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Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa is a meditation on humanity’s massive redesign of the planet and a dystopic pamphlet on the anthropocene. Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa portrays a brief moment of euphoria as the drifting occupants on the raft, hoping and praying to be rescued, appear to glimpse a possibility of salvation. We can almost hear the hoarse cries through which they attempt to draw attention to their desperate plight, mustering a final ounce of strength before the void. This is their last chance of survival. Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa refers to the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of high biodiversity in order to reduce life to its conversion into a resource through capitalism, with an enormous environmental and social impact. It is an allegory for states of emergency in environmental policy, climate and migration, with an ethical-political purpose.

Salomé Lamas (Lisbon) studied cinema in Lisbon and Prague, visual arts in Amsterdam and is a Ph. D candidate in contemporary art studies in Coimbra. Her work has been screened both in art venues and film festivals such as Berlinale, BAFICI, Museo Arte Reina Sofia, FIAC, MNAC – Museu do Chiado, DocLisboa, Cinema du Réel, Visions du Réel, MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Harvard Film Archive, Museum of Moving Images NY, Jewish Museum NY, Fid Marseille, Arsenal Institut fur film und videokunst, Viennale, Culturgest, CCB - Centro Cultural de Belém, Hong Kong FF, Museu Serralves, Tate Modern, CPH: DOX, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, Bozar , Tabakalera, ICA London, TBA 21 Foundation, Mostra de São Paulo, CAC Vilnius, MALBA, FAEMA, SESC São Paulo, MAAT, La Biennale di Venezia Architettura, among others. Lamas was granted several fellowships such as the Gardner Film Study Center Fellowship – Harvard University, Film Study Center-Harvard Fellowship, The Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio Center, Brown Foundation – Dora Maar House, Fundación Botín, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Sundance, Bogliasco Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Camargo Foundation, Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD. She collaborates with Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola. She collaborates with the production company O Som e a Fúria and is represented by Galeria Miguel Nabinho and Kubikgallery.

“The photo was taken using a painted board in Kuling Park on Lushan…” A woman is reminiscing about the story behind a photograph: it was a bright summer day in the 1980s. Her family traveled to Lushan to escape the heat. As her memory unfolds, we gradually come to see the forgotten history and that very photograph being damaged by water stain.

1985 Born in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, An experimental animation artist with his hands on video arts, painting, installation, music and VJ performance also. In 2009 He got a master's degree in animation from Tsinghua University. In 2010, his film This is LOVE was shown at Ottawa International Animation Festival and awarded The 2010 Best Narrative Short. In 2013 his film Recycled was the Winner Grand Prix shorts - non-narrative at Holland International Animation Film Festival. In 2014 he is the Jury of Zagreb / Holland International Animation Film Festival. and he was the winner of 2014 asian cultural council grant. In 2017 he works in CalArts Experimental Animation program as Faculty. In 2018 he invited for New Academy Member for the Short Films and Feature Animation branch. In 2019 his first feature film Breathless Animals has been selected by Berlinale Forum.

C’est l’été en Normandie. Céline travaille sur un chantier de fouilles et en profites pour passer un week-end dans son village d'enfance, qu'elle n'a pas revu depuis longtemps. Ses recherches archéologiques se mêlent à des retrouvailles plus ou moins probables au fil de ses promenades.

Originaire de Normandie (France), Christelle Lheureux est cinéaste, artiste et enseignante. Elle vit à Paris (France) et enseigne à la Haute école d’art et de design de Genève (Suisse). Après une formation aux universités d’Amiens (France) et de Paris VIII (France), aux Beaux-Arts de Grenoble (France) et au Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing (France), elle réalise de nombreuses installations vidéo dans les années 2000, et participe à de nombreuses expositions, biennales et résidences d’art contemporain en Europe et en Asie. Dans les années 2010, elle réalise plusieurs courts et moyens-métrages primés dans des festivals de cinéma. Elle prépare actuellement "Le vent des crocodiles", son premier long-métrage avec Christmas in July (Julie Salvador), "Dans le ventre de la baleine", un moyen métrage en Thaïlande avec Kidam (François-Pierre Clavel), et termine "80 000 ans", un court métrage en diptyque.

