experiment

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 landscape of Eastern Australia, born of extinct volcanoes and solidified magma, both barren and lush, connects to the Pacific volcanic arc. Multiple exposures on 16mm film directly in the camera create visual overlaps and disrupt the gravitational logic of the image, while dynamic editing scrambles time and space – the present sinks into the depths of geological memory. This environmental visual poem is accompanied by field recordings and musical compositions by Lawrence English.“Filmed across the lands of the Turrbal, Yuggera, Jinibara, Gubbi Gubbi, Wakka Wakka, Jarowair, Barrumgum, Quandamooka, and Butchulla Peoples in Australia. We acknowledge them as the Traditional Custodians and Knowledge Keepers of the land. Sovereignty has never been ceded.”

“Bardo” is a Buddhist term for the state between death and rebirth, when a person's consciousness leaves the body and seeks a new form. Viera Čákanyová had a similar experience during dark therapy. Her short experimental film is an attempt to translate this transcendental experience, an encounter with another dimension of being, into images and words that are understandable even to those who have not descended into their own subconscious. While colours flow and textures blend into abstract images generated by artificial intelligence, the soundtrack features ambient music and an associative stream of the director's thoughts and feelings. The metaphysical journey does not lead to clear answers. However, it opens up space for perceiving what transcends language, reason, and the common understanding of reality. “I can't decide between being and non-being, action and inaction. I have been stuck in this dilemma my whole life.” — quote from the movieBefore the screening on October 28 in the DIOD hall, there will be a launch of a new book by theorist Jana Dudková entitled Člověk na okrAI: Postantropocén Viery Čákanyovej. The book is published by the Slovak Film Institute's publishing department.

This film, which straddles the line between fiction and documentary, is based on the director’s own book, and explores the tension between personal memory and imagination. The author returns to his childhood, when he shared everyday adventures with his friend Zeta, with whom he observed the surrounding world from the treetops, and created fictional stories about their neighbours. Years later, these memories intertwine with a reconstruction of the last hours of Zeta’s life, who tragically died as a member of a bus crew. The actor’s voice presents his thoughts and feelings during the journey, as imagined by the author of the film. They clash with the real testimonies and telephone conversations of passengers in the present, as they travel through the dry and mountainous Chilean landscape. Part of the film traverses the streets from the author’s memories via Google Street View, raising the question of digital memory, the capture of place and time, and the intertwining of reality with its virtual imprint. The work deals with the loss of a loved one, memory, and the ways in which film images and storytelling can capture transience.“I looked for your dad on Facebook. He told me you’d been hired as a stewardess for a bus company, and that you never came back.”

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.”

The parable, formed by evocative images of unveiled and veiled faces, traditional fabrics, and freely grazing animals, is wedged between the lines of a paragraph from Boccaccio's Decameron. This visual interlude in the story of a girl who, while asleep, drifted from the Aeolian Islands to the North African coast near the city of Sousse in present-day Tunisia, reflects Western ideas about the former Barbary Coast. “The maiden, hearing these Latin words, concluded that a contrary wind had driven her back to Lipari; and, getting up, she looked around her, and not recognizing the country, and seeing herself on the shore, she asked the good woman where she was.The good woman replied:‘My daughter, you are near Susa, in Barbary.’Hearing this, the maiden was grieved that God had not sent her death, fearing shame and injury; and, not knowing what to do, she sat down at the bottom of the boat and began to weep.” Source: Giovanni Boccaccio. Dekameron. 1886. Translated by John Payne.

For several decades, Jaroslav Kořán has been associated with his own percussive instrument, the dreamers' astronomical clock, and other projects between experimentation and ambient music. The film Magical Movements is 100% cinematic-ambient, but it also represents the purity and courage of a personal perspective. The viewer's feeling of being surrounded is enhanced by multi-channel sound. “Each fragment is a micro-story that composes our life perceptions and together forms the essence of the observer's memory. The film acts as a painting with living photography and evokes wonder at the everyday magical side of reality,” says the author.Magical Movements are presented together with Jan Šípek's film Solstice 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.

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

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 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.”

