Catalogue 2025
Below, browse the 2025 Rencontres Internationales catalogue, or search the archives of the works presented since 2004. New video clips are routinely posted and the images and text are regularly updated.
Liina Siib
Nii tuli lõpp
Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 17:31 | Estonia | 2025
"Nii tuli lõpp / And Then Came The End" is based on the experiences of a German Catholic priest, Magnus Frey, in prisoner of war camps in Narva, Estonia from 1945 to 1946. In this film, Siib depicts the locations of the story in Narva in their current state and without people, i.e. dilapidated buildings and winter landscapes. The soundtrack includes everyday life snippets from Frey’s memoirs, such as how prisoners of war were not paid the few rubles they had been promised and had their warm blankets taken away before winter came. And how religious prisoners managed to make communion bread despite the difficult conditions. And how hungry prisoners entertained themselves and each other by remembering their favourite dishes and writing down their favourite recipes. The excerpts of Frey’s diary are arranged on screen with a picture and on a soundtrack with music to create a prose poem of documentary material. The value of such micro-history, both as text and film, is not in revealing major developments or in interpreting historical turning points. Instead, the value is that individual anecdotes and fragments can be evidence that bring history to life and help us to take seriously the suffering and existence of others — past and present. By Teemu Mäki
Liina Siib is a visual artist, filmmaker and educator who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. The topic of her works ranges from femininity and social space to different manifestations of people’s everyday practices. She combines field observations with archival sources, historical accounts and various narratives circulating in the society as well as with psychoanalytic approaches and contemporary art and film theories. The characters, spaces and situations in her works tend to go unnoticed due to their ordinariness or are silenced or ignored. In her multidisciplinary approach she uses the means of film, video, photography, installation, performance, ready-mades, print media and artist’s books. Her experimental documentary videos and staged short films have been shown both at festivals of artists' films and at art exhibitions in the galleries, often using the format of expanded cinema. In 2011, the project A Woman Takes Little Space by Liina Siib represented Estonia at the 54th Venice Art Biennale. Her work has been included in several public and private collections (e.g., the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn, Neues Museum in Nürnberg and Moderna Museet in Stockholm).
Adam James Smith
Phantoms Of The Rising Sun
Experimental doc. | 0 | color | 8:20 | United Kingdom, Japan | 2025
The abandoned spaces of a Wild West theme-park, a love hotel, and a billionaire's mansion are brought to life with plant overgrowth and animals, late-summer rain, and the haunting remnants of past human habitation.
Adam James Smith is a British-American filmmaker based in New York. His filmmaking practice spans rural and urban environments across China, Japan, and the United States. Adam was educated in film at Stanford and anthropology at Cambridge, the latter of which he is currently affiliated with the university’s Visual Anthropology Lab.
Maryam Tafakory
Razeh-Del
Experimental doc. | 0 | color | 27:47 | Iran | 2024
In 1998, two schoolgirls sent a letter to Iran's first-ever women’s newspaper. While they waited to be published, they considered making an impossible film. Using citations and image intervention, Razeh-del journeys through parallel histories of war on images of women.
Maryam Tafakory, born and raised in Iran, works with film and performance. Solo screenings of her work include MoMA, BOZAR, NGA, Washington DC, and Academy Museum, among others. Selected group events include Tate Modern, Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival. She was awarded the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago Int’l Film Festival, Tiger Short Award at the 51st IFFR, and Best Experimental Film at the 70th and 71st MIFF. She was the 2024 winner of the Film London Jarman Award.
Wey Yinn Teo
latex labyrinth
Experimental video | mov | black and white | 12:38 | Malaysia | 2025
An old man awakens in a deforested rubber estate and finds himself in the colonial past. A distant old folk song ripples as he falls into the eternal loop of rubber tapping.
Wey Yinn Teo is a Kuala Lumpur based filmmaker. Her works often drift away from realms of reality and truth, exploring grief, alienation and the spectrum of the human experience. Aside from her work in sound and music, Yinn’s debut short ‘Enflightenment’ (2023) won the Audience Award in the Short Waves Festival in Poland, and has continued to screen in festivals including Leiden Shorts, EXPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin and more. 'Latex Labyrinth' has recently internationally premiered at the Ji.hlava IDFF and won 'Best Dance Video' at Eye Catcher Global 2025, Hong Kong.
Nicolas Thomé Zetune, Felipe André Silva
Minhas férias
Experimental fiction | 0 | color | 16:36 | Brazil | 2025
"I just arrived from the future, and there people still go to the movies. On second thought, maybe it's better to start like this: I just arrived from the future, and there people still go to the movies."
Nicolas THOMÉ ZETUNE (1993, Brazil) is a film director based in São Paulo. In 2012, he founded the production company FILMES DE AMOR. Nicolas' short films have been screened at some of the biggest film festivals, such as the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Nicolas' first feature film, “O Pequeno Mal”, was presented at FID Marseille in 2018. The second film, “O Tubérculo”, had its world premiere at the 27th Tiradentes Film Festival. In 2025, Nicolas was one of the selected participants for Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires, an international forum for discussion and project development organized in partnership with the Berlin Film Festival and BAFICI – Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival. He is currently preparing his third feature film, "Invisible Tunnel," a project selected for FIDLab (Marseille, France). Filming is scheduled for November 2026. Felipe ANDRÉ SILVA (1991, Recife) is a filmmaker and poet. His film credits include the features Santa Mônica (2015) and Passado (2020), and the short Cinema Contemporâneo (2019). He regularly works as a curator for the Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife festival. In literature, he has published the chapbooks o escritor Xerxenesky and o autocad de Britney Spears, and currently runs &legal edições, a digital micro-publishing house dedicated to contemporary poetry.
Justin Randolph Thompson
From the Campidoglio to the Zoo
Experimental film | super8 | color | 26:0 | Italy | 2023
From the Campidoglio to the Zoo is a film and sound work that examines the bridging of coloniality into a postwar Italy drawing upon the Ponte Flaminio, a bridge projected to celebrate fascist aspirations and to provide a ceremonious entry to the city, constructed based on the original proposal of Armando Brasini after WWII. The work borrows its title from an unpublished essay by author William Demby, written as a critique of the 1959 Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers which he attended. The congress, dedicated to the development of vision and solidarity amongst Afro-diasporic cultural producers existed in contrast to its hosting by the Istituto Italiano per l’Africa. The film is activated through a live sound performance recorded inside the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, by Dudu Kouate and Justin Randolph Thompson drawing upon the essence of negritude advanced in relation to the congress and the fragmentary nature of global Black unity. The sound was performed using a range of instruments that are part of the ethnographic collection of the Pigorini Museum in Rome housed by the Museo delle Civiltà. This was the first time that these instruments have been played since their placement in the collection in some cases over one hundred years ago. The work was supported by the British School at Rome and the Museo delle Civiltà.
Justin Randolph Thompson is an artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Based between Italy and the US since 1999. Thompson is a recipient of a 2024 MAP Fund Award, a 2022 Creative Capital Award, a 2020 Italian Council Research Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park amongst others. His work and performances have been exhibited widely in institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and The American Academy in Rome and are part of numerous collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museo MADRE. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and the arrogance of permanence by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse, social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity.
Aidan Timmer
Tarik en Ik
Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 21:48 | Netherlands, Belgium | 2025
Looking back on the footage of a hijacking at the Dutch national news broadcast, back in 2015. Aidan Timmer, who now shares the age of the culprit, reflects on the incident. While watching the young man struggle to recite a letter on live television, Aidan gets emotionally closer to the boy who took his father hostage.
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. ‘Tarik en Ik' portrays the emotional and obsessive relationship with a fear from the past.
Traumazone
Strings
Multimedia concert | mov | color | 19:35 | Germany | 2025
Project Strings is an audio-visual live performance and a video essay by TraumaZone art duo. The project is based on the book Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway, where the author reflects on how ideas, beings, and worlds are connected together like strings in the game of Cat’s cradle. Taking the string games as the main idea, the Strings talk about the concepts of human and non-human co-existing together in a social system. As the narrative moves forward, the audience sees the solid grid of connections gradually dissolving, and fluidity emerging as the core cooperation principle. The performance consists of reactive live and prerecorded visuals, and the live sound set, that includes a 20-second loop of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a solar panel, combined with fragments of AM broadcasts recorded during an art residency in rural Bavaria. The video essay also includes the shortened version of the material with more energetic pace of narration. Project Strings invites the audience into a meditative landscape where sound and visuals work together, destroying rigid structures and embracing a more fluid, interconnected modes of existence.
TraumaZone is a live-coding duo based in Berlin, consisting of Ksenia Sova, a video artist and Fyodor Stepanov, a sound designer. Their main focus is to politicize the art community by bringing to the spotlight important questions and creating a safe space for discussion. Ksenia Sova (they/them) is a media artist based in Germany. They studied media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Germany. They work are especially interested in exploring topics connected with alienation, isolation and anxiety of a queer body in digital environments. They use an expanded cinema approach to create time-based art-pieces for personal and group exhibitions. Fyodor Stepanov (he/they) is a sound artist and composer based in Berlin, Germany. He specialises on electro-acoustic works for interactive installations, audio-visual performances and video art. His creative output is driven by notions of transience, non-linearity, and ambiguity intrinsic to sound. The approach he has developed over the past decade combines generative algorithms with bits of radio broadcasts, field recordings, and electromagnetic listening to produce eerie acousmatic soundscapes that slowly develop over long periods of time.
Yuliya Tsviatkova
In the animal's skin
Experimental film | mov | color and b&w | 14:10 | Belarus, Poland | 2025
I dreamed that I turned into an animal. I could cross the border freely, through the forest. I entered that land unnoticed — the land I miss and fear at the same time. I met my grandmother, whom I haven’t seen for several years. She didn’t recognize me, but we stood very close to each other, in silence. In the Animal’s Skin explores the Belarus-Poland border cutting through the ancient Bia?owie?a Forest — a protected sanctuary turned into a place of walls, detentions, and fear. The wall not only blocks refugees, but also divides animal habitats and disrupts ancient migration routes. In Bohoniki, a Tatar village near the border, the local tatar community buries refugees found in the forest with quiet dignity — a stark contrast to political neglect.The film reflects on borders, violence, and the fragile connections between humans, animals, and the forest that bears silent witness.
Yuliya Tsviatkova (b. 1993, Belarus) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Germany. With a background in microbiology and fine arts, she approaches moving image as a space where scientific observation meets poetics. Her work explores ecology, memory, and political trauma through non-linear narratives, often centering on exile, environmental violence, and the entanglement of human and non-human lives.
Julio Urbina Rey
SUPERFICIES INCUBADAS
VR 360 video | mp4 | color | 4:58 | Peru | 2024
How can we escape our bodies from the isolation of our homes, from the canonical costumbrist modes of the home as a place of peace, refuge, and security? This immersive video piece, created during the context of planetary incarceration due to the COVID 19 pandemic, immerses us in a memento mori, an invented, amniotic space riddled with vulnerable, mutating recesses, questioning the limits of the living, of the human, the horror of the everyday, and the expansiveness of inhabiting. Through performance essays carried out in isolation, the artist digitizes various objects, captures his home with homemade photogrammetry, and creates an incubating postbiological laboratory that expands and unincarcerates the limits of the body, granting unimaginable possibilities to hybrid creatures in communion with the nonhuman. Drawing inspiration from Amazonian worldviews, they imagine ways to escape, emancipate themselves, and resist systems of control and domination.
Visual, new media, and performance artist. Graduated from the National Autonomous University of Fine Arts of Peru (UNABAP) in 2016 with a specialization in Sculpture and Integrated Arts. Her training includes workshops, artist residencies, and ongoing self-directed learning. Her practice constructs alternative systems of reality that function as critical and poetic tools aimed at subverting the politics of control that affect bodies. Using the body, installations, and hybrid media, she works at the intersection of personal experience and sociopolitical dimensions, exploring themes related to migration, displacement, technologies of control, the epistemic boundaries between human and non-human, and gender and sexual dissidence, reinterpreting ancestral knowledge from Peru and Latin America in light of current conflicts. Her works have been exhibited in Peru, several Latin American countries, and Europe.
Xavier Veilhan
Sculpture Park
Experimental VR | 0 | color | 20:0 | France | 2024
Sculpture Park by Xavier Veilhan is a virtual reality artwork that redefines traditional art viewing. This immersive experience combines sculpture, architecture, video, and lighting, showcasing Veilhan’s multifaceted artistic approach. Visitors explore interconnected spaces — The Island of Dogs, Island of Tom, The Cité Radieuse, The Light Machine, and The Forest — each reflecting themes of reality, perception, and the influence of architecture. VR technology allows for intimate interactions with artworks, offering multiple perspectives and dynamic responses to the viewer’s presence. Enhanced by a soundscape from I:Cube, the exhibition deepens sensory engagement, making "Sculpture Park" a pioneer in digital art exploration.
Xavier Veilhan (born in 1963, lives and works in Paris) has since the late 1980s created an acclaimed body of work (sculpture, painting, installation, performance, video, photography) at the intersection of classicism, modernity and high technology. His exhibitions question our perception and often generate an evolving ambulatory space in which the audience becomes an actor, like for Veilhan Versailles (2009), the series Architectones (2012-2014), Studio Venezia (2017), his proposition for the French Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia.Veilhan’s projects often involve collaboration with artists from other fields, such as architecture, music and fashion. He designed the visual universes for three Haute Couture shows for Chanel (2022-2023). His work has been shown in various acclaimed institutions across the world, like the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Mamco (Geneva), the Phillips Collection (Washington), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo) and MAAT (Lisbon).
Resem Verkron, Marc Serena
AS AVENTURAS DO ANGOSAT
Fiction | mov | color | 35:0 | Angola | 2025
In 2017 Angola launched its first satellite into space… and it was shortly declared lost. As Aventuras do Angosat is thed dream born from that frustrated endeavour, in the form of a musical film written and performed by Isis Hembe, one of the leading names in Angolan urban music, here transformed into Man Ré. Filmed in a single take in the Cazenga district of Luanda with new emerging talents.
Resem Verkron (1999) is part of two leading prominent cultural movements in Luanda: the urban art collective Verkron Collective and Geração 80. His debut short, Lola & Mami (2021), explored toxic masculinity. Marc Serena (1983) codirected the award-winning documentary Tchindas (2015), broadcast on PBS in the United States. His feature El escritor de un país sin librerías premiered at l’Alternativa and won a DIG Award for outstanding European investigative journalism.
Philip Vermeulen
Chasing The Dot
Multimedia installation | 0 | color | 18:35 | Netherlands | 0
Chasing The Dot (2021-ongoing) is an immersive rollercoaster of light and colour, a sensorial plunge into the limits of perception. Within a vast, horizonless Ganzfeld space, the audience floats through storm-like fields of colour, blazing with indirect light, 1 million lumen waves carrying vivid after-images. At the centre of their gaze, a single floating point, he foveal dot, flares to life and remains fixed, no matter where the eye turns. Premiered at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, this installation explores stroboscopic thresholds and synaesthesia. Inspired by Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique, the meticulously crafted light score fragments and reassembles vision, prompting open-eye hallucinations. Viewers experience a sensory fusion, seeing with their ears and listening with their eyes. Every modulation of hue, frequency, and decay reveals the hidden architecture of consciousness, exposing its hinges and seams. The audio emerges directly from the humming, pulsing, and crackling of the powerful lights, intertwining seamlessly with the visual hallucinations. It sounds like a rhythmic, electric storm rich, textured, and hypnotically synchronized with waves of colour. Here, light becomes tangible matter. Perception transforms into choreographed dance, casting each viewer as co-author. The artwork completes itself when spectators close their eyes, creating private cinemas behind their eyelids. Chasing The Dot demonstrates how flexible our perception of reality truly is, highlighting how astonishingly fine tuned our brains are in creating consciousness.
Philip Vermeulen is a Dutch artist who explores the fundamentals of human perception. His installations are to be experienced with the whole body, while challenging the physicality of light and sound, movement and vibrations. Vermeulen experiments with a variety of elements including motion, light, sound compositions, physics, nature, and digital technology, creating hypersculptures that appeal to and trick the senses of the spectator. These kinetic works act as a catalyst, dissolving the boundaries between mind and material, creating new realms of imagination and challenging perspectives. His installations have been exhibited in museums such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (NL), Rijksmuseum Twenthe (NL), Museum Voorlinden (Wassenaar, NL), Museum for International Light Art (Unna, DE), iMAL (Brussels, BE), Light Art Museum (Budapest, HU), Industrial Art Biennial (Labin, HR) and ART Rotterdam (NL). Works have also been featured at media festivals, including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam, NL), Ars Electronica (Linz, AT), Festival Interstice (Caen, FR), Mapping Festival (Geneva, CH), Novas Freque?ncias (Rio de Janeiro, BR) and CTM at Halle am Berghain (Berlin, DE). In 2024, Vermeulen will present his first large-scale solo exhibition Chasing The Dot at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe.
Susanna Wallin
Lizzy
Experimental doc. | 0 | color | 15:0 | Sweden, USA | 2024
Lizzy is the result of the days spent in the aftermath of the death of a neighbour, who passed in the house where she had lived out her whole life on the Hillsborough River in Tampa, Florida and who left behind an electric organ addressed to the filmmaker, without a note. To receive it was like a wild riddle.How might one story continue in the hands of another? What powers organize the telling? Through weaving indoors with outdoors, dust with swamp, celebration with critique, the film traverses binary notions such as self-world, truth-fiction, witnessing-imagining and nature-experience among others.
Susanna Wallin is an artist and filmmaker engaged in questions regarding what to do with our time, our bodies and the tools we are given to live a life. She probes subject matter across diverse contexts, modalities and timescales, often immersing herself in a particular place over extended periods. She is attentive to what emerges in hesitation, together, through experimentation and open ended, lending an ear to the unspoken with fiction as practice. Born and raised in Sweden, she studied filmmaking and art practice/theory at Goldsmiths College and University of the Arts London in the UK. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including The Flamin London Artist Film and Video Award, New Approaches, Film London UK, Pure Fiction, Sweden and commissions from the UK Film Council, Channel 4, BBC, Arts Council England, Arte France/Germany, SVT, Sweden and the BFI in the UK. Her award-winning films are shown in cinema and gallery contexts and have appeared in venues such as MOCA LA, The American Cinematheque, The Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery, The London Underground, ICA and the British Film Institute. In recent years, Wallin has been developing several feature length film projects, one of which is set in Florida and now in post production. She is part of the Research School at University of the Arts London in the UK completing a PhD through practice and is Assistant Professor of Film and Video at University of South Florida in the US. She lives and works between Tampa and London.
Chun Wang
Budapest Is Grey And Blue, But Hell Is Purple
Experimental film | 0 | color and b&w | 16:10 | Taiwan, Hungary | 2023
These images appear in this world all because of an 18-year-old gypsy boy, Pisti. A chance encounter an existing gap in our chain of cause and effect. Like opening the door but realising there is no end, and now it cannot be closed no matter what. “I” is a place where events take place, an existential exploration.
WANG Chun (b. 1988, Taiwan) is a video production worker and film producer. His practice is based on transformations between different creative languages (those of image, text, sound, and body), searching for the limits of language and seeking to measure the distance in the act of viewing.
Franz Wanner
Berlin-Lichtenberg
Documentary | mp4 | color and b&w | 7:20 | Germany | 2024
The video Berlin-Lichtenberg uses footage from a home movie filmed in 1943. The apparent intention of the filmmaker – to capture peaceful moments of family life such as a wife and child on a walk or leisure time at a lakeside restaurant in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg – is disrupted by unintended visual content. In the background, everyday life in the forced labour system becomes visible: a group of female forced labourers on the way to their work site, and the barracks of a forced labour camp behind the excursion venue. These visual elements are not consciously chosen, but rather a casual documentation of the omnipresence of forced labour in Nazi Germany. The amateur footage has been re-edited for the video with intertitles that contextualise the silent images and add a fictional level.
In his artistic work, Franz Wanner (*1975 in Bad Tölz, Germany, lives in Zurich) addresses topics such as the European Union’s migration policy, the German secret service and the arms industry, as well as their history and current structures, and the effects of Nazism on the German imperative of prosperity. “In a conceptual practice whose consistency of research and artistic output, in the tradition of Hans Haacke, continues – by means of investigations and transmedia – to ask questions where no one has yet done so” (Nora Sternfeld, HFBK Hamburg), “he creates images of a collective cognitive dissonance and analytical poetry about the pathology of overlooking within the Germany of today and its idioms” (Stephanie Weber, Lenbachhaus Munich). As Artist in Residence at the Harun Farocki Institute, he developed the exhibition Mind the Memory Gap for the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Under the title Eingestellte Gegenwarten, he realised his first solo exhibition in Italy at Merano Arte, which will be shown in modified form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2026.
Feargal Ward, Jonathan Sammon
Ivanko the Bear's Child
Experimental doc. | dcp | color | 25:0 | Ireland | 2024
A peasant’s wife loses her way in the forest and stumbles into a bear’s den. The bear keeps her with him, and after a time, a half-bear, half-child is born. They long to escape. To this backdrop, we move through the corridors and streets of a deserted German military town, once the central headquarters of the Soviet army’s occupation of Eastern Europe. Sealed off to the public for decades, this obscure complex became known to outsiders as “the Forbidden City.” A primal Russian fairy tale is employed to navigate this labyrinthine site, which appears to speak to both the legacy of this contested past and the unsettling resonances of our present.
Feargal Ward and Jonathan Sammon are filmmaking artists from Ireland. Much of their work explores the boundaries and possibilities of the hybrid-documentary form, where tropes and devices of narrative cinema are often appropriated or subverted in an attempt to interrogate established truths. Previous films they have collaborated on include 'Tin City', which premiered at this year’s Berlinale (Forum Expanded) before screening at multiple festivals including Karlovy Vary, Cinéma du Réel, and Festival dei Popoli, where it was awarded the International Discoveries Prize. Other collaborations involving Adrian Duncan include the films 'Lowland' (Cork International Film Festival), 'Memory Room' (IDFA, EVA International, Dokufest Kosovo), and 'Tension Structures' (IDFA, Hot Docs, RIDM). Ward’s feature documentary 'The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid' premiered in the main competition at IDFA and screened at multiple festivals before being broadcast on German, Irish, and Finnish television. His debut feature documentary 'Yximalloo' (co-directed with Tadhg O’Sullivan) premiered at FID Marseille, where it won the Prix Premier
Kim Woong-yong
gray matter
Documentary | 4k | black and white | 16:42 | Korea, South | 2024
For Filipino migrant workers employed in factories on the outskirts of Seoul, home is both a place they have left behind and a paradoxical space of longing and fear—one that has been swept away by floods yet still haunts their memory. They are constantly being displaced, resettled, and set in motion, their sense of home inseparable from the movement of their own bodies.The sounds of factory machines, fragments of horror films, and mobile phone images intertwine into a narrative that unfolds within the migrant worker’s body itself. I began to imagine a home for those who are always drifting.
Woong Yong Kim studied film directing and contemporary art at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève), Switzerland, and works across video installation and film. He has participated in several artist-in-residence programs, including the Digital Arts Studios in Belfast, CEEAC in Strasbourg, MMCA Goyang Residency, SeMA Nanji Studio, ACC, and as a visiting artist at the Rijksakademie. He completed the doctoral coursework in Film and Media Theory at Chung-Ang University’s Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science. He also translated and published in Korean, Exhibiting the Moving Image (JRP|Ringier)
Ali Yahya
BENEATH WHICH RIVERS FLOW
Experimental doc. | mov | color and b&w | 16:0 | Iraq | 2025
In the marshlands of southern Iraq, Ibrahim and his family live isolated from the rest of the world, deeply intertwined with the river, the reeds and the animals they tend. The quiet and withdrawn Ibrahim finds solace only in his buffalo, his one true companion. As Ibrahim’s world collapses, he must confront forces beyond his control that threaten not only his way of life but also the one living creature he truly understands.
Ali Yahya is an Iraqi filmmaker, born in 1994 in Baghdad, where he has lived and worked his entire life. His journey began after studying Psychology at the bachelor’s level. He later moved into visual arts, first as a graphic designer and then as a Creative Director at Becorp, one of Iraq’s leading creative agencies, where he continues to lead visual storytelling and cultural-visual projects. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Film. He uses film to explore the human experience, capturing the beauty and complexities of everyday life. Through his work, he brings the stories of his homeland to the world. His debut short film Beneath Which Rivers Flow (2025), shot in the marshlands of southern Iraq, blends poetic observation with lived reality, exploring the fragile relationship between a community and its disappearing landscape. The film premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, where it received a Special Mention from the jury.
Jinjoo Yang
Coming Home
Video installation | 4k | color | 12:57 | Canada | 2024
The film moves through the hidden storage spaces of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, revealing artworks whose ownership records remain incomplete. Some bear traces of wartime displacement and intentional omissions; others have shifted in attribution, altering the narratives attached to them. It traces how institutional structures shape what becomes visible and what remains unresolved. As the camera moves through the storage rooms, “Coming Home” observes the museum as an active system of organization, where artworks are continually recontextualized. Viewers encounter the collection as an unseen archive and are asked to navigate a place where certainty is partial and orientation never fixed.
Jinjoo Yang is a Montreal-based artist and architect whose films emerge from direct engagement with specific sites. She works with institutional interiors, using controlled camera movement to trace how places hold and mediate their histories. Her practice moves between observation and construction, turning regulated environments into temporal landscapes where visibility, authorship, and memory subtly shift. Yang’s recent works include “Coming Home,” filmed in the collection storage of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and “Occupied,” a forthcoming film shaped by Cold War infrastructures. Her projects have been presented internationally at institutions such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Center for Architecture in New York, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
Haythem Zakaria
Interstices Op.III
Experimental video | 4k | black and white | 23:5 | Tunisia | 2024
Opus III explores the landscape of the Atlas Mountains as both a physical territory and a symbolic topos. Filmed between Tunisia and Morocco, the work expands the research initiated in Opus I and II by confronting the visible landscape with its mythological echoes. The piece considers the Atlas not only as a geographical massif but as an archetypal figure shaped by recurring narratives, beliefs and collective memories. Through a slow and contemplative visual language, Opus III becomes a passage between the material presence of the mountains and the intangible layers of meaning that inhabit them. The work invites the viewer to shift perspective and enter a space where landscape, myth and perception intertwine.
Haythem Zakaria is a transdisciplinary artist and sound performer born in 1983 in Tunisia and based in France. Working across video, installation, photography, drawing and sound, he explores how landscapes, myths and forms of memory shape perception, and how the visible can open onto more elusive dimensions of experience. His practice is grounded in field research, slow temporalities and a refined attention to the resonance of places. Since 2010, his work has been presented internationally in major exhibitions, biennials and independent art spaces across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia and North America, including documenta 15, the Venice Biennale, the Japan Media Arts Festival, Cairotronica, Dream City, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Casa Árabe and numerous institutions in Paris, London, Berlin, Beijing, Rabat, Tokyo and San Francisco. Recipient of the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival for Interstices, Zakaria continues to develop research-based projects where image, sound and matter intersect, forming a space of inquiry into archetypes, memory and the thresholds between the visible and the unseen.