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Life on the island follows the changing pace of day and night. Where the only road seeps into the forest, the air gets warmer, more humid. Here, in the shade of tall trees, a man is at work with his tool. The sounds he produces blend in with the sounds of the all-embracing nature. His daily routine is directed by light and shadow until the sun sets. At night, at the other end of the road, his loneliness is softened by the voices of the others, next to the warming fire, until the first light.

Isabell Heimerdinger was born in Stuttgart, Germany. She studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and received an MFA in photography at the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles. During her years in Hollywood, she made a living working in special effects animation. Unsurprisingly her art work revolves around the conditions of filmmaking. In 2008, she shot her first narrative short film in France (Detour), followed by a series of experimenal films set in Beijing (Good Friends, Blind Date, Mr. Xu) and in Italy (Giorgio). While the settings of her films are always real, the stories and the characters that inhabit them are not. Isabell Heimerdinger lives and works in Berlin. Her films have been shown among other venues at Berlinische Galerie, Kino Arsenal, Centre George Pompidou, Art Film at Art Basel, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and various international film festivals.

Two daughters of a Nepalese Tamang family are preparing to study abroad. Their hopes for a better life are high, but the price is immeasurable. They have to leave behind what is the Tamang people‘s greatest good: their family. The sisters seek a conversation with their mother and grandmother, who still live arduous lives following the old tradition.

Ronja Hemm grew up in Bamberg and studied time-based media at University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. During her studies she devoted herself mainly to documentary formats. The documentary film For Your Sake is her graduation film.

"Sublime" est un texte écrit en 2018 par la plasticienne Margaux Henry-Thieullent. Elle a ensuite donné carte blanche à la musicienne Molpé en 2019 pour la création musicale. En 2020, "Sublime", devient un projet a vocation immersive et expérimentale. À partir d'un travail de sculpture digitale sur iPhone, Margaux Henry-Thieullent réalise une série intitulée "Encore des Morceaux" de quatre vidéos, toutes produites au début de la période de confinement en France. "Sublime", est la première vidéo de cette série. Elle questionne la construction de notre mémoire contemporaine laissant place à l’émergence de récits organiques. Dans le projet "Sublime", on assiste directement à l'éclatement de la caverne digitale. Notre société du spectacle navigue violemment au cœur de lieux oniriques, des théâtres virtuels où se désacralise le réel. D’autres perceptions du dehors se dessinent alors, certainement par nécessité, à la frontière d’un nouveau langage : celui qui nous rassemble encore.

Margaux Henry-Thieullent, est une artiste plasticienne française. Architecte, diplômée de Paris Malaquais en 2019, elle montre pour la première fois son travail de dessin la même année au salon DDessin à Paris (France) ainsi qu'au Festival Vrrraiment à Toulon (France). En octobre 2020, la Galerie 5un7 à Bordeaux (France) présente son travail. Dès la réouverture des lieux de culture, Margaux Henry-Thieullent participera à l'exposition collective, "Vaste Monde #2" organisée par la Villa Beatrix Enea, Centre d'Art Contemporain d'Anglet (France). Elle travaille actuellement sur son premier solo show pour 2021, qui sera présenté à la Cité des Arts de Bayonne (France).

Discovery of a girl in Red Cross footage - a sensorial journey towards her, exploring her intimacy. Dreaming of her growing up to be a woman in this desert world, this wind, this water, under the sun, while time seems to spin in circles.

Born in 1997, Linn Nora Henz starts a Bachelor in Philosophy at the University of Zurich and leaves for an art propedeuticum at Lausanne School of Arts (ECAL). To further work in essay and art film, she continues her studies at HEAD Geneva, Cinéma Department and focuses on editing. She persues her interest in sound creation as a medium of its own, but also for film and installation works. Besides, she has been collaborating in multidisciplinary projects and curatorial researches.

Cette vidéo est une réaction artistique à la pandémie de Covid qui s’est déroulée au cours de la dernière année. Une bouée, dispositif passif et fixe de signalisation, que je remplis d’images souvenir et d’impulsions de mouvement. Un drone monte et descend. Je montre les êtres humains en tant que foule dans un stade de football et en petit groupe de vacanciers sous un parasol sur une plage déserte.

1961: naissance à Düsseldorf, en Allemagne. 1980-86: études de beaux-arts, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Allemagne). Depuis 1993, travaux libres de vidéo documentaire et expérimentale

An immersive cinematic poem of a seven year journey of return, "Kitâb al-Isfâr: Book of the Journey," weaves together stories of near-death and mystical experience in Andalucia. When I was 19 I set out, hoping I could learn the meaning of life by "experiencing everything." I bought a car for 20 marks in a cafe in Ulm. I spray painted it yellow and green and drove it from Holland to Romania to Spain, sleeping in the back seat in a red blanket. Driving down to Malaga, at the crest of the mountains, the brakes went out. As the car sped down the mountain then crashed, I lost consciousness, followed by three days and nights of visions. What did I see, what did I understand? The Shaykh al-Akbar, sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn 'Arabi, writes that the journey only has true meaning if it brings a new beginning. In traveling, the heart becomes the goal of the journey.

Baba Hillman is an artist and filmmaker who grew up in Japan, Venezuela and Panama and works between France and the U.S.. Her films and performance works explore memory, history, perception and the poetics and politics of place, language, and the body. Her films have screened at festivals and museums including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, FIDMarseille, Edinburgh Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Ann Arbor Film Festival, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Athens Avant Garde Film Festival, ICAIC Havana, Africa World Documentary Festival, Yaounde, MIX Brazil and European Media Art Festival, Osnabruck, among others.

A young man’s letter to his mother, sent home to New Zealand from England during the First World War. London’s Royal Parks are the picturesque setting for revisiting empire, tourisms and longing in this hybrid film that features the artist’s grandfather’s photography and writings from his enlisted travels.

Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is currently Associate Professor in Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His work explores the nation state, particularly in colonised countries in an era of re-imagined communities and ideas of social and political utopia. His recent moving image works engage film as a cinematic art that blurs conventional genres of essay film, documentary and experimental narrative structures. Hipkins has exhibited extensively in international exhibitions and film festivals including: 16th 25FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival, International Competition, Zagreb (2020); Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (2020); 33rd Stuttgarter Filmwinter: Festival for Expanded Media, Stuttgart (2020); New Zealand International Film Festival (2020); Videoex, Zurich (2019); The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018, 2015); International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, International Competition (2017, 2016); The Jewish Museum, New York (2015); Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York (2014); Edinburgh Art Festival (2014).

Silo 5, once the largest granary in the world, was celebrated by architect Le Corbusier in 1927 as a glimpse towards a utopian modernity and an aesthetic future of architecture. Since the 1990’s Montreals gigantic silo complex has been an industrial ruin, far too big to be demolished. The abandoned granary, now an unintended monument to colonial global extractionism, marks as a place of storage the starting point for the video piece [?zi:lo]5. The work approaches different gestures and technologies of preservation and collection and therefore – simultaneously and inseparably – also questions of overwrite, delete or rewrite. Seen from the perspective of a near (queering) future, collections expose themselves as accumulations of gaps and omissions. These voids become resonating bodies, having the potential to open up spaces for other practices of intermediate storage.

Kerstin Honeit studied fine arts and stage design at the Berlin-Weissensee Art Academy. She lives in Berlin and is teaching media art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. In her practice as an artist and filmmaker, she works at the interface of different forms of staging. Her artistic research focuses on the investigation of representation mechanisms in the production of hegemonic image worlds, especially in connection with cultural and linguistic modes of translation in the context of the moving image. Since 2006 she has been showing her work in exhibitions and at festivals. Exhibitions / Screenings (Selection): La Centrale Powerhouse, Montreal / HMKV, Dortmund / International Short Film Festival São Paulo, São Paulo / Ruhrtriennale, Bochum / Kunsthalle Rostock, Rostock / Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin / Off Biennale Cairo, Cairo / Videoart at Midnight, Berlin / MMOMA Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow / Schwules Museum, Berlin / Fajr International Film Festival, Tehran / HKW, Berlin / Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen / SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen / Berlinische Galerie, Berlin / Les Complices*, Zurich / Videonale, Bonn / Gallery 400, Chicago / CCNY, New York / Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin

An essay film about crowds, nationalism, and the loneliness of rollercoasters. Born in London to Polish immigrants and now living in Germany, Krzysztof Honowski is very confused by what is happening right now in the two countries that he comes from. Examining the roots of his own political disappointment Honowski, together with the German actress Laura Sundermann, attempts to create a narrative that “speaks for a generation”. This is of course impossible, and this parody of a grand narrative soon gets derailed by the small details of the everyday. Honowski and Sundermann’s narrator must instead confront their own cowardice, exhaustion, and disavowal.

Born in London in 1986, Krzysztof Honowski studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge, and completed his postgraduate studies in Art at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) Cologne. He is a doctoral candidate in Art Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He has presented performances and exhibitions throughout Europe. These include 'Kustom Kar Kommandos Karaoke' (2015-16) at the Barbican London, Sound Acts Festival Athens, and a.m. London as well as 'And Now The Screen Is Struck By Lightning' at Tropez Berlin in 2019. Group presentations include Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Art Cologne, and Jewish Museum Berlin. In 2019 his short film 'Beasts Of No Nation' had its world premiere at the Ruhrtriennale and was selected for the Official German competition at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2020. In 2021 the film was chosen by the German Short Film Association for their Emerging Artists programme. A new installation will be presented at Kunstverein Leverkusen in 2021.

Radical feminist, street fighter, practical dreamer. This lyrical doc, shot in super 8, recounts Judy Rebick’s pivotal role in securing women’s rights over their own bodies in Canada. She lays out the key tenets of second wave feminism, even as a family time bomb threatens. The film closes with a harrowingly personal account of a divided self, and a startling embrace of mental illness as creativity.

Mike Hoolboom (1959, Toronto). Media artist and writer. He was schooled at the Funnel, Toronto's former underground movie palace, and has made more than 100 movies since 1980. He is the author/co/editor of 30 books. There have been 20 international retrospectives of his work, and he has won more than 80 festival awards, including the Best Short Film Award in Toronto IFF two times. In 2009 he received the Bell Award in Video Art, presented by the Canadian Council of Arts "for the exceptional contribution to the advancement of video art and practices in the country".

In a suite of 15 scenes, most arriving in a single master shot, the Russian heroine renegotiates her pact with Russian capitalism, and the new bodies and relationships it made possible. Shot in Saint Petersberg during a sunny autumn, when our faces could still bear the old light.

Alena Koroleva is a multidisciplinary Russian artist and curator. Co-founder of Kinodot EFF, author of few short films and sound releases. Mike Hoolboom makes movies and writes.

The fabrication ritual of the green coca powder (called mambe or "Jiíbie") unveils an ancestral myth of kinship. In the Muiná-Muruí community, the coca plant is not a product, but a sacred interlocutor, the beating heart of a collective body.

Laura Huertas Millan is a French-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist, whose practise stands at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art and research. Selected in cinema festivals such as the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and Cinéma du Réel, her films have earn prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. More than twenty retrospectives and focus of her work have been organised around the globe, in cinematheques such as Toronto ?s TIFF Lightbox, Harvard ?s Film Archive or Bogota ?s cinematheque, and leading film festivals as Mar del Plata and Rencontres du Documentaire de Montreal. In the art field, her latest solo exhibitions were held at the MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin ?s Modern Art Museum. Her films have also been exhibited and screened in art institutions (Centre Pompidou Paris, Jeu de Paume, Guggenheim Museum NY, Times Art Berlin) and biennials (Liverpool, FRONT Triennial, Videobrasil, Videonnale). They are part of private and public collections (Kadist, CNAP, Banco de la República de Colombia, CIFO, FRAC Lorraine, and others). Huertas Millan holds a practise-based PhD on “Ethnographic Fictions” developed between PSL University (SACRe program) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). She works as an educator in academic and alternative spaces. Since 2019, Huertas Millan is part of a research-based duo with curator and writer Rachael Rakes on critical anthropology and the aesthetics and politics of the encounter.

The video installation Modern Escape questioning the relation between the individual position and a global political context. We are preoccupied to examine our social behaviors and subjective relationship with both general historical issues and the different cultures we are part of. Time has blurred reality, art, living, exciting into a melting pot, where our POV has changed. The automated camera gaze takes over the photographer's empathetic gaze and starts all the way from the floor and ends in something that refers to a drone gaze. The world is migrating, walls are shooting up in the same speed as refugee camps and now infections are spreading. The art room is transformed into a living room, where a TV includes reality by showing excerpts from TV news. At the same time, television commercials offer surveillance equipment and anti-theft devices to keep the world out: The living room turns into a safe guarded castle. However, the reality insist to penetrate.

Hanne Nielsen and Birgit Johnsen have a MFA from the Art Academy of Jutland.. They have worked and exhibited together with video, documentary and installations since 1993. Latest can be mentioned their solo exhibition is AT THE FENCE af Kunsthal Viborg 2019, PROTECT/ RELEASE at Röda Sten Konsthall 2017, REVISIT a monographic exhibition at Overgaden 2018-19 as well as INCLUSION / EXLUSION at ARoS art Museum 2017. They have received Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl Nielsen’s Honorary Award in 2016, the Eckersberg Medal from the Royal Academy of Fine Art 2017 and latest The New Carlsberg Foundation`s Artist Grant in 2020.

A la tombée de la nuit, un oracle volant s’avance et déroule un message.

Pauline Julier est artiste et cinéaste. Ses films ont été présentés dans des festivals, des centres d’art et des institutions du monde entier, parmi lesquels le Centre Pompidou à Paris, le Festival Loop à Barcelone, Visions du Réel à Nyon, DOCLisboa, le Tokyo Wonder Site à Tokyo, le Museum of Modern Art en Tanzanie, le Centre d’Art de Genève, à New York, Madrid, Berlin, Zagreb, Bucharest, à la Cinémathèque à Toronto ou encore au Pera Museum Musée à Istanbul. Elle a reçu le Swiss Federal Art Price à Art Basel en 2010 et elle a présenté une exposition solo au Centre Culturel Suisse de Paris en 2017. Cette année, elle participe à l’exposition de Bruno Latour, « Critical Zone » au ZKM et finit une résidence d’une année à l’Institut Suisse de Rome pour un nouveau cycle de recherches et films. Nicolas Chapoulier, co-réalisateur sur ce film, est directeur artistique de la compagnie « Les 3 points de suspension » avec laquelle il tourne mondialement. Auteur, comédien, acrobate, plasticien et metteur en scène, il assure la mise en scène et la direction artistique des spectacles Nié qui tamola, La grande Saga de la Françafrique (nominé aux Molières 2017) Looking for Paradise, et Squash . En 2011, il rédige Nié qui tamola au Editions Requins Marteaux, un roman graphique documentaire. En 2014, il est lauréat de la Fondation Beaumarchais/SACD Ministère de la Culture- Bourse à l’écriture, Ecrire pour la Rue pour le projet Looking for Paradise. En 2015, il fonde le collectif 3615 Dakota, qui réalise des performances urbaines avec lequel ils sont invités au pavillon français de la biennale de Venise d’architecture en 2019.

In Migratie (9min 26sec), humans and puppets come together to tell a parable on Migration by Flemish writer, director and performing artist Pieter De Buysser. The performers wear masks, distorted reproductions of their own faces. Interactions between puppets and humans serve the purpose of doing things that would be outrageous/not allowed in real (i.e. setting a politician on fire). All this creates a very weird, alienating effect, increasing its impact for the viewers. The exaggerated game between reality and imagination opens up further possibilities on how to act. Using the detour of the imaginary and the artificial to be able to speak directly, might be a better strategy for relating film as a construction to parrhesia.

Eleni Kamma (Athens, 1973) is a visual artist, film maker and researcher. Her practice moves along a Moebius strip schema, that keeps circulating from her as individual artist to dialogical collaborations Kamma is based in both Maastricht and Brussels. She holds two nationalities, Greek and Cypriot. Due to her father’s refugee status in Greece and to the occupation of the northern part of Cyprus where her family originates, she experienced the feeling of ‘not properly belonging’ from an early age. This has led her to consider herself as a pároikos — someone living close to others as a temporary dweller — leaving her with questions of how to raise one’s voice in relation to one’s identity in times of migration and mobility. Whom and how to address? Kamma’s practice is informed by the inherent gaps, blind spots and contradictions within existing cultural narratives and structures. These involve issues of memory, authenticity and identity, often in the context of an increasingly paradoxical Europe. Since 2015, she is investigating parrhesia, the ancient Greek notion of the obligation to speak for the common good, even at personal risk. Kamma is part of the Brussels-based artist run organization Jubilee – Platform for artistic research and production.

In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organized the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (current day West Papua). Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations, and consisting of several of the wealthiest members of American society wielding 16mm film cameras, still photographic cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a microphone, the expedition settled for five months in the Baliem Valley, among the Hubula (also known as Dani) people. It resulted in Gardner's highly influential film Dead Birds, two books of photographs, Peter Matthiessen's book Under the Mountain Wall, and two ethnographic monographs. Michael Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller (Standard Oil) family, was tasked with taking pictures and recording sound in and around the Hubula world. Expedition Content is an augmented sound work composed from the archive’s 37 hours of tape which document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The piece reflects on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to multimodal anthropology, in the lives of the Hubula and of Michael, and in the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua.

Ernst Karel (1970, Palo Alto, USA) works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, and postproduction sound for nonfiction vilm, with an emphasis on observational cinema. His work often focuses on the practice of location recording and composing with unprocessed location recordings. In the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, Karel has collaborated with filmmakers and taught courses in reality-based audio. In fall 2019 he was the visiting fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. Veronika Kusumaryati (Bantul, Indonesia) is a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua. Her scholarship engages with the theories and historiography of colonialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality. She has worked as a curator and produced documentaries that were screened at the Jakarta International Film Festival, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, and Tampere Film Festival. She received her bachelor degree from the Jakarta Institute of Arts majoring in Film and Media Studies. She was a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab and currently a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Villa Empain was a passion, a vision, a plan, a home, an artwork. It is a heartfelt dream that was abandoned. Villa Empain, today, looks like it did in the 1930s, but it has turned into another entity held by the same fundament. Villa Empain exists between past and present, comprised of pieces of contemporary art within a single, unique piece of Art Déco and Bauhaus. It is a humble and enduring architectural body. It is a dichotomy of private mansion and public space. It is a conversation between a family’s history and an architect's dream, between a father's travelogue and an artist's performance, an encounter of water on stone, of charcoal on paper and of light on film. Concrete, marble, brick and steel: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable as a building. Yet, the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shapeshifters. Villa Empain's atmosphere is strange and full of wonders. The camera touches gently upon textures, as if to glimpse the moments they witnessed. There is a secret to unveil, but as with every good secret it evades us, it is elusive, we can never grasp it. This experimental short film is an attempt to find out about something that we cannot put our fingers on. So we put our fingers on wood, water, marble instead, and feel.

My interest in personal and political transformations led me to gain a Bachelor in Psychology and International Relations, before graduating from Doc Nomads, a travelling film school based in Lisbon, Budapest and Brussels. Throughout my career I was working as production manager and assistant director in documentary, fiction and advertising, and I was lucky that the projects took me to inspiring places in Africa, Australia, the US and Europe. My work is influenced by fragile environments and the people behind these. Drawing upon the idea of psychogeography, I am searching for traces, using analogue film to document and explore inner and outer transformations.

Patriarchal masculinity seems to catch its last breath in the sun. A story about a cold relationship between a father and his son. Their bond, plagued by indifference, disintegrates completely.

Born in 1991 in Vilnius, Lithuania, Vytautas Katkus graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in cinematography from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. He works as cinematographer in movies as well in video art projects. He won best young cinematographer award by Lithuanian Association of Cinematographers in 2014 and 2015. Since 2016 he is a member of Lithuanian Association of Cinematographers. ?Kolektyviniai sodai (Community Gardens), his debut short film, is selected at the 58th Semaine de la Critique.

The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two wells for performing initiation ceremonies built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them.

Chris Kennedy (b. 1977 Easton, Maryland, raised Cambridge, Maryland) is an independent filmmaker, film programmer and writer based in Toronto. He is the Executive Director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. He programmed for the Images Festival from 2003-06, Pleasure Dome from 2000-06 and for TIFF Cinematheque’s The Free Screen/Wavelengths from 2012-2019. He co-founded and co-programmed Early Monthly Segments from 2009 to 2018. His short experimental films have screened at over one hundred film festivals worldwide and have been featured in solo shows at the Canadian Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Forum, Nam June Paik Art Center, the La Plata Semana del Film Experimental and the Pacific Film Archive. His film “Watching the Detectives” won the Ken Burns Award for the Best of the Festival at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2018. He has presented the work of others in Belgium, Egypt, Germany, the US and Canada. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was co-founder and host of a weekly film salon. His work as an artist and programmer operates in dialogue with the history of film as art, exploring the medium’s materiality in a contemporary context.

Une nuit, un homme étrange apparaît. Arrivé non loin des côtes, il croise le chemin d’un fantôme, qu’il se décide à suivre.

Nicolas Keroulas est né en 1997.

In "German Shepherds Need Heroes Too" Roman Selim Khereddine reflects on the popularity of German and Belgian shepherd dogs in Morocco. "Do you inherit your dog's violent history?" he asks, taking into account that these dogs have been used in military and police work ever since their standardization as breeds at the turn of the 20th century. The video-essay traces the history of these dogs as mediums in hierarchical relations between different human groups, ie., in concentration camps, colonies and civil rights protests. The human-animal relationship is portrayed here as one shaped primarily by violence and domination, while the potential for agency of both owner and dog is questioned. "How much of your violent history does your dog inherit", then? Found footage – videos uploaded to Youtube by Moroccan dog fanciers, and news clips – is combined with an essay, which appears as a series of captions. In his text, Khereddine draws from colonial history, Islamic tradition, popular/meme culture as well as his own experiences, memories and opinions.

Roman Selim Khereddine (b. 1989) holds Master Degrees in History and Fine Arts. He lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.