art

The amnion – the fetal membrane protecting the embryo – becomes a metaphor in the film for an intimate space where pain can be shared and a path to healing sought. This sensitive portrait of three women whose lives have been marked by sudden separation is carried from the outset by a meditative soundtrack that shapes an environment in which personal experience becomes expressible. Ritual gestures – traditional costumes, cooking together, hugging – create a protective shell that allows pain not only to be expressed and shared, but also transformed.“True healing means opening yourself up to the truth of your life.” – from the film’s accompanying material

The voice-over of this intimate, visually delicate video confession describes physically experienced bouts of anxiety, panic, and radical loss of self-confidence that bring the author to the very edge of existence. It is precisely this place, where everything loses its meaning and urgency, that allows her not only to let go and fall, but also to grab and hold on again.“Hanging in There is an intimate account of the inner struggle between the pressure to be strong, to have everything under control, and the need to allow oneself to feel and fail. Sometimes, the greatest strength comes precisely at the moment when we allow ourselves to give up.” — from the film’s accompanying material

A collage of excerpts from Czechoslovak television educational programmes from the 1970s and 1980s devoted to the artificial termination of pregnancy is accompanied by an urgent voice-over reflecting on what really shapes the history of abortion: is it the idea of self- ownership and freedom, the development of medical technologies, state reproductive policy, or market logic? The film paints a complex picture of the reproductive history of socialist Czechoslovakia, in which media representations of abortion—so different from the rhetoric surrounding the feminist pro-choice movement in the US—are transcribed into intimate bodily experience. “We control our bodies. We control bodies. What is ‘we’ when we say ‘ours’? Touch the skin. On my own skin, I discover that I am thousands of others, not my own skin.”

A spectacular pop culture story from 20th-century Central Europe. Hildegard Knef: global movie star, fashion icon, respected chanson singer, last German diva, feminist. Outspoken, controversial, archetype and antitype of her time. As an actress, singer, and writer, she enjoyed international success, experienced crushing defeats, and was creative for more than five decades. She became famous in Germany at the age of 20 and could never return to anonymity. Her favourite themes of success, failure, self-discovery, and the ability to overcome harsh blows made her an expert in survival. The film portrays a highly talented, ambitious, laconic, and astute woman who showed the world how to cope with both fame and failure.

Mājā – a Sanskrit term denoting a veil, illusion, or deceptive reflection that conceals the true nature of reality while simultaneously creating it. The film translates this ancient metaphor into slowly flowing black-and-white images: mesmerizing details, alternating light and shadow, flowing water that melts on the girl's face like a translucent veil. The central symbol of the film is a mirror cube – both a deception and a gateway, in which reality shatters into a dimension of reflections and opens up a space for quiet contemplation. “Through this visual meditation, I am searching for a way to come to terms with the impermanence of the world and find harmony in it—not as an escape, but as a deeper acceptance.” — from the film’s accompanying material

This film poem was created during Juhannus, the Finnish celebration of the longest day of the year, using cyanotype, a contact copying process that uses light-sensitive iron salts in contact with UV light to create typically blue prints of objects. The illuminated shapes of leaves, stems, twigs, and fluff wander across the film material with increasing intensity, occasionally interspersed with flashes of blossoming flowers and a girl. The visual composition is accompanied by a delicate soundtrack composed of insect voices, the rustling of grass, and occasional jingling.“Over its short runtime, Midsummer becomes increasingly cluttered with complex forms, some of which appear more photographically based than the initial rayographs. This prompts a slight confusion between figure and ground, such that we cannot tell what may have been photographically registered on the film in the first place.” — Michael Sicinski Source: In Rewiew Online.

A four-minute stop-motion animation composed of photographs, watercolors, and fungal pigments brings to life the imagery of mushrooms in an endless array of shapes and forms. With exaggeration and humor, it allows a fascinating mycological universe to grow, evoking the infinitely ramified, mysterious world of mycelium and its hidden communication. “What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back to my senses, not just – like flowers – through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there.” — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushrooms at the End of the World (Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 1.