Thanks to the rise of mining, post-communist Mongolia was the fastest growing economy in the world in 2012. However, the poor were not profiting from the booming industry, and climate change plus overgrazing were leading to vast desertification. According to Mongolian shamanistic belief, the earth and sky are connected. Violation of nature by men provokes the anger of the ruling spirits or the ‘masters of the land’ and leads to drought and pestilence. How does the population relate to its ancestors when desires threaten to upset the cosmic balance? The film opens with images shot in Baganuur and Nalaikh, once the largest coal mines in Mongolia. Fixed camera images of workers in the shadow of gigantic machines alternate with desolate landscapes and downtown Ulaanbaatar by day and by night. Intermediate texts cut the medium long shots. The first excerpt originates from the Hungarian poet Ferenc Juhasz. In 1957, under the influence of LSD, he experienced the painful initiation of a shaman. The second excerpt comes from a song by the shamaness Kyrgys Khurak. It deals with the evocation of lurking greed and inequality that might destroy nature – an aspect that implicitly refers to the climate crisis. (Ive Stevenheydens)

The long-term projects of photographer and filmmaker Jan Locus study the complexity of worldwide, socio-political issues. His books include Mongolia, De Bewegende Stad and Devoted. His films have been screened at IFFR Rotterdam (NL), DokFest Kassel (DE), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (DE), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (FR/DE), Asolo Art Film Festival (IT), Split International Festival of New Film (HR) and FIFA Montreal (CA) among others. He lives and works in Brussels.

Refusing to pay for the debt, two Athenians decide to leave their city. Guided by mysterious crow calls, they wander through a desolate urban landscape until they reach a zone of passage and are spirited to an ancient forest, the Realm of the Birds. Here they meet the Hoopoe, half-bird half-woman, who tells them how the birds live by sharing their resources amid the magical forces of the forest. However, one of the men has other plans for the birds. Though far from easy, the inter-species encounter will be illuminating for all. Some 2,500 years after it was written, an experimental adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Birds. Between a contemporary Athens marked by crisis and the surviving Laurisilva Forest of La Gomera, Ancient Greek and Silbo (an endangered whistled language that forms part of a long tradition of resistance), comes a tale of flight, loss and reenchantment in a space of refuge where new alliances can emerge between different species, temporalities and languages.

Silvia MAGLIONI and GRAEME THOMSON are filmmakers and artists whose work explores the porous boundaries between fiction and documentary, cinema and the visual arts. Their work has been screened in festivals around the world, including FID-Marseille, IFF Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives, Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, Thessaloniki IFF, Berlin Critics Week, Bafici, Jihlava, Festival Hors-Pistes, Docs Kingdom.

A sudden immersion into the mysterious and savage waters of the autonomous carnaval in Marseille. With the city center in a gentrification limbo, the carnaval troops occupy the streets, searching, intertwining. Limbs tear out a part of the present and the troops go on to attack the winter.

Ultrasocial Pop is Filip Markiewicz’s latest experimental audio visual project. Creating a performative dialogue between his visual and filmic work and his musical compositions as Raftside. The live performance is always a unique experience that includes a comment on actual social events. The idea is to question the link between pop culture and populism and to create a videographic moving painting. The work in progress of Ultrasocial Pop will lead to the release of a visual book with vinyl Lp (Label Grzegorzki Records) in the frame of his solo show at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin (D) in May 2021. Ultrasocial Pop is supported by the Bourse Bert-Theis.

Filip Markiewicz was born in Esch-sur-Alzette (L) in 1980. His solo shows have been hosted by institutions such as the MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (RO), NN Contemporay Art in Northampton (UK), Kunsthalle Osnabrück in Osnabrück (D), CCA Derry -Londonderry (UK) an the Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'Art Contemporain (L). He represented Luxembourg at the 56th Biennial in Venice. Markiewicz follows a theatrical and musical performance route, which has led him to create shows at the Staatstheater Cottbus for the Lausitz Festival (D), Theater Basel in Basel (CH) and the Expo in Shanghai (CHN), to his work in the visual arts field. He lives and works in Hamburg (D) and Luxembourg (L)

Finding access to the deeper levels and truths of a stretch of land via the surreal, the digitally alienated. Thus is the aim behind Lukas Marxt’s Imperial Irrigation, whereby digital surrealism is anchored in an experimental documentary intent, while text and sound levels snarl the multiple layers of action thus continually decentering the narrative. Starting point for this complex and vibrant territorial study is California’s Salton Sea; close to where Marxt’s Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off) already led. The visual approach to this slowly drying up lake and its highly checkered past takes place through various types of images—most of which have been implanted with elaborately placed, willful moments of alienation. As though the intangibility of the scenery offered could not possibly be encountered via veristic means, the shots are digitally chopped, extended by time stops, permeated by undefinable MacGuffins—and tremble erratically owing to air reflections that arise when filming from a great distance. Marxt does not exclude himself from this quasi-colonial inspection of a landscape. His cowboy boots, his snakeskin hat, and his hanging out at slot machines or in the car repeatedly intervene as idiosyncratic presences in the flow of images. The artist Julia Scher emphatically narrates a history of Salton Sea based on a text by William L. Fox recapitulating various discursive anchoring moments. At the same time, subtly woven sound elements, most notably insistent passages by the musician Jung An Tagen, for their part, “alter-medially” outdo the “insane sense” of the events. What emerges is a disturbing portrait of a bit of the Anthropocene, whose ongoing catastrophic course, the film sums up nicely. (Christian Höller)