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 turbulent pre-election atmosphere in Indonesia becomes absurd background noise to everyday scenes of a stagnant village life in the film Sunshower. Director Micko Boanerges visits his grandparents in the countryside and observes how little the struggle over the country's fate disrupts the peaceful flow of life there. The minimalist film lets the black-and-white camera rest on everyday scenes in which so little happens that the rush to bring in the laundry at the onset of a rain shower becomes one of the most dramatic scenes. The director's grandparents barely exchange a few words and spend most of their time just relaxing, paying little attention to the disputes between election candidates blaring from the television. Sunshower can thus be viewed as a contribution to the meditative cinematography of empty scenes, but also as an ironic film that draws on the aesthetics of boredom, showing the contrast between the turbulent situation in the public sphere and people who rarely come into contact with it. “You said that the leaders who have never been poor couldn’t lead their people. I think that this statement is mistaken and has to be straightened out. What if the leaders who have always been wealthy turned out to be capable of leading.”

In this video essay, the polysemy of iron is mined like a rare ore and smelted into a wealth of unexpected synergies: the stellar origin of iron is linked to its presence in human veins and in the geological layers of the Earth. The moose's sense of magnetic north and south intertwines with images of the Arctic landscape, in which the rusty remains of military equipment lie scattered. Fungi and bacteria that feed on iron are absorbed into the motif of a hunting knife. Between the cosmos and the individual, nature and technology, life and civilization, an iron bond is formed, which is commented on in dialogue and occasional unison by a girl's and a woman's voice. “The word ‘raqs’ in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs [Media Collective] takes this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time.” Source: Raqs Media Collective

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

A documentary investigation into the fate of two Amazonian natives who were brought to European civilization at the beginning of the 20th century turns into a sensory travelogue through a landscape of archival and contemporary footage. Images of the old and new worlds pile up on top of each other, colliding or slowly flowing by like the Amazon River. In fleeting moments, in photographs, in diary entries, Aredomi and Omarino rise to the surface of history before disappearing again, perhaps forever. The shameful history of inhumane treatment of indigenous tribes is also a painful chapter in the story of the director's family. This is one of the reasons she embarks on this journey. “I didn’t want to repair this history, because I don’t think it’s possible to repair anything, but I do think it is possible to transform.” — Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski

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

The third part of the trilogy on representation, art, and politics is a collage of images and quotations with a congenial sound design by Ian Mikyska. While The Signature of Certain Things (2022) explored the role of artworks and institutions in society and The Commodity Catalogue (2023) focused on the commodity nature of artistic creation, the final part offers subversion rather than synthesis: it reveals the contradictions of artistic analysis, which do not lead to a clear political position but instead undermine themselves.“The silent imperative of accumulation now reigns supreme and absorbs everything, including hope. It is a new type of religiosity that interprets the world, permeates everything, and is capable of justifying anything. Even this modest dissenting film, seeking through its pre- declared resignation the possibility of expression, moves nothing, illuminates nothing. It too will be absorbed.”

A composition of collages from magazines, diary sketches, and skin prints, accompanied by a girl's confession in voice-over, tells the story of how the female body is transformed into an object—a mere vessel of male desire—in a whole range of forms of sexual violence: from subtle street harassment to rape. Imaginative stop-motion animation combines drawing, photography, and real objects. “Where does innocence end, and where do remarks begin that can lead to sexual violence? How does this shape her self-perception?” — from the film’s accompanying material

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

Heavy words bounce off the images of silent walls like another screen. Black-and-white shots taken with a handheld 16 mm camera follow empty corridors, blind windows, and bars of the former Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp in Trieste. They are permeated by György Ligeti's fragmented and nervous electronic composition Artikulation. The memory of the motionless walls is framed by an excerpt from the Italian translation of Jean Baudrillard's book La trasparenza del male (The Transparency of Evil).“During the 16 mm film shooting and development workshop held by Labbash Film in Trieste, I visited the Risiera di San Sabba, a place I had only heard about until then… I thought about how complex and ambiguous history is, how one question can have ten different answers that contradict each other, and I concluded that whatever I did in the short time I had to make this film had to be as far removed as possible from a rhetorical idea of representing evil.” — Mario BlaconàSource: PerSo Film Festival.

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