through a personal tour of their phones.
  Film page
- Kevin B. Lee
  
  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.
  Film page

Sunday 20 September 9 blocks

Cinema Kijkhuis

Cinema 1

- Michal Kosakowski
  
  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.
  Film page
- Thom Anderson
  
  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.
  Film page
- Hanwen Zhang
  
  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.
  Film page
Opening Event Kevin B. Lee
- Kevin B. Lee
  
  In his latest desktop documentary, Lee unpacks with a forensic style the visuals of the War on Terror and ISIS propaganda. Through digital archives, cultural artefacts and artistic research, he asks: “how can we collectively resist the act of forgetting?
  Film page

Cinema 2

- Ross McElwee
  
  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.
  Film page
Film on Film
- Herman Asselberghs
  
  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.
  Film page
- 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.
  Film page
- Deborah Stratman
  
  A collage of American rituals and spectacles reveals the contradictions and costs behind the ideals of freedom, heroism, and patriotism.
  Film page
Stoker +1
- Stelios Bouziotis
  
  How do you write a letter to a person you have never met? A moving depiction of family, reconciliation and the inevitability of death spanning from 1970s Greece to the present day.
  Film page
- Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflânca
  
  Two archives meet and gaze back at each other in this film about American journalist Edward Serotta’s trip to 1980s communist Romania to photograph daily life, and the state surveillance photographing him in return.
  Film page
Screening with Live Scoring
- Benjamin Christensen
  
  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.
  Film page

Monday 21 September 11 blocks

Cinema Kijkhuis

Cinema 1

Film on Film
- Herman Asselberghs
  
  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.
  Film page
- 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.
  Film page
Film on Film
- Peng Zuqiang
  
  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.
  Film page
- Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre
  
  Interconnected relationships between the Inuit, caribou, and lichen challenges the boundaries between human, animal, land, and image-making.
  Film page
- Onyeka Igwe
  
  A rebellious remembering and reclamation of The University of Ibadan, a former institution of British colonial rule in Nigeria.
  Film page
- Sammy Baloji
  
  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.
  Film page
Beirut, Lebanon
- Sarah-Rose Antoun
  
  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?
  Film page
- Mon Dewulf
  
  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.
  Film page
- Jocelyne Saab
  
  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.
  Film page
Conversation with Screening: On Filming Love
- Jeroen Kooijmans
  
  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.
  Film page

Cinema 2

- Chris Marker
  
  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.
  Film page
- Ricardo Ruales Eguiguren
  
  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.
  Film page
- Lana Daher
  
  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.
  Film page
Performance Screening
- 3133 (Eric Lee)
  
  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.
  Film page
Sara Rajaei: In Focus
- Sara Rajaei
  
  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.
  Film page
- Sara Rajaei
  
  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.
  Film page
- Sara Rajaei
  
  An image unfurls slowly and enigmatically. So too do childhood memories of women, loss and disappearance, narrated meditatively like a meandering river.
  Film page
- Tusharr Madhavv
  
  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.
  Film page

Tuesday 22 September 11 blocks

Cinema Kijkhuis

Cinema 1

- Masao Adachi
  
  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.
  Film page
- Hanwen Zhang
  
  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.
  Film page
Next of Kin
- Gabrielle Stemmer
  
  “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.
  Film page
- Yannis Karpouzis
  
  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.
  Film page
- Sari Lluch Dalena
  
  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.
  Film page
Surge of Transference +3
- Geo Barcan
  
  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?
  Film page
- Esther van der Heijden
  
  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.
  Film page
- Darya Andijan
  
  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.
  Film page
- Lotte van Hulst
  
  A two-channel investigation into the alternative geopolitical framework constructed by the self-regulatory governing body of international football, the highly disputed FIFA.
  Film page
- Kevin B. Lee
  
  In his latest desktop documentary, Lee unpacks with a forensic style the visuals of the War on Terror and ISIS propaganda. Through digital archives, cultural artefacts and artistic research, he asks: “how can we collectively resist the act of forgetting?
  Film page

Cinema 2

- Ross McElwee
  
  In 1985 McElwee set out to document the lingering traces of General Sherman's march through the American South. He instead created a landmark autobiographical essay film in which history gives way to self-portraiture, a method he would later reexamine with Remake (2025), which is also screening at this festival.
  Film page
- Thanassis Vassiliou
  
  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.
  Film page
Under Watchful Eyes
- Cyan Bae
  
  A series of performances reconstructing the data collection processes behind AI models that detect emotions, even micro-expressions and deceptive attempts to conceal them.
  Film page
- Nicolas Gourault
  
  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.
  Film page
- Deborah Stratman
  
  A night-time horror portrait of suburban America, where neon and artificial lighting carve out simulated safety and convenience, held together by hovering surveillance.
  Film page
Listening to the Archive
- Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati
  
  A relistening and reinterpretation of colonial recordings of New Guinea made in 1961 by Michael Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil family.
  Film page
- Joseph Kamaru
  
  An imageless film, sounds from a repatriated colonial archive are interrogated to construct an emancipatory relistening to sounds collected through colonial violence.
  Film page
Performance
- Rabih Mroué
  
  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.
  Film page

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Programme

Cinema 1

Cinema 2

Cinema 1

Cinema 2

Cinema 1

Cinema 2