Lukas Marxt (*1983, Austria) is an artist and a filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt´s interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature was first explored in his studies of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Graz, and was further developed through his audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He received his MFA from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and attended the postgraduate programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Marxt has been sharing his research in the visual art environment as well as in the cinema context. His works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, 2018), at The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium, 2018), and at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (Croatia, 2018). His films have been presented in numerous International Film Festivals including Berlinale (Germany, 2017 and 2018), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal, 2018), and the Gijón International Film Festival where he receiced the Principado de Asturias prize for the best short film (Spain, 2018). Since 2017, Marxt has spent a considerable amount of time in Southern California, where he has researched the ecological and socio-political structures surrounding the Salton Sea.

The major video screening set up echoes the documentary Condivisione di un ricordo: this work presents the operation which concerned Bergamo and the municipalities of the Val Seriana over the summer, in which numerous posters portraying Pellizza’s painting were displayed, thanks to the involvement of people encountered by the artists.

The two artists have worked together since 1999, focusing on video art and installations. They express themselves through the language of video, and in different forms such as performance, theater, installation, photography and recently cinema. In Italy they are recognized among the most important video artists and innovators in the field of contemporary art. Their artistic research has focused on the theme of incommunicability, highlighting the paradox of our communication society. This has led them to produce very intimate pieces alongside work with a greater anthropological, social, and political feel. They strive to engage their audience by using the moving image as an immersive installation. MASBEDO have also worked with video-performances to engage their audience within the creative space and gestures created by the video itself

Being lead by a virtual voice an ordinary man find shelter in the woods. There, he will try to understand the mystery of his situation.

Miguel Mejías (Tenerife, Spain, 1991) studied in Madrid screenwriting after having the studies in sociology and communication. After miscellany of other jobs as driver, cultural promoter, stevedore, journey laborer, editor, historical restorer, he is currently a professor of cinema and literature in Sundsvall, Sweden. His work has been selected for international festivals as Trieste, Toulouse, Experimental Superstars, International Film Festival of Las Palmas, Málaga, Mostra de Cinema Mediterraneo, Ismailia, Bogotá or Buenos Aires.

Made during the New York lockdown, “Haunting” is a two-channel film assembling footage from several decades of supernatural domestic horror films. These are films in which domestic and residential spaces—suburban houses, decaying mansions, off-season hotels—are haunted by the spectral or the paranormal. Drawing on horror’s highly organized genre conventions, “Haunting” creates an imaginary architecture in which the repressed always returns and the past is never dead. The film’s protagonists—often played by actors now forgotten—appear not unlike ghosts themselves, their wanderings twinned across the film’s two screens in a strange, apparitional choreography. “Haunting” is a study in the spectral, as it is a response to the ghostly world that emerged from the pandemic—a world that became, for many, both uncanny and terrifying.

John Menick’s visual art and writings investigate how the fictive troubles the real. Working with cinematic history, hearsay, pseudoscience, and genre, Menick has created a diverse artistic practice that operates between fiction and critique. His earliest film, The Disappearance (2002), took the form of a fictional location scouting in Nuremberg, Germany, in order to tell the postwar history of the city. Menick’s Starring Sigmund Freud (2012) was a video memento for Sigmund Freud’s life as a fictional character in film. His most recent project, Haunting (2020), is an evocation of the long history of ghosts in cinematic horror, and how film itself can be understood as a spectral medium. Born in White Plains, New York, Menick studied fine art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. After graduation, he was an early member of several seminal New York art collectives including Nomads + Residents and 16 Beaver Group. His visual art and films have been exhibited and screened at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; the International Film Festival, Rotterdam; MoMA PS1, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; and Artists Space, New York. Menick’s essays and stories have appeared in Frieze, The Believer, Mousse Magazine, BOMB, Spike Art Quarterly, Art in America, and Witte de With Review, among other publications. His first book of collected prose, A Report on the City, was published in 2012 by Walther König and was listed by Frieze magazine as one of the highlights of the year. Menick received grants from the Jerome Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received several commissions, including from Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in France. Menick currently lives in New York City where he is also a visiting professor of film at the Cooper Union.