Two narrative and aesthetic levels—a stylized studio room with a horror vibe that the fictional Nora can't leave, and a voyeuristic handheld camera recording a nervous girl in a real setting—connect the main character's body and experience with sexualized violence. A variation on Ibsen's woman, whose story is taken over and rewritten by a man, creates a counterpoint to the image of the contemporary heroine, who speaks for herself falteringly and painfully and refuses to be silenced.“We will never see all the fragments, nor will the story affect us in the same way as in big movies; we may be a little confused. Nora will not become our perfect, strong heroine, yet she invites us to share with her a sad walk through the city and a glimpse of that strange room.” — from the film’s accompanying material

Latvian documentary filmmaker Juris Podnieks (1950–1992) gained worldwide attention for his relentless need to “be there,” but also for his ability to capture unique moments of the pulsating present. This urgent documentary portrait, using personal diaries, photographs and film footage, presents the fascinating life journey of a filmmaker who reflects on his obsession but is unable to control it. The need to capture “the death of the monster”, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Latvian struggle for freedom proved fatal for him and his long-time colleagues. The unclear circumstances of his death highlight the magnitude of the unfinished work of this leading figure in European documentary filmmaking. “In the West, they see it as a movie. They do not understand that in this ‘perestroika’, people’s destinies are being decided. And it is creating immense pain. We even call it an awakening, but nobody really wants to wake up.” — Juris Podnieks, 1987

This adaptation of the storyboard L’amore è un lepidottero (1941) by Italian artist and experimental filmmaker Bruno Munari contrasts dreamy melodrama set against the backdrop of war with the giallo aesthetics of Italian slasher films. The result is a rapid collage that combines computer animation, improvised shots, archival material, and images generated by artificial intelligence. Each element speaks a different visual language, but together they create a paradoxical “handmade” aesthetic in which technology clashes with nostalgia.“The film's process mirrors reports of Silicon Valley giants pirating terabytes of historical resources and destroying millions of physical books to feed their machines. While their AI garbage pollutes our environment, Replica deliberately processes problematic historical material and purifies it using contemporary tools.” — author's explanation

The Sandia Mountains in New Mexico, located on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, combine steep snow-capped cliffs with the aridity of the desert at their base. This visual portrait of the landscape, in which the mountains come alive, pulsate, and transform, is accompanied by an audio mix of extreme temperatures and songs of the Pueblo tribes who have lived here since time immemorial. Techniques based on the tradition of experimental film, such as frame by frame copying, painting, collage, and engraving into the material, draw the digital image into a visual trance. “Mélissa Faivre’s work is immersive, hallucinatory or even vertigo-inducing, depending on your reception, or possibly your viewing experience. They are rich in colour, movement and associations. The films are based on camera images, and on photographs reproduced frame by frame and layered with video images via compositing and montage creating new imaginations. […] The montage reaches a level of multi-dispersion that seems to be pure fantasy; at the same time it has a potential to trigger your individual memories and associations.” — Walden Kunstausstellungen Source: http://www.galerie-walden.de/INFECTED%20REALITY-english.pdf

The film is based on video diary entries that the authors shared on their journey from Brazil/Peru to Florida. The juxtaposition of images of everyday life on both sides of America, connected by a single sea, is accompanied by text fragments in Czech and Spanish. These refer to Operation Condor, during which the US supported dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as to the vision of “colored parachutes” by Brazilian thinker and activist Ailton Krenak, who calls on us to use our creativity at the end of the world to make parachutes with which to delay the fall.“So maybe we need to invent the parachute. Not to eliminate the fall, but to invent and manufacture millions of colorful, playful, and even pleasant parachutes.” Source: Krenak, Ailton. Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo / Ideas to Postpone the End of the World. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019.

A dark fantasy inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, interwoven with Lovecraftian allusions, follows a lonely traveler who enters a forgotten realm where reality shatters. Visions of high mountain cliffs, glaciers, and monsters, created in collaboration with artificial intelligence, are accompanied by a voice-over narrating the events in an incomprehensible language. The black-and-white, high-contrast imagery builds an atmosphere of inexplicable horror that accompanies, in Lovecraft's words, “the defeat of those fixed laws of nature which are our only protection against the assaults of chaos and the demons of the unexplored universe.” “There is knowledge that defies words. And a tongue best left uncomprehended.”

Jan Šípek documented the unmistakable singer-songwriter and spiritual seeker Oldřich Janota (1949–2024) during the last period of Janota's life. This meant accepting the challenge and approaching Oldřich's song koans with a wholly original film style. The film was made on the day of the winter solstice during one of the very last performances of this great figure of Czech independent culture.Solstice is presented together with Jaroslav Kořán's Magical Movements in the block Czech Ambient Film. Both films, which we are premiering, are the surprising results of acoustic experimentation on the Czech music scene. At the same time, they significantly transfer the specific features of ambient music to the film medium: hypnotism, a different speed of time, contemplation of the details of the world and its perceived unity.

