All Films in Competition

This personal experimental film explores the lingering effects of trauma. A figure marked by past injury seeks light. There is no traditional narrative. Occasional sounds, such as the hiss of wind, intensify the sense of tension. The repetition of images mirrors the way trauma resurfaces, creating a portrait of memory and resilience.

Textura Vitae is a stirring musical animation that unravels leaves as a microcosm of the natural world, accompanied by stunning AI-generated images. Imagining a journey of exploration, from the forest canopy down to microscopic cellular structures, the film reveals the intricate beauty of organic forms through a synthetic lens. Utilizing multiple generative AI platforms, the leaf evolves from a simple botanical object into a metaphor for nature’s intelligent design and transformative energy, manifested through vein textures, pulsing chlorophyll, and abstract cellular geometries. Ultimately, it is a visual dialogue that encourages curiosity about the layered rhythms of leaves and the unseen complexities within nature.

This experimental film delves into the century-old history of Hong Kong’s iconic tram system. Through a nonlinear collage of industrial materials — wood, concrete and steel — the film reconstructs the tram as a contested vessel of cultural identity, embodying the tensions and transformations of urban modernity.

In a city—evoking, without specificity, a city of the Roman Empire—the poem depicts a state of waiting: the arrival of the “Barbarians” has been announced, the emperor himself seems ready to submit to their authority, and every hypothesis about the future is possible. The city holds its breath in anticipation… But who, exactly, are these “Barbarians”? And what if they do not come?

Célian, a 6-year-old kid with autism spectrum disorder, splits his time between a harsh and dull reality and a profuse and disjoined imagination in which he takes refuge. He’s interested in everything: astronomy, biology, chemistry… but given his young age, all this information tends to collide in his little head. While his life is punctuated by a whole series of rituals, one day something happens that perturbates his well-oiled daily routine, pushing him to take a decision on his own, while respecting his parents’ orders as well as possible. He will set off on an adventure, alone, and at the risk of his own life, and will overcome all the obstacles he will encounter by escaping into his imagination.

My father David Nerwen, was a visual artist and graphic designer. He worked in the printing industry where he applied his keen sense of color to offset lithography and color separation processes. As a fiber artist he created hand stitched abstract wool designs on canvas and produced a large body of work ranging in scale from 10 inches to 6 feet in a period of over 50 years.

Color Separation weaves together found and shot footage to reflect on my father’s creative work, his decline in health and the disorientation of losing a parent.

A personal reckoning unfolds through fragmented images of the body; hands as deeds, eyes as all knowing, projections as reflections. My pledge ‘…I am a Jew…’ is not theatre.The film interrogates interdependence in violence and survival, revealing that to become a perpetrator may be the most profound violation of all.

Postcard Potholder emerged from a Mail Art “add and pass” exchange rooted in Fluxus traditions of collaboration, chance, and process. Each animator contributed to a circulating series of mailed postcards and documented the successive evolution of linework. When sequenced in rapid succession, these scanned moments form a kinetic tapestry where line and color weave into neoplastic animontage. The work transforms tactile correspondence art into motion, turning everyday exchanges into a shared act of mark-making.

While wandering the streets and canals of Venice, Italy, two filmmakers experience dualities: modernity and antiquity, crowded and empty spaces, melancholy and joyfulness, static and kinetic, day and night. Their distilled experiences are translated through the lens of this collaborative diptych.
La Struttura/Flusso-Flux is a collaborative experimental city symphony built from the directors’ sensory experiences in Venice. They were invited to Venice for a screening of their previous films and instinctively started indexing their time together. As they moved through the city, they filmed and photographed their surroundings, sometimes landing in the same place. What resulted is a diptych that shows both each director’s unique vision and how their work intersects.

Postcard Potholder emerged from a Mail Art “add and pass” exchange rooted in Fluxus traditions of collaboration, chance, and process. Each animator contributed to a circulating series of mailed postcards and documented the successive evolution of linework. When sequenced in rapid succession, these scanned moments form a kinetic tapestry where line and color weave into neoplastic animontage. The work transforms tactile correspondence art into motion, turning everyday exchanges into a shared act of mark-making.

In 2025, working with a 1909 hand-cranked projector inspired my first experiment with hand-painting on film. This fragile 35mm scroll reflects life’s impermanence; as I manually turn the gears under an 800-watt light, history flows through a „crack“ in time.

The title, „Listen to the wind eight hundred times,“ draws from a Chinese anecdote about finally perceiving the landscape and Dao of life.

The film explores a personal feeling the two queer filmmakers face again and again in their daily lives and uses an experimental approach to convey that feeling. A person runs through meadows and bushes, their breath is heavy, sounds are distorted, and time feels unstable. There is no visible pursuer, yet the urgency never fades. The film ends with a sudden silence and a sense of relief, fragile, almost unfamiliar. The question lingers: whether there ever was a reason to run or if stopping would have been an option.
Reflecting on the weight that comes when societal norms are pushed upon people who fear falling short of their rigid rules.

In the film „BLISS“ a group of women escape a traumatic event to create a utopian, self-sufficient community, becoming a living caryatid that explores the power of femininity, nature, and the search for grace