L'état de notre urgence 4 a été tourné à Paris pendant le premier confinement à 20 heures

J'ai réalisé une cinquantaine de films, certains ont été auto produits d'autres produits et diffusés dans des festivals et sur Arte Mon récit moi autobiographie 14 eme version a été publié par les éditions sens et tonka Chroniques palestiniennes et divers textes sur le virus ont été publiés par les éditions de l'obsidienne Certains de mes textes et films inédits sont diffusés dans le marché des collectionneurs.

Il y a très longtemps, se trouvait un vieil homme au village, qui gardait jalousement un secret. Certains soir de l'année, quand la lune était pleine Il s'asseyait devant l'arbre sacré. Les mains écartées, il prononçait des paroles incantatoires jusqu'au bout de la nuit. La forêt tout entière s'animait. Après quoi, On raconte l'avoir vu à des centaines de kilomètres de là. Certains disent qu'il aurait le pouvoir de se téléreporter.

Pierrick Mouton est artiste et vidéaste, et vit à Paris (France). Son travail s’articule autour de systèmes de croyances, spirituels ou idéologiques à travers des films, des œuvres sonores ou des objets, qu’il fait réaliser ou qu’il réalise lui-même. Cette démarche est associée à une approche documentaire, et à une immersion sur le long terme avec différents groupe de croyance et de pensée. Pierrick Mouton a récemment exposé au Salon de Montrouge, Paris (France); à l’École d’architecture de la ville et des territoires Paris Est (France); à la Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (Inde); à la Villa Belleville, Paris (France); à l’Alliance Française, Chandigarh (Inde); à la Nunnery Gallery, Londres (Royaume-Uni); et à Carrousel, Londres (Royaume-Uni). Ses créations radiophoniques sont régulièrement diffusés sur France Culture et DUUU radio.

As everything stopped and the lockdown extended all over the planet, I dedicated myself to create new original music and review some historical works, with material that had been left out of the initial postproduction of the videos. In this way I approached again to the expedition in the Patagonian Ice Fields, a project that I made in collaboration with members of a rescue mountain team. Patagonia is dramatically affected by climate change and global warming. The glaciers are disappearing in front of our eyes. In this context, a group of persons find themselves lost in a labyrinth of ice. United and in solitude, they contemplate the collapse of their universe.

Charly Nijensohn (Buenos Aires, 1966) ist ein multidisziplinärer Künstler der in Berlin lebt und arbeitet. Seine künstlerische Arbeit ist vielschichtig. Nijensohn arbeitet an der Idee einer Konfrontation zwischen dem Menschsein und den natürlichen Kräften des Universums, die uns umgeben. Die Beziehung zwischen der menschlichen Figur und dem sie umgebenden Raum stellt einen Konflikt dar, der real und existenziell zugleich ist. Er vertrat Argentinien mit einer Einzelausstellung auf der 50. Biennale in Venedig. Nijensohns Arbeit wurde auf der BienalSur in Buenos Aires (2017) und der Mediations Biennale in Polen (2012) präsentiert. Er stellte auf der Valencia Biennale (2001) kuratiert von Peter Greenaway, der Singapur Biennale (2008) kuratiert von Fumio Nanjo und der Dojima River Biennale in Osaka (2009) aus. Er stellte auch auf vielen Festivals aus, darunter die Transmediale, Videobrasil in Sao Paulo, Rencontres Internationales im Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) und Centre George Pompidou (Paris), Monitoring in Kassel, Visions of Nature, Kunst Haus Wien (2017/2018), Video Art in Latin America, States of Crisis, LAXART in Kalifornien (2017). Des Weiteren stellte er im Kröller-Müller Museum (Windflower, Perceptions of Nature, 2011) in Otterlo, Museum Morsbroich (Radical Shift) in Leverkusen, der Akademie der Künste (Realidad y Utopía, Argentiniens künstlerischer Weg in die Gegenwart, 2011) in Berlin, Whitechapel Gallery (2010) in London, Políticas de la diferencia im Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (MALBA) und Latin America: Video Views - Latin American Artist of the Twentieth Century, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York aus.

Surrounded by the sound of nocturnal animals, a girl falls into a deep sleep. Gradually we are drawn into her dream, which unfolds into a cosmic journey through the meadows of Erpe-Mere, a rural community in Belgium.