Beneath the polished floors of a contemporary art gallery, a new form of life is awakening, gradually transforming the urban space into a living, symbiotic system connecting humans with the realm of plants and bacteria. This speculative docufiction, shot on 16 mm film in response to the We the Bacteria exhibition at the Milan Triennale, imagines an alternative future for architecture told from the perspective of non-human actors. It explores the thorny structure of experimental architect Rachel Armstrong's SPIKA installation, which functions both as a fortress and an ecosystem, and outlines the possibility of urban buildings transformed into metabolic nodes of a new community. SPIKA (Structural Protection for Interdependent Karyotype Assembly): A bacteriophage‐inspired structure housing microbial fuel cells and hydroponics transforms waste into energy and nutrients through electrogenic biofilms and bioreceptive plant systems, reimagining architecture as a regenerative ecological partner. Source: Armstrong Rachel: “Beyond the Petri Dish: Exhibitions as Catalysts for Microbial Literacy-Bridging Science, Culture and Society”. Microb Biotechnol. 2025 Aug.

The Deers suggests an image of a gender-polarized society unevenly marked by history. Archival footage of ceremonies from the era of the Uruguayan dictatorship and harsh military exercises clash with intimate images of sleeping girls with intertwined hair, linguistic exploration of fragile bodies, and still-lifes of set tables frozen in time. The film oscillates between the collective memory of dictatorship and everyday intimacy, between power and vulnerability.“The military dictatorship in Uruguay remains in the memory of survivors and families. The wait for justice brings routine into a standstill. The faces come in diffused ways. The image still remains.” — Emiliano Grassi

Minimalist musical accompaniment, together with sound design replicas and emotionally charged screams from a crime drama revolving around the character of a deranged criminal, unify the vertical montage of 16mm film strips. The result is a slightly paranoid and self-ironic mélange, which is shaped as a structural film. “This naive 16mm film was created through collective collaboration as part of a 16mm workshop at the Czech Visions 2025 festival. […] The assignment was: create a structural film experiment together. When asked what that was, I replied that it wasn't important, that they should just imagine it or ask AI. I don't know if they did that or what they imagined, but even though the result is a form composed solely of mistakes and errors, it has (at least for me) the unique charm of the unintended.” — Martin Ježek

This cinematic poem tells an epic tale of being in a woman's body – that of a woman born into a fiercely patriarchal Middle Eastern society. The poetic language of this staged documentary accumulates culturally and politically charged meanings through literary and visual metaphors. The narrative voice in the collective plural becomes an expression of the experiences of countless different women. It speaks of the constant, persistent definition of relationships in relation to men. Of physicality, which brings a moment of identity, sensuality, and a feeling of impurity in the eyes of others. But above all, it speaks of the insistent need to be oneself, in one's own body and world. “It is inescapable to wonder: were we conceived in love and lust? Or are we daughters of guilt and disgust?” — Tijana Mamula, NERO

This cinematic epiphany, shot on 16mm film with lightness and gentle humour, pierces the crust of everyday life to reveal the miracle of existence. A web of tactile images and slightly surreal scenes braided around a girl's body is interwoven with verses by the late Latvian poet Imants Ziedoņis. “Each day catches fire. If you have walked all day and not seen it, wait. Don’t blink; it might happen that instant. One morning there was dew on the grass. But no sunlight, and the dew was red-grey, the rose didn’t speak. The next day there was dew and sun, but the rose had shed its petals. There must be a triad. A flower and myself are not enough, there must be sun. A birch and myself are not enough; the birch needs wind, or a thrush, or frost.” — Imants Ziedoņis

Anni Albers was a prominent member of the interwar Bauhaus art movement in Germany. After Hitler came to power, she left her native country and devoted herself to her work with unwavering passion in the USA. Weaving textile patterns was more than just an aesthetic activity for her; she saw the intertwining of threads as a tangible projection of the very fabric of reality. “Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.” — Dedar

The seemingly purely observational fascination with insect bodies is disrupted by a diegetic soundtrack composed of distinctive frequencies to which the observed creatures are exposed. This scientific film experiment, which results in a visual transcription of their auditory responses into colored marks on a speaker, concludes with a tragic punchline.“The film captures how certain insects react to sound frequencies that are also used, for example, in military applications.” — from the film’s accompanying material