Catalogue 2024

Surrounded by the ferocity of the world, five young artists try to transcend contemporary anxiety through a collective production that is itself the subject of the play performed in front of an audience and during which the film was shot. Taking refuge in legendary Hôtel du Belvédère at the French-Spanish border, they attempt a chaotic search from Beethoven, an anachronistic example of a heroic overcoming of the catastrophe: making music without hearing it, anyway. A story of depression and ecstasy between pathetic and poetic. The existential vertigo of creation as a casual allegory of a consented collective shipwreck. You have to remember that this is a comic film.

César Vayssié spans across several artistic fields and explores the relationship between art and politics. He produces films and performances that conceptualize the diversity of genres and artistic skills. He works with student and young artists in order to explore their relationship with sentimental, artistic and political desire in a troubled society. His works have been displayed all over the world. His movie UFE(UNFILMEVENEMENT) won the Georges de Beauregard national award and the Audience award in the 2016 FID in Marseille. His movie, NE TRAVAILLE PAS (Don’t Work) was awarded the FIPRESCI Award in the 2018 Viennale.

The work combines material from the Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany with my conversations with several geoengineering experts. Calm images are overlaid with discussions that follow a wide range of topics – questions about visual models and their real life impact, uncertain- ties connected to geoengineering, questions about power and CO2 mitigation, guesses about climate warming and the probability of stratospheric aerosol injection deploy- ment. The design of one of the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope in Effelsberg is massive yet mechanically relatively simple. It is used to research distant territories far away from Earth, the formation of stars and the disap- pearance of matter into black holes. Also to detect radio waves from neighboring galaxies. I have chosen this as a research object in order to think about what can be perceived and understood through visibility? How visual simplicity fails to convey the complexity of such sets of relationships? Or how to think of inconceivable scales? Effelsberg stems from my research about solar geoengi- neering, that theoretizises the idea, that it will be pos- sible imitate the activity of volcanoes and thus reduce climate warming. One of the most scientifically studied processes describes the spraying of large amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere, where they would scatter the sun’s radiation and thereby reduce the amount of energy reaching the earth’s surface. It would be a delib- erate intervention in the global climate system, it would have to be done for about a few hundred years, and its fully realised form could not be interrupted without cata- strophic consequences.

Ivar Veermäe (born 1982 in Tallinn, lives and works in Berlin) received a BA in photography from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2009 and a MA in 2014 at Spatial Strategies department in Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. He has received various scholarships and grants – Kunstfonds Arbeitsstipendium, Edith-Russ-Haus Media Art Grant, Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium Berlin and scholarships from Estonian Cultural Endowment. The artist has had solo exhibitions in Edith-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg, Germany, Gallery im Turm, Berlin, Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, City Gallery of Tallinn, Estonia, AV17 Gallery in Vilnius, Lithuania, Cultural Center Belgrade in Serbia, among others. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at Riga Biennale, BIENALSUR in Buenos Aires, Venice Architecture Biennale, transmediale Festival in HKW, Moscow Biennale for Young Art, the Bozar in Brussels, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Netherlands, the Art Museum of Estonia, Art Hall of Tallinn, the Estonian Contemporary Art Museum, the Kulturhuset Bronden in Denmark, the Kunstverein Kassel, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, the Pinnacles Gallery in Australia. His videos are being screened at the Rencontres Internationales in Paris and Berlin, in HeK Basel, transmediale Festival, e-flux.com, MoMa web platform, AND Festival in Manchester, EMAF in Osnabrück, Kasseler Dokfest, Crosstalk festival in Budapest, in Virtual Memorial, Cambodia.

Failing to have found Homer, I met Sisyphus It is the search for something that does not exist or no longer exists. It’s a movement that brings you alive. It is the encounter with absurd and ephemeral repetition. This is a look at the ongoing construction sites on the island of Ios. It is an echo of Greek mythology, Homer and storytelling in the broad sense.

When I was little, I made films with playmobiles and plastic Indians. Today, I am at the Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, in my second year and I specialize in video and writing. I also work with various materials including sculpture, ceramics and drawing. After my baccalaureate in Theater specialty, I did a year of hypokhâgne in Paris, then an artistic preparation, before moving for the first time, to Bordeaux. I've been making films for some time now, and I know that it's really in this area that I can express myself best. Show, make people travel, make people feel emotions. Choosing the aesthetic, the words of my actors, the framing of the shots, the editing of the rushes. All the stages give me a satisfaction and pleasure that I rarely find otherwise.