Noemi Osselaer was born in Aalst, Belgium. She studied audiovisual arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Ghent. Her graduation film ‘Erpe-Mere’ screened at several festivals including Dok Leipzig and IFFR. From January 2021 till December 2022 she will be a resident at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent.

Les pelages bruns, beiges, blancs et noirs se fondent à l’ocre de la terre et des murs inondés de soleil. Calme à l’heure du repos, l’endroit devient assourdissant quand vient le moment de nourrir les bêtes, qui entament alors leur concert d’aboiements. Dans le refuge pour chiens errants d’Agadir au Maroc, plus de 750 animaux trouvent aide et protection en attendant d’être adoptés par une famille. Chaque journée ressemble à la suivante, rythmée par la seule distraction des repas. Avec un regard aussi empathique qu’alerte aux jeux de lumière et de textures, Halima Ouardiri observe la chorégraphie qui régit la vie de la population animale, dont le quotidien suspendu évoque l’attente bien plus tragique de millions d’êtres humains à la recherche d’une terre d’accueil.

Halima Ouardiri est cinéaste. Suisso-Marocaine, elle travaille entre le Canada, le Maroc et la Suisse. Elle a obtenu un B.A. en Science Politique et un B.F.A. en Production filmique à la Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema à Montréal (Canada). Son premier film, "Mokhtar", tourné en Super 16mm, a reçu un très bon accueil dans une centaine de festivals internationaux tels que le TIFF – Toronto International Film Festival (Canada); la Berlinale, Berlin (Allemagne); le Festival international du film de Rotterdam (Pays-Bas); et le Festival international du film de Dubaï (Émirats arabes unis), avant d’être diffusé sur France 3, sur CBC et sur la TSR. Le film a remporté de nombreux prix, dont deux Prix de la Meilleure Réalisation et cinq Prix du Meilleur Film. Tourné dans un petit village du sud du Maroc, le film met en scène les villageois, beaucoup de chèvres et un hibou. De tous les interprètes, seul le hibou est un acteur professionnel. Aujourd’hui, Halima Ouardiri passe au long-métrage avec "Nico", un récit initiatique inspiré de son expérience comme garde du corps à Genève (Suisse), sa ville natale, et avec le développement du scénario de "La Camel Driving School".

A violent supermarket incident involving a refugee in East Germany is reenacted in a film studio. Ten citizens observe and comment on the case, which highlights the blurred distinction between civil courage and vigilante justice.

Producer / Director Mario Pfeifer's (*1981, Dresden / Germany) films explore representational structures and conventions in the medium of film and video, in locations ranging from Mumbai to New York, from Brazil to the Atacama desert, from Tierra del Fuego to East-Germany to the Western Sahara. He conceives each project out of a specific cultural situation, researches social-political backgrounds and weaves cross-cultural art historical, filmic, technological and political references into a richly layered practice.

The impetus to think how this project has been pulled to start from the end, is a symptom of the crisis of historical experience. As the seminaries in the Basque Country began to close, their pedagogical methods have been reduced to the imagination of several generations. "LOVE NEEDS TIME TO KILL" is about the emptiness distilled by the loss of what’s natural and cultural. Over recent decades Franciscan seminaries, along with those of other Orders, have been closing down across the Basque Country. With their closing, comes the loss of a pedagogy that has been a fundamental pillar in the education and identity of the Basque Country. Part of the pedagogical approach was to have large collections of plant and animal specimens, collected from missions in the American, African, and Asian colonies. This research project connects the identity of the diaspora in the missions and their forgotten pedagogical approach to the construction of an exotic and colonial imaginary. On the stage of a small theater in one of the closed seminaries, we have recreated a Baroque still-life scene from the 17th century. The still-life becomes a form of barricade, a gesture of struggle and resistance, in which the inert yet expressive bodies of the animals assert a sense of destiny and uncertainty that has accompanied us from the Romantic era through to present day.

Txuspo Poyo ( Alsasua, Navarra) holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU). In 2001 he completed an ISCP residency sponsored by Foundation Marcelino Botín and also studied at the CADA center of New York University. In 2006 he received funding from the Vegap Foundation and The Valencia Art Foundation for his Delay Glass project, and the same year won the Prize Gure Artea of the Basque Government. In 2008, he was awarded first prize at the 10th Unión Fenosa International Exhibition. In 2015 he received the Multiverso grand funding from The BBVA Foundation for La Engaña tunnel project and 2018 from Huarte contemporary Art Center and the Navarra Government for Izaro project. In 2019 he received funding from the Vegap Foundation. He has taken part in the Madrid Region’s 15th Image Symposium, and has been an invited speaker on master’s programs at the University of Cuenca and the University Of Basque Country UPV-EHU. He has held solo exhibitions in venues such as BBVA Foundation, Madrid, Artium Museum in Vitoria, Centre d’Art La Panera in Lleida, the Costa Rica Museum of Contemporary Art and Design and the Montcada Gallery of La Caixa foundation in Barcelona. His group exhibitions include Geopolíticas de la animación showing at the CAAC in Seville and MARCO in Vigo; Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Madrid/Berlin; the 2nd Angola Triennial; the FILE in São Paulo; Incógnitas at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Cine y casi cine at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid; Multitude at the Artist Space Gallery in New York, and Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, in Guarene-Torino, Italy.

“Queer Landscapes | Segues from Endless” is an experimental portrait of the character in the state of transition. Through their research the different characters and voices form a multilayered essay about queer intimacy, loneliness and resistance. This daydream plot becomes a choir of an oppressed identities, which become revolutionary and free. The essence of the film is based on the informal community of performers of different social backgrounds, gender identities, nationalities and migration status (Chile, France, Mexico, Poland, Ukraine). The combination of their personal stories, alongside fragments of literary works, films, memoirs, and dream notes creates a mosaic structure, situated in the genre of queer abstraction.

Wojciech Pus is an artist engaged in various fields of art: film, theatre, visual arts, and opera. In his works he combines the aesthetics of experimental film with elements of light and video installations, giving them a cinematographic character. He has created an original, recognisable style, largely referring to rhythm, movement, and time, analysed by the artist using the medium of film. Pu? confronts the viewer with abstract representations having narrative potential, constructed with the use of montage and music. His works are on the verge of two realities – the actual one, and the one created by the film’s visuality.

East of Skopje there is a small quiet square where you can sometimes hear the trace of orchestral music. If you follow these sounds, they lead you into a large studio. The "Film & Music Ensemble" (FAME's project) in Skopje specialises in music for film. The hundred or so musicians, sound engineers, etc., who're part of it come every day to record scores from all over the world. The composers usually attend the sessions by teleconference. On the same day, you can move from a French TV drama to a Bollywood production. Following a smooth-running mechanism, the orchestra continuously produces music to support images and to give them their emotional tones. On the small square next to this large studio, life follows its course in a quiet indifference.

Coming from visual arts and developing a practice on the edge of music, radio and cinema, Simon Ripoll-Hurier (born 1985) tracks down situations of listening. Between 2014 and 2017, he developed Diana, a research project that includes film, video, performance and radio. He is now working on a film connecting today’s Silicon Valley with old CIA parapsychological experiments. His work has been presented in festivals, biennials, museums, galleries, and broadcasted on the radio. He also plays with Les Agamemnonz, an instrumental surf band, and co-founded *DUUU, an artist-run webradio.

Ben Rivers' films study the otherworldly, looking for places and stories outside the daily conventions of reality. Look Then Below was filmed in a Somerset transformed into a coloured, mist-enveloped island in an oily ocean with a cave basking in a subterranean glow. Time seems to stand still there. After Slow Action and Urth, this is the final part of a trilogy developed with American SF author Mark von Schlegell.

Ben Rivers studied Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art, initially in sculpture before moving into photography and super8 film. After his degree he taught himself 16mm filmmaking and hand-processing. His practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction. Often following and filming people who have in some way separated themselves from society, the raw film footage provides Rivers with a starting point for creating oblique narratives imagining alternative existences in marginal worlds. He is the recipient of numerous prizes including: FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film Two Years At Sea; the Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel 42, 2011; shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2010/2012; Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists, 2010. Recent exhibitions include: Slow Action, Hepworth Wakefield, 2012; Sack Barrow, Hayward Gallery, London, 2011; Slow Action, Mattâ’s Gallery, London and Gallery TPW, Toronto, 2011; A World Rattled of Habit, A Foundation, Liverpool, 2009. Artist-in-focus include Courtisane Festival; Pesaro International Film Festival; London Film Festival; Tirana Film Festival; Punto de Vista, Pamplona; Indielisboa and Milan Film Festival. In 1996 he co-founded Brighton Cinematheque which he then co-programmed through to its demise in 2006 “ renowned for screening a unique programme of film from its earliest days through to the latest artist’s film and video.