All Films in Competition

Kisses of the Wind embodies the director’s sensory experiences of the Port Waikato dunes in New Zealand through a series of digitally edited still photographs and sound. As the images of sand patterns transform into one another, they create an illusion of movement that echoes the rhythm of ocean waves. In this liminal space, between stillness and motion, sand and sea, the film suspends fixed boundaries, allowing new forms and meanings to emerge.

Katia lives in Berlin since 2022, she is fleeing a war. As she reflects on the deep wounds that a war can leave, she tells Yann how important and inevitable it is to try to be happy.
Meanwhile the clouds are drifting in the night, people are drifting in th clouds, in the streets, at sea.

A 14-minute wordless cine-manifesto born from darkness, chance, and the eroticized body. Written after the downfall of the Occident, this prophecy uses painting—the freest of arts—to resist the indifferent flow of linear time.

European culture once rested on the stone; it supported what stood above but crushed what lay beneath. Now, as foundations dissolve and freedom drowns, we perform a symbolic act: returning the stone, but setting it upon the water. „Manifesto of the Stone upon the Water“ is both a declaration about the survival of art and the act of painting itself.

EQUAL is a cinematic exploration of Richard Serra’s sculpture of the same name on display at the Museum of Modern Art.
The sculpture consists of eight forged-steel blocks stacked in pairs. Each rectangular block measures 5 feet by 5 and 1/2 feet by 6 feet and weighs 40 tons. The blocks are rotated and stacked so that the top and bottom blocks align differently. Yet the four stacks are each 11 feet tall.
This simple form makes me think about space, mass, weight, and time. Like the sculpture, my film seeks to both overwhelm the viewer and invite contemplation.

A childhood memory brought to life through a mixture of archival found photos, staged scenes, and stop-motion animation, “The Man Cave” is a brief, bewildering journey inside two young girls’ shared dream of manhood.

“2nd Day & the End of the World” is a 12 minutes handrawn op paper, Hyper-Family-Drama about processes of secession, post-traumatic attacks, tempting body conditions & powerless loneliness in a climate-catastropic universe.

swallows dancing over an alpine lake

An 8mm reel of a Hollywood western flickers to life once more. As the first call of the bugle rings out, the cavalry charges—swift and chaotic—while the film strains to keep pace. It ripples, trembles and tangles, caught in the chaos of gunfire and the thunder of galloping hooves.

Gluttony is a poetic short film driven by ECHLO’s original poem and music. It frames consumption not as a moral failure, but as an existential attempt to fill an inner void. The protagonist carries a literal hole in her chest—a raw space of longing that no amount of external stimulation can satisfy. Moving through surreal landscapes, she reaches for beauty and objects, yet every momentary relief collapses back into the void. The film redefines gluttony as an “excess of input”—the endless scrolling and distraction used to avoid the silence of modern life. Her body becomes a battleground of ritualistic consumption and exhaustion. Ultimately, Gluttony offers a compassionate lens on this hunger, viewing it as a universal human symptom. Rather than condemning excess, the film invites viewers to witness their own longing with tenderness and clarity.

Before our very eyes a strange human-bird hybrid undergoes constant transformation to cope with the omnipresent tensions of economical, ideological, military, and climatic threats.

The dreamer wakes up in abstract vastness. In this surreal space, terrain is unfixed and moves in time. As the dreamer starts running from the impermanent, they come to accept the unknown. Nothing can remain still.

Family meal time goes haywire in this video work created during the current war; ordinary routines dissolve into chaotic, spectacular performance as everything falls apart.

Between blurred walls, a being subjected to controls and interfaces undergoes a metamorphosis that gradually fragments it, in a futile attempt to complete an endless task.

An animated suite in five movements that transforms urban decay and personal mourning into a visual refuge.
Through the singularity of the small, and exploring the urban skin through the ephemeral traces of Valencia’s street art, Microcosmos is an experimental documentary animation that immerses us in the collection of existence.

Lost in her daydreams and oblivious to the cuckoo egg in her nest, a bird mother is breeding her own catastrophe.