Who is behind the most influential work of art of the 20th century? The answer to this question is highly debated. Is it by a celebrated male- or a forgotten female artist? Art experts tumble over each other to prove their version of the truth. The interests are great and the arguments numerous. But what is the value of their truth, if the artist him-/herself wishes to remain anonymous? Speculation about the work of art creates value, and that goes beyond the art market on which the many copies of the work circulate. When we try to get into the heads of the once so progressive artists themselves, the story takes an unexpected turn. From Dada to data: Alreadymade, like Fountain in 1917, radically challenges the idea of authorship and identity, and does so in a remarkable setting: the digital afterlife.

Barbara Visser (1966, the Netherlands) studied Photography and Audiovisual Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Cooper Union in New York and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and is an awarded artist. She has also worked as the artistic director of IDFA. Her work focuses on cultural and historical narratives and how these become manifest through art, design, media and science. By challenging conventions in storytelling and image-making, and questioning our memory- and belief systems, Visser aims to provoke a new perception of what a normality has rendered invisible.

synopsis CYCLES Appropriation of Godfrey Reggio's QATSI Trilogy ‘That is really expanded cinema, explaining cinema as a direct theory for the eye.’ Pip Chodorov, Director of The Film Gallery, Paris after watching the project's silent version 24 Frames per Second - Deconstructing Movies was the title of my exhibition that opened on Christmas Eve 2015 in Beijing/China. The project’s aim was to make visible each and every single frame of a given movie, in this case Zhang Yimou’s ‘Raise the Red Lantern’. A digital file as scroll had been created and, printed in book form as well, but now for the first time on wallpaper that kept meandering 40 meters in length and 3 meter in height along the gallery walls. More Untitled Filmscrolls were to follow even if the results soon appeared too limited being too static. More digital experimentation, reintroducing movement, led to another climax that seemed to be peek with the digital translation of Godfrey Regio’s QATSI Trilogy. Renamed CYCLES (CYCLE OF DISRUPTION - CYCLE OF WAR - CYCLE OF CHANGE) an extraordinary visual DNA was revealed, the dance of hundreds of thousands of frames caused by the excessive use of stop motion technology of the original, including time lapse, jump cuts, use of color etc., most fascinating hidden meta-levels of the cinematic language with endless cascades of caleidoscopic image patterns no one seemed aware of they existed. As in real life viewers of a film are locked into the unfolding process of time. Looking at a filmscroll is like looking at time from the outside, with past, presence and future happening simultaneously, transcending the usual timeline. The drone-soundtrack by Thomas Fleischhauer (2024), created especially for the Moving Image Art Prize, offers a new experience alltogether. BURKHARD von HARDER, 2024

biographical note burkhard von harder, *1954, germany photographer, filmmaker, artist Film Studies Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, 1977/78 Guest Student of Willy Fleckhaus, University of Wuppertal, 1982/83

Container ships, infrastructures of the digital economy, mines and cityscapes of contemporary California are brought into an associative montage that expands via the soundtrack of improvisational musician Zsolt Sorés. In a film without dialogue, landscape images and music produce a raw and psychedelic anti-effect in which musical delays reflect on the surfaces of the images and support the montage: Individuals are networked, but Silicon Valley's digital enterprises are inaccessible, public space closed off by smart fences.

The artist and filmmaker Clemens von Wedemeyer, currently lives and works in Berlin and holds a professorship for media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Mass (1999), Otjesd(2004), From the Opposite Side(2007), Muster / Rushes (2012), The Horses of a Cavalry Captain (2015), Esiod 2015 (2016), Transformation Scenario (2018)

A spell breaking, QUEBRANTE traverses the caves, ruins and phantasmagorias of Transamazon BR230 Highway, portraying its stones and its ghosts. A conversation between the moon and the stones, QUEBRANTE is freely inspired in Robert's Smithson project THE TRULY UNDERGROUND CINEMA (1971) and in the film THE VERY EYE OF THE NIGHT (1958) by Maya Deren. Set in the tiny town of Rurópolis (Pará) - the very first one to be build in the Highway to serve as a base for the workers that were building it - QUEBRANTE follows Ms. Erismar, known in the region as "The Cave Woman". A retired elementary school teacher, Ms. Erismar was the one responsible for the discovery of the region's caves: she would enter the dark unknown holes till their ends, with only a candle in her hands and a lighter tied to her pants - in case the flame would fade out. A huge nationalistic propaganda part of the progress and development project of Brazil, Transamazônica Highway was implemented during the civic-military dictatorship that took place at the moment – and it is till nowadays a warm scar of the wreckage dream of the history of the country.

Janaina Wagner (1989) develops her research in film, drawing and installations. Her work aims to present a critical understanding of the ways in which humans impose systems of order and control upon their surroundings. Currently a Phd student at Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains (FR), Janaina has participated in several residencies, such as Gasworks (UK); VISIO - European Program on Artists’ Moving Images (IT); FID Campus (FR), Bolsa Pampulha (BR). Her work is part of important collections, such as Instituto Inhotim (BR), Galeria Municipal do Porto (PT) and Coleção Moraes Barbosa (BR). Among the main exhibitions, stand out the individuals CINEMA CAVERNA (BR) and With burning love - Villa Belleville (FR); and the group 22a Bienal Videobrasil (BR), Ensaio de Tração - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (BR); Garganta - CIAJG - José de Guimarães International Arts Center (PT); Aliens are temporary - Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (DE). Janaina has been participating in several film festivals, such as Berlinale (DE) and Tiradentes Film Festival (BR). Janaina Wagner is currently developing her first feature film, the experimental documentary A Mala da Noite. Janaina lives and works between Paris and São Paulo.

A spell breaking, QUEBRANTE traverses the caves, ruins and phantasmagorias of Transamazon BR230 Highway, portraying its stones and its ghosts. QUEBRANTE follows Ms. Erismar, known in the region as "The Cave Woman". A huge nationalistic propaganda part of the progress and development project of Brazil, Transamazônica Highway was implemented during the civic-military dictatorship that took place at the moment – and it is till nowadays a warm scar of the wreckage dream of the history of the country. A conversation between the moon and the stones, QUEBRANTE is freely inspired in Robert's Smithson project THE TRULY UNDERGROUND CINEMA (1971) and in the film THE VERY EYE OF THE NIGHT (1958) by Maya Deren.

Janaina Wagner (1989) develops her research in film, drawing and installations. Her work aims to present a critical understanding of the ways in which humans impose systems of order and control upon their surroundings. Currently a Phd student at Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains (FR), Janaina has participated in several residencies, such as Gasworks (UK); VISIO - European Program on Artists’ Moving Images (IT); FID Campus (FR), Bolsa Pampulha (BR). Her work is part of important collections, such as Instituto Inhotim (BR), Galeria Municipal do Porto (PT) and Coleção Moraes Barbosa (BR). Among the main exhibitions, stand out the individuals CINEMA CAVERNA (BR) and With burning love - Villa Belleville (FR); and the group 22a Bienal Videobrasil (BR), Ensaio de Tração - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (BR); Garganta - CIAJG - José de Guimarães International Arts Center (PT); Aliens are temporary - Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (DE). Janaina has been participating in several film festivals, such as Berlinale (DE) and Tiradentes Film Festival (BR). Janaina Wagner is currently developing her first feature film, the experimental documentary A Mala da Noite. ?Janaina lives and works between Paris and São Paulo.

In a dystopian future, humans have had to block out the sun in order to survive on Earth. Drought is extreme and the planet is gradually turning into a scorching desert where the survivors, installed in the basements of the great observatories, live in perpetual darkness. To compensate for the image of a sun they can no longer see, they instruct an artificial intelligence program to reconstruct it. The AI is supervised by a young woman whose mental images are particularly vivid. Drawing on the photo-novel structure of Chris Marker's film La Jetée (1962), Chronicles of the Dark Sun work on a science fiction narrative in which, as in Marker's film, an algorithm is tasked with reconstructing the past using an image from the protagonist's childhood. By recycling photographs from personal albums, advertising images and scientific snapshots, all of which are reprocessed by an AI, the film examines our relationship with technology in a disturbing and ironic way. This work is an uncanny fable that makes us think about the deformation of reality in AI as well as the unsustainability of our way of inhabiting the planet. Production with the support of Hangar Y, in partnership with l’Observatoire de Paris-PSL

Gwenola Wagon is an artist and researcher. She teaches at the Sorbonne School of Arts and the University of Paris 1. Through installations, films and books, she imagines alternative and paradoxical narratives for thinking about the contemporary digital world. With her first films, Globodrome, she surveyed the virtual globe, investigating the space of hyperinformation and Internet infrastructures in collaboration with artist Stéphane Degoutin, with whom she co-produced World Brain and the book Psychoanalysis of the International Airport. After Bienvenue à Erewhon, Virusland and Chroniques du soleil noir, post-cybernetic fables with Pierre Cassou-Noguès, she published Planète B, an essay that blends investigation and fiction in order to apprehend a rapidly expanding monster.

In Memory Architecture, a surveyor travels to the north of Sweden to survey a site for the building of a new data centre. This systematic task of transforming the terrain into a digital model quickly becomes a desperate search for some kind of underlying structure of the surveyor’s surroundings.

Alexander Walmsley (UK, b. 1992) is a filmmaker and photographer. In his research-based practice, he investigates how our understanding of the earth is shifting, mediated by the new technological, environmental and social realities of the 21st century. His recent work has been shown at the Daejeon Biennale of Arts and Sciences, Tirana Art Lab, Sharjah Art Foundation, The Photographers' Gallery, and Athens Digital Art Festival. He was a commissioned artist for the Albanian pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for the Deloitte Photo Grant in 2023 and Istanbul 212 Photography Prize in 2021. He previously studied Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Cambridge (UK) and the University of Geneva (CH), and is currently a lecturer at the Film University Konrad Wolf in Potsdam, Germany, where is also undertaking an artistic PhD on the subject of real-time representations of the planet.

In an age of wire and string, futuristic visions anchor in lithic time. In the dark, people are driven to shine in the most spectacular ways. Light, emitted from our digital extensions, has roots traversing millions, even billions of years.

Yuyan Wang, born in 1989 in China and currently based in Paris, is a filmmaker and video artist. Her works involve recycled materials from the industrial sphere of image production, tracing their mutation and proliferation within the digital frameworks and representations. Through the editing process, Wang deconstructs and recontextualizes the intricate hierarchies and inherent meanings in materials —whether found, processed, and produced—striping symbols of their conventional paths of perception and turning them into immersive sensory experiences. Wang completed her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016 and later at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in 2022. Her work has been showcased at Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, UCCA Beijing, the 12th Berlin Biennale and various festivals, such as the Berlinale International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMa Doc Fortnight, CPH:DOX, the European Media Art Festival, receiving numerous awards.

Just before the launch of artificial moons, a retired couple finds their harbor in the fading darkness. Trying to catch up with the pace of modernity, their daily life traces this forthcoming brightness back to its earthly origins.

Yuyan Wang (b. 1989, China) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. Her work focuses on the impact of image creation in media, representation, and the attention economy. By deconstructing and recontextualizing inherent meanings of found materials, her practice probes the continual mutations within the industrial production chain of images, a perpetual development leading to an abstraction of reality. Her work has been showcased at Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, the 12th Berlin Biennale and various festivals, such as Berlinale, IFFR, European Media Art Festival, Indie Lisboa, receiving numerous awards.

This film evocatively disrupts the notion of a distinction between science fiction and our lived reality by giving expression to the difficulty of communicating in a world still reeling from the effects of a global pandemic. Weird and discomforting, the film manages to create a sensorial experience that feels sticky in its seepages as it probes through life in rural Sweden.

Hannah Wiker Wikström, b.1990, is a Swedish artist and filmmaker. She holds a master’s degree in Fine Arts from KHIO in Oslo and Konstfack in Stockholm. With a history of collective processes, Hannah’s work circles between film, text, performance and performative installations, exploring queer, new materialist and posthumanist approaches in relation to form and aesthetics, spatiality and temporality. Hannah is a co-founder of several collective platforms such as Post Post, Omställning Skärholmen, Glada Sprutan and Eternal spring - sites for art and ecology. Previous work has been shown at several sites and film festivals, such as Oberhausen Kurtzfilmtage, Malmö Konsthall, CHART Art Fair, SALTS, Intercultural museum in Oslo, etc.

On the one hand, the short film OPEN CALL deals in an artistically condensed way with the current manifestations of the ideological shift towards a society of total personal responsibility, the pressure to 'perform' and 'deliver' as perfectly as possible on the stage of life and work in order to survive the increasingly merciless competition between individuals. On the other hand, the escalating competition and social coldness lead, absurdly enough, to countless advertisements constantly assuring us how much they 'love' us and their products. The questioning choir off-screen represents the doubts as to whether we really want to take part in this game. This rhetoric, which is part of a broader intertwining of neoliberal capitalism and emotions that Eva Illouz has labelled "emotional capitalism", has become increasingly widespread in recent years, particularly in social media, but also increasingly in politics.

Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler are artists and filmmakers collaborating on films and video installations that are shown internationally at film and media festivals and in numerous solo and group exhibitions.Their work undertakes a mental archaeology of hyper mediatization and digitalization, examining their influence on the mind and power relations in society.

For Bond (2023), Anna Witt collaborated with the members of Youth Forum Gröpelingen. The video that arises from this collaboration, explores the ways which the young people position themselves against the past of this district, perceive its present and consider their future. Together we explored visual and performative spaces to activate forms of solidarity and empowerment in Gröpelingen, a district historically marked by industry and migration. Archival images about strikes and protests of the first generation of so called “guestworkers”, became the backdrops for the film and a tool to reflect on the past, in order to produce their own position for the future. What images do we want to see in the collective memory and how have ideas about self-positioning, discrimination and cultural diversity changed in the eyes of today’s young generation in Gröpelingen? The members of the group are at the same time protagonists in the film and directing the choreographies, in order to keep the control over the images being produced about themselves.

Anna Witt, born in 1981 in Germany, lives and works in Vienna. Working with performative intervention and video installation, her practice deals with the construction of cultural stereotypes and individuals positioning within social systems. Her works ambivalently sit between fictional re-enactment and documentary staging and represent the problematic of subject-formation in relation to identity politics, collectivity and citizenship rights. Recently her work has been shown at Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin, 2014 (solo show), An I for an Eye, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York , Risc Society, MOCA Museum of Contemporary ArtTaipei, Taiwan; Fremd & Eigen, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck ; Emscherkunst 13, Triennale Ruhrgebiet (Kat.); Over the Rainbow, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; We only dream of places and resistance, for now, Lux/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, London In 2013 she received the BC21 Art Award from Boston Consulting and Belvedere Contemporary, Vienna. Anna Witt: Worst fear, best fantasy at Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina is supported by: Austrian Ministry of Education and Culture (BMUKK), Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports of the Republic of Kosovo, Directorate for Culture, Youth and Sports of the Municipality of Prishtina, X-print and DZG POSTS

The visual isolation of the performers is intended to facilitate an objective assessment of sound performance. It is interesting to note that this acousmatic situation, so to speak, is visually extremely powerful and inevitably generates a cinematic effect. It is not for nothing that the term “voyeurism” has no acoustic counterpart. Together, composer and media artist Jannik Giger and scenographer Demian Wohler develop a kind of intermedia limbo, within which music, film scene and exhibition become entangled in multiple gazing.

Demian Wohler is a freelance scenographer and artist. Interested in complex project developments, surreal scripts, immersive installations, ghost trains, overlength evenings, participatory art and cross-competence, collective work.? Born 1984 in Zug (CH). Studied scenography at the Kunsthochschule in Basel, graduating in 2009. From 2006, he toured the German-speaking theater landscape with the independent theater group FARADAYCAGE for six years (Gessnerallee Zurich - HAU Berlin - Theaterformen Hannover - Festival Impulse etc.) and resided with the group at Theater Basel from 2012-2015. Since then, he has worked at various municipal theaters, but also in other contexts. He realized a dance film in Tbilisi with the Morphological Institute, a set design for a TV series and three feature-length films, co-founded the Social Muscle Club Basel and in 2017/18 was head of set design at Theater Oberhausen, where he won the Theaterfreunde Prize with his first directorial work. Most recently, he conceived and realized two installative music films together with composer Jannik Giger, made Götterdämmerung with director Marco Storman and Mein Herz dein Bunker with director Paula Thielecke. The Basel-based composer and video artist Jannik Giger completed a Bachelor of Arts in Music and Media Art at the Bern University of the Arts with Daniel Weissberg and Michael Harenberg as well as a Master of Arts in Composition at the Lucerne University of Music with Dieter Ammann. In 2015 he completed his Master of Arts in Specialized Music Performance ( Composition ) at the Basel Conservatory with Michel Roth and Erik Ona. With his compositions and video works, he is active both in contemporary music as well as in the context of fine arts. The questioning of media and art productions can be found throughout his entire work and is clearly visible in art genre-crossing pieces. A central focus of his work lies on the engagement with staging rituals in the art and music business. Video and sound as forms of transformation-, interference- and communication processes are integral parts of his artistic work. Recurring themes of his work are hierarchical relationships and interactions between author, interpreter, and the piece itself. Jannik Giger’s compositional signature is characterized by the organic integration of foreign material into his own sound language. He lets tonal and harmonic sounds shimmer through, but cleverly complements and surrounds them with microtonal discolorations and leaves room for the various sound worlds to unfold, to collide lustfully and finally to grow together anew. Jannik Giger’s works are internationally received in the context of music, film and art. For example, at the Wigmore Hall London, as part of the Ultraschall Berlin Festival, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Swiss Art Awards, the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, the Theater Basel, the Bern Music Festival or the Gare Du Nord in Basel. His compositions are performed by a wide variety of formations. These include the soloist ensemble Kaleidoscope Berlin, the Arditti Quartet, the Ensemble Mosaik, the Mondrian Ensemble Basel, Sarah Maria Sun & Nina Janssen-Deinzer, the Trio Rafale, the Ensemble Phoenix and the Basel Sinfonietta. Jannik Giger has won several prizes and awards, including studio scholarships in London ( Foundation Landis & Gyr ), Berlin ( Atelier Mondial ), Sri Lanka ( Swiss Cultural Foundation Pro Helvetia ) or contributions from the Fondation Nicati-de Luze, from the Swiss Cultural Foundation Pro Helvetia, from Kulturelles BS / BL, the Canton of Solothurn, the UBS Cultural Foundation, the Lions Club Basel as well as 2013 the promotional award for music of the Canton Solothurn.

A chilling voice from the past falls in line with the current wave of divisiveness, anti-immigrant rhetoric and political turmoil in an America torn by violence and bloodshed.

Nancy Wyllie's films have screened throughout the world including The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, the 7th International Berlin Director's Lounge, Tribeca Cinemas Video Art & Experimental Film Festival in New York and the Aesthetica Film Festival (AFF), York, UK. "Moth Vitals" was one of 28 international selections screened at 'Now & After" International Video Art Festival at The State Darwin Museum in Moscow in 2017 where her work became part of their permanent collection. “Moth Vitals’ screened at 2020 jellyfest film festival at the AFI /American Film Institute, Mark Goodson Theater, Los Angeles. Also in 2020, ‘Inquest’ was selected for the Blow-up International Arthouse Film Festival, Gene Siskel Theater, Chicago, IL. USA. In 2018, her short gun violence film, ‘Reenactments’ won The Americas Award for Best Experimental Short at The Americas Film Festival New York. The Awards Ceremony took place at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian on June 15, 2018. “Soaked Earth” was selected for the Extremely Shorts Film Festival 2020, Aurora Picture Show, Houston Media Arts and received Honorable mention for Best Experimental at the SENE Film Festival 2021 with an LA Premiere at the Super Shorts Los Angeles Film Festival at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute, December 2021. Her film project exposing the underbelly of the global skin bleaching epidemic titled, “Getting Under Our Skin” was funded by The Puffin Foundation and screened at The Torpedo Factory in Through These Eyes July- September 2022. Also in 2022 her film “Inquest” was selected for screening at the International Portrait Film Festival (IPFF) in Sophia, Bulgaria and at “Diorama Room Presents: Tune Into Green,” 13 short experimental and expanded documentary films by international filmmaker, sound artists and musicians. 'Soaked Earth' screened at the New York Short Film Festival at Cinema Village, Manhattans oldest independent cinema, in 2022. In 2023, 'Twenty Square Feet' was a semi finalist at the Blow-up Arthouse Film Festival 2023 in Chicago. 'The Through Line' was a semi finalist at Berlin Shorts 2023 and received an Honorable Mention at the Video Art & Experimental Film Festival at Tribeca Cinemas. 'Soaked Earth' is part of Human Landscapes, a Loosenart International Art project, at Rome Art Week 2024. Wyllie holds Master’s degrees from RISD and Tulane University, New Orleans. She studied film at New York University and taught foundation art & design, digital media courses and video art at Ithaca College, RISD, Vermont College of Norwich University (MFA faculty) and at CCRI until 2018.

The chilling voice of 1960’s charismatic cult leader and mass murderer Charles Manson falls in line with the current wave of divisiveness, anti-immigrant hostility, antisemitism, misogyny and political turmoil in an America torn by the contagion of hatred and violence. The ultimate manipulator, Manson knew how cull the most inflammatory aspects of the zeitgeist during the tumultuous Vietnam era to fuel his own agenda. He alternately peddled fear and love and used his early exposure to Biblical teachings to stoke the fires of a deranged dogma that included an imminent race war that would be blamed on Blacks. Like a film director with the outward appearance of a peace loving hippie, Manson issued precise instructions to his followers as they set off to carry out grisly murders in the Hollywood Hills and beyond while he remained behind the scenes. Manson’s amalgam of white supremacy, the Dale Carnegie method and devotion to his twisted interpretation of Christian ideology strikes a dangerously familiar note in America in 2024.

Nancy Wyllie's films have screened throughout the world including The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, the 7th International Berlin Director's Lounge, Tribeca Cinemas Video Art & Experimental Film Festival in New York, Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASFF), York, UK. and the New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles. "Moth Vitals" was one of 28 international selections screened at 'Now & After’ International Video Art Festival at The State Darwin Museum in Moscow in 2017 where her work became part of the permanent collection. In 2018, her short gun violence film, ‘Reenactments’ won The Americas Award for Best Experimental at TAFFNY The Americas Film Festival New York sponsored by the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies CUNY. Wyllie spoke about the proliferation of gun violence in the US at the Awards Ceremony which took place at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Her film about Marilyn Monroe’s personal library titled ‘Cover to Cover ‘was made with support from the Sam Shaw Family Archives and screened in 2022 at IPFF International Portrait Film Festival, Sophia, Bulgaria. ‘Soaked Earth’ screened at Human Landscapes, Rome Art Week 2024. Wyllie holds a Master’s degree from RISD and studied film at NYU.

Piece together some Chinese characters to sound like English. Secrets are briefly revealed, but at the same time the door to them is closed forever. We linger at the door, and I just want to stay with you longer.

Mengzhu Xue is a Chinese director and artist. She is currently studying fine art and film in Germany. Mengzhu enjoys exploring the combination of different media to create images in a multi-dimensional way. She often draws inspiration from personal experiences and subtle observations of cross-cultural contradictions in everyday life. Through artistic transformation, she wants to create a space that transcends language.

From one day to the next, Meriem takes care of everything and everyone. Meriem, she's my mother

Ynès Yaza-Zerrouk (b. 2005) is a young French documentary filmmaker. She is currently studying at Ateliers Varan.

Nécrose is an essay film that explores the post-apocalyptic remnants of Beirut and the remote landscapes of Lebanon. Blending elements of documentary and surrealism, it narrates the other side of the story of the Genesis by following a man and a woman who awaken in an underground purgatory, trapped in a decayed post-human world where time stands still. Their journey through desolate cityscapes, abandoned ruins, and murky nature blurs the line between reality and nightmare, taking viewers on a cosmic odyssey of consciousness. As the film delves into personal introspection, it ventures into darkness and insanity, immersing audiences in a visceral and disorienting experience. Nécrose is a haunting visual and sensory exploration, inviting viewers to question the nature of existence and to embrace the enigmatic beauty of a world on the brink of collapse. Within the interminable darkness of this temporal landscape, the film becomes an elegy for a displaced spirit, embodied by the director. Like a wandering soul, the camera guides us through a fragmented pilgrimage navigating the shadows of a post-human realm, blurring the boundaries between reality and the director’s own subjective experiences.

François Yazbeck is a Lebanese sound designer, filmmaker, and Doctoral Researcher based in Helsinki. He studied film directing at IESAV, Saint Joseph University of Beirut, and later specialized in sound design and mixing at Aalto University in Helsinki. His debut feature film, Nécrose, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2024. Currently, he is working on his second feature film. François’s films explore themes of oppression, alienation, and fragmented identity shaped by social and political pressures. As a sound designer, he has contributed to Lebanese, Arab, European, and international films.