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The film uses the methods of presentation as a path to the company of other living beings. It expands upon the issues of ecological moving image narrative, the focus being on presentation, imaging and imagination in the context of the moving image.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila is a renowned Finnish filmmaker and contemporary visual artist, born in Finland in 1959. She studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, at the London College of Printing and at the University of Helsinki. She has long been considered a master of the cinematic installation form. In 2011, the artist was appointed to the main jury of the Venice Film Festival and in 2013 she was the Chairwoman of the Jury in FIDMarseille. She is currently doing her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Ahtila’s work is conceptually organized around the construction of image, language, narrative and space. Her earlier works dealt with unsettling human dramas of teenage sexuality, family relations, mental disintegration, and death. Her recent work tackles more profound and artistic questions where she investigates the processes of perception and attribution of meaning—at times through a cultural and existential thematic, like colonialism, faith, and post-humanism. Ahtila’s work has received many awards including the ARTE Award for Best European Film at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; the Great Prize Fiction at Vila do Conde International Short Film Festival, and the Best Nordic Short Film at Nordisk Panorama. Her crafted work was showed in some of the most prominent contemporary art museums and festivals including the Guggenheim, Bilbao; Monderna Museet, Stokholm; DHC/Art Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal; Jeu de Paume Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo d/Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bolzano, Italy, and Tate Modern, London. Her short films have also been shown at major festivals throughout the world, including Berlin International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and Venice International Film Festival.

WHERE IS WHERE? is based on an incident which took place during the Algerian independence war in 1950?s. Reacting to the acts of violence committed by the French, two young Algerian boys murder their friend, a French boy. The story, told in multiple simultaneous images, starts in the present day as Death enters the house of the Poet. She starts to investigate these past events, which gradually become interwoven with the present moment. A mist clears from the back garden of the Poet`s house to reveal a small row-boat which has appeared in the swimming pool. In it sit Adel and Ismael.

EIJA-LIISA AHTILA Born in 1959 in Hämeenlinna, Finland, Eija-Liisa Ahtila is visual artist and filmmaker. Her films and multi-screen installations explore and experiment with narrative storytelling, creating extraordinary tales out of ordinary human experiences. Her works deal with separation, loss, sexuality, relationships among family members, mental disintegration, and death. They investigate the processes of perception and the attribution of meaning, with breaking down the story on several screens around the viewer in the space. Making installations and films has become for her a process of identifying the links between images, sounds, rhythms, light, characters and words, and using them to approach and construct the story. Eija-Liisa Ahtila was the recipient of the Artes Mundi of Cardiff, Wales in 2006, the Vincent Van Gogh Biannual Award for Contemporary Art in Europe, Maastricht, The Netherlands, as well as the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award, Switzerland, both in 2000, and the Edstrand Art Prize, Sweden in 1998. Ahtila attended Helsinki University, Faculty of Law (1980-85); Independent Art School, 198184; and London College of Printing, School of Media and Management, Film and Video (1990-91). She received a Certificate from U.C.L.A. in Film, TV, Theater and Multimedia Studies, Los Angeles (1994-95) and attended special courses at the America Film Institute, Advanced Technology Program, Los Angeles (1994-95). Ahtila has exhibited extensively at numerous museums and film festivals around the world and her films have received distinctive film awards and prizes over the years. Her work has also been widely seen on television in Europe. British Film Institute has published a home DVD box of her films titled The Cinematic Works of Eija-Liisa Ahti/a. Eija-Liisa Ahtila currently lives and works in Helsinki.

The Annunciation is a film in which one of the central motifs of Christian iconography is constructed and re-enacted through moving image.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila Born in 1959 in Hämeenlinna, Finland, Eija-Liisa Ahtila is visual artist and filmmaker. Her films and multi-screen installations explore and experiment with narrative storytelling, creating extraordinary tales out of ordinary human experiences.

OR119 is a theoretical musical based on the ideas of radical psychologist Wilhelm Reich who, as Freud’s favorite student, centered his study on the intersections of psychoanalysis and Marxism. Reich’s best work advocates for a re-imagining of family structure and gender roles, sexual liberation for younger people and the working poor and a deep understanding of the effect of fascisms on the body. OR119 is based on quotations by Reich set to song and also in imaginary conversations between Reich and a number of contemporary feminist thinkers. With a group of women friends in improvisation, we playfully examine the unsettled legacy of Reich and his surprisingly relevant dynamic with feminist thought. Reich proposed Orgone, a universal life energy (akin to Chi) based on sex and positive expression that Reich claims to have discovered, and here we grant him the honor of the next number on the periodic chart (OR119) for his discovery. The musical resonance and vibrations of the voices in song make manifest the invisible positive energy that Reich believed was universal. This is by no means a bio-pic! but it is a celebration of life's potential for immersion in nature, the cosmos and interactive energy.

PEGGY AHWESH has worked since the 70's in wide range of technologies and styles in an inquiry into feminism, cultural identity and genre.  Featured in the Whitney Biennial (1991, 1995, 2002). Solo exhibitions include: Spike Island (2021); Kunsthall Stavanger (2022); Cleave (2019) Microscope Gallery, New York. Film retrospectives: Anthology Film Archives/NYC, Guggenheim Bilbao/Spain, New Media Fest Seoul/Korea, BFI/London and others. Ahwesh is Emeritus Professor from Bard College and al-Quds Bard College, West Bank, Palestine, where she taught media production and history. Collaborator JACQUELINE GOSS makes movies and web-based works that explore how political, cultural, and scientific systems change our sense of self through animation and live action in documentary and essay forms. Her work has shown at Eyebeam Atelier, The Wexner Center for the Arts and festivals in New York, London, Rotterdam. Goss has received awards from the Tribeca Film Institute, Creative Capital Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Herb Alpert Foundation, the United States Artist Award and the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm. Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank in Chicago. She teaches Media at Bard College

The video shows two policemen wearing Spanish anti-riot uniforms, dancing a tango version of the famous Eurhythmics 80´s song in the luxurious and extremely decorated ballroom space of the XIX century palace Museum Cerralbo in Madrid. The fantastic lyric of the song “ Sweet dreams are made of this ” is the central motor of the piece. The tango version cove song has been arranged by the bandoneon player Fernando Girdini and recorded exclusively for the video. In its origins, tango was mainly a dance between two men. Tango was the result of the cultural mix of locals with African, Italian and Hispanic immigrants. It was originally forbidden by the church and rejected by high society, which resulted in its development in poor suburbs and working-class slums. The video reflects about the last years crisis, 15M movement, the violent riots, Cataluña independency, brutality of Spanish police and military forces and the recent antidemocratic Spanish law ” Ley Mordaza ” (the Gag Rule), becoming illegal and punished to take photos or videos of police forces or use of the police uniforms without the Government’s permission. Desire, power, decadence and frustration: they shoot horses, don´t they?

Carlos Aires was born in Ronda, Spain in 1974. He obtained a bachelor in Fine Arts at the University of Granada in Spain. Upon graduating in 1997, he moved to the Netherlands and completed his postgraduate studies at Fontys Academy (Tilburg, Netherlands), HISK (Antwerp, Belgium) and Ohio State University (Ohio, USA). He was honored with prestigious grants and awards, including: OMI Residency (USA), Edith Fergus Gilmore Award (USA), Generation2008 Caja Madrid (Spain), Young Belgian Art Prize (Belgium), 1st Award Young Andalusian Artists (Spain), Fulbright (USA) and De Pont Atelier (the Netherlands). He has participated in numerous exhibitions in national and international institutions, such as: CAC (Malaga, Spain), MACBA (Barcