Programme Paris 2026

Assemblies Anonymous takes shape as a mystical collection of ephemeral architectures found in the peripheral woods of nordic suburbs. Existing between sculpture, shelter and ruin, these organic, collective assemblies remain in a state of constant transformation. Shot on 16 mm film and accompanied by an electroacoustic soundscape composed on a Buchla analogue synthesiser, the work unfolds as a ritualistic journey through a landscape in which these living sculptures emerge, evoking a mythic time where youth, freedom and collective imagination intertwine.

Jonna Kina (b.1984) lives and works in Stockholm and Finland. Her multidisciplinary practice often begins with deconstruction — revealing the structures, codes, and conventions that shape how we see, hear, and interpret. She blends digital and analogue, artificial and natural, tangible and imagined by challenging how perception is constructed, mediated, and transformed across different representation systems. Kina graduated from the The University of the Arts Helsinki, Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Time and Space Arts, department of Time and Space. She has also studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and in Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. Her works have been presented at the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; e-Flux Video & Film, New York, Berlinale Forum Expanded Program, Berlin; Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Espoo Museum of Modern Art EMMA, International Film Festival Rotterdam IFFR, Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Helsinki Art Museum HAM, Galleria delle Carrozze di Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence among others.

Bound by love and the olive trees they left behind, two Syrian friends in exile uncover the shared logic of violence that stretches from dictatorship to democracy. When one returns home after Assad's fall to film Syria's rebirth, his camera captures another cycle of violence, while tenderness endures as an act of resistance.

Rand ABOU FAKHER (1995, Syria) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels. Trained as a flautist, she later expanded her practice to the audiovisual arts, using film as a medium to explore memory, displacement and intimacy. Her debut short Braided Love (2018) premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival, followed by So We Live (2020), which screened at Berlinale Shorts and received several international awards. Why Do I See You In Everything? (2026) marks her feature debut, while her fiction project On the Way to Forgive I Forgot Myself is currently in development. In addition to her filmmaking, since 2022 she works as a programmer. She programmed for the Toronto Arab Film and currently working for ALFILM in Berlin.

locusts (2024) explores how the psychological legacy of war persists across generations, shaping bodies, memories and relationships long after the conflict has ended. Drawing on recorded testimonies of people who experienced the Second World War and its aftermath in southern England, the film brings together documentary voices and choreographed performances by a father and daughter. Through gestures of holding, hiding, swimming, drowning and building, their bodies become vessels for memories that are not their own. Moving between domestic interiors, underwater sequences and a forest, the film examines how trauma is transmitted through family relationships, embodied experience and the spaces we inhabit. As the two performers construct a fragile shelter, their movements suggest both the desire for protection and the possibility of breaking free from inherited patterns. Combining oral history, choreography and experimental cinema, locusts considers how the past continues to inhabit the present, and whether acts of remembrance and physical connection might open a space for healing.

Grzegorz Stefa?ski (b. 1983, Poland) is a London-based artist and filmmaker working across moving image, photography and performance. His practice explores the psychological and social construction of masculinity, intergenerational trauma, memory and human relationships, with a particular interest in the body as a site of emotional and historical experience. Combining cinematic language with choreography and performance, his films investigate how gestures, physical interactions and spatial relationships reveal experiences that often resist verbal expression. Stefa?ski studied philosophy at Jagiellonian University before studying fine art under Miros?aw Ba?ka at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He completed an MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, in 2018. His work has been presented internationally, including at the Louvre, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Whitechapel Gallery, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Manifesta 11. He has participated in residencies at Tokyo Arts and Space and the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York.

Ira Sliusar is a Ukrainian director, cinematographer, and screenwriter based in Berlin. She studies at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) and already holds a Master of Fine Arts in Film and Television Image. Her work explores themes of loss, war, and intimacy, combining raw reality with poetic and symbolic imagery. My Little Rabbit, her most recent short film, received the Spotlight Grand Prix: Visions at the Concordia Film Festival and was screened at various international festivals, including the Up and Coming International Film Festival Hannover, ClujShorts International Short Film Festival, and others. Ira has another short in post-production and is currently developing her feature debut—a haunting, visually oriented exploration of love, death, and the impossible choice we face at the end of life.

Cranes on flat country. A Taiwanese chip giant is building Europe’s biggest semiconductor factory north of Dresden. The “building blocks of modern economy” play a central role against China, the USA, the rest of the world … Yet it is precisely in this place, where the new is grandly heralded, that a “forgotten future” lies buried. This was the centre of GDR semiconductor research, which strove to realise a social utopia by means of microelectronics. Some see the chip as a “weapon” in the fight for economic dominance and profit, others saw it as a political programme on the path to the “new human”. The film mixes neon-coloured images of a futuristic setting from the cleanrooms of the present with GDR science fiction and archive footage, unearthing what was buried. Once more, the promises of a golden future appear at the end. And the certainty that in the ground on which its gleaming factories are built what was declared dead only lies dormant.

Leon Meschede (b. 1999, Halle/Saale, Germany) is a filmmaker and visual artist. His work explores how culture and technology are remembered, politicized, and reimagined—particularly within the context of the young post-socialist identity following the german reunification. He is currently a MFA student at Columbia University in New York. His short films have been screened at festivals such as DOK Leipzig, as well as galleries and art museums such as Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Museum der Bildende Künste Leipzig, Werkleitz Festival, the Nordic House in Reykjavík, and Lkham Gallery in Ulaanbaatar.

Every day at 9:00 am in every city and town across the territories of unoccupied Ukraine, there is a moment of silence to recognize those who have been killed in the fight against Russia. Wherever people find themselves, they stop, if they can, to become provisional monuments to the soldiers, medics, rescue workers, and civilians who have been killed as a result of Russian armed aggression.

David Ross is a Canadian visual artist. His work over the past two decades has involved the production of moving image and photographic projects that have used architecture and the social spaces generated by architecture as a way of observing and commenting upon themes as varied as self-storage, the education of land surveyors, full-scale architectural mock-ups, and the photographic conventions of cemetery portraiture. Ross’ works have been presented in museum and gallery exhibitions including MoMA (US), Kunst Meran/o (IT), the Swiss Architecture Museum (CH), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (CA), and the National Gallery of Canada (CA). Film festival presentations have included the Sharjah Film Platform (AE), Toronto International Film Festival (CA) and Rencontres Internationales (FR). Monographic publications include Epithets the Book (OPA!, 2026), Archetypes (Park Books, 2021) and The Traces of Lost Facts (DOVA, Rice University, 2017). His work has been published in periodicals and journals including PLOT, Cassabella, Drawing Matter, Werk, Bauen + Wohnen, Harvard Design Magazine, and Flash Art. The Graham Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, and Arts Council England have supported his work. Ross has guest lectured and taught thematic courses for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Concordia University (Montreal), Ontario College of Art and Design University, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Estonian Academy of Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Most recently he has taught in Ukraine at the Lviv National Academy of Art and the Kharkiv School of Architecture.

After a Long Silence is part of a cinematic diptych connecting two realities that are rooted in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It casts a last glance over the contested region shortly before it would be ethnically cleansed by Azerbaijan. Following the narrative of a last inhabitant, the film explores themes of memory, displacement, loss, grief, trauma, and collective responsibility.

Pieter Geenen (°1979) is a Brussels based artist working in moving image, photography, sound and print. He holds a master’s degree in photography and he is a laureate of the international postgraduate program Transmedia at Sint-Lukas Brussels. His work has been presented at the international film festivals of Rotterdam, New York and Hong Kong, VIDEOEX (Zürich), Doclisboa (Lisbon), Images Festival (Toronto), EMAF (Osnabrück), ExiS (Seoul), FID Marseille, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Beursschouwburg (Brussels), M-Museum (Leuven), La Capella (Barcelona), FRAC Basse-Normandie, Argos (Brussels), Médiathèque FMAC (Geneva), Annie Gentils Gallery (Antwerp), V2Vingt (Brussels) and Eté78 (Brussels) amongst others. He was awarded the Input/Output Art Prize and the ArtContest Art Prize. His work is part of the collections of the Flemish Community, National Bank of Belgium, Colección INELCOM Arte Contemporáneo (Madrid), Emile Van Dorenmuseum (Genk) and different private collections. Together with audiovisual artists and filmmakers Sirah Foighel Brutman, Eitan Efrat and Meggy Rustamova he is a founding member of Messidor, a collective platform for reflection, production and distribution.

This synopsis, just after you opened it and it appeared before your eyes, was shot straight across the sea by a wire as thin as a human hair. All information reaches us through wet tubes laying at the bottom of the ocean. During the period of two years, I visited specific landing sites of the Estlink1 optic fiber cable in Estonia and Finland. Here the cable comes ashore, at these points it delivers and transmits almost everything; from love letters to election results.

Aidan Timmer (b. Amsterdam, The Netherlands) his work is mainly based in the audio-visual field. He has increasingly immersed himself in documentary, essayistic and hybrid filmmaking. Most of his films or works arise from this obsessive fascination for all that attempts to convey truth or verity. He sees his films as essayistic explorations of objectivity and the illusion of impartiality. With video and audio as a tool, Timmer tries to give forgotten moments of insignificance, significance again by hyper analysis.

Prelude: where are you i miss you is conceived as a site-specific installation for a gallery presentation in two interconnected rooms on the bel étage of a nineteenth-century townhouse on the Mauritsweg in Rotterdam. Taking the architecture of the gallery as its point of departure, the filmwork transforms the space into the imagined home of a young woman and a young man. Through a three-channel film work, a sequence of short scenes unfolds across adjacent rooms, offering fragmentary glimpses into their daily lives. Rather than constructing a linear narrative, the work dwells on moments of proximity and distance, presence and absence, suggesting the emotional contours of a shared domestic space. The filmwork occupies a space between domestic interior, artist's studio, and film set, where existing architecture and cinematic fiction become inseparable. A house that has long functioned as a gallery and presentation space temporarily returns to its possible former life. Visitors/ spectators are invited in an environment that unfolds like a novella, where moving images, sound, and material elements evoke the memory of two young lives. Continuing our ongoing exploration of film, installation, and constructed environments, where are you i miss you, considers how architecture can hold fiction, memory, and the quiet narratives embedded in everyday space.

Nanouk Leopold and Daan Emmen have both graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and have been working together under the name Leopold Emmen since 2008. Nanouk Leopold also studied directing at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. Nanouk Leopold is a film, theatre and opera director and screenwriter who makes feature films that have premiered at a.o. Berlin and Cannes. Her work is celebrated for its consistent artistic character, its restrained expression, and the way space and location determine the story. Daan Emmen is a visual artist who makes sculptural installations and works with analogue and digital photo and video techniques. He also works for a socially engaged foundation, within the context of art education and vocational studies. Together Leopold and Emmen have developed an interdisciplinary practice, that focuses on the crossover between art, film, theatre and architecture. We make in situ and staged film installations. Our work explores the possibilities of a cinematographic and spatially designed narrative.

Sulphur Edges is a choreographic encounter shaped with and through place. Created during Forum Dança’s PACAP 8/Mystery School residency, this one-hour film unfolds across San Miguel’s thermal sites, public pools at the ocean's edge, the traces of a mine and the shell of an abandoned hotel. These locations act not as a backdrop but as co-agents in the process of sensing, listening, and transmission. Guided by Meg Stuart’s direction, the performers respond intuitively to the elemental conditions of each site. Movement arises from relation — to temperature, texture, invisible forces, and to one another. Bodies waver along thresholds between stillness and trembling, containment and release, public space and private reflection. Edges of architecture, voice and presence remain permeable. Fantasy flickers in the in-between, where a pool becomes a portal, a ruin becomes a score and attention becomes the work itself. The camera moves as a choreographic partner, tracing tensions between body, sites and atmosphere. What remains is a record of relations — provisional, porous, alive.

Meg Stuart is a choreographer, director, and artist living and working between Berlin and Brussels. Her practice spans performance, moving image, and installation, approaching the body as a sensitive terrain where memory, sensation, and imagination converge. She is drawn to moments of disorientation and transformation, where habits loosen and new ways of sensing and relating can emerge. Since founding Damaged Goods in 1994, Stuart has developed an expansive body of work, from solos and large-scale choreographies to films, collaborative processes, and research platforms. Her projects grow through long-term collaborations with performers, musicians, visual artists, scenographers, filmmakers, and thinkers. Improvisation runs through her practice as both method and ethic: a way of listening closely to bodies, environments, and the forces moving between them. Moving image extends her choreographic thinking, with the camera acting as a partner in tracing how bodies resonate within architectures, landscapes, and transitional spaces. Stuart also initiates contexts for collective inquiry and transmission, including zero point and the Mystery School of Choreography. Her work is presented internationally. Her distinctions include the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (2018), Deutscher Tanzpreis (2018), Bessie Award (2008), and Guggenheim Fellowship (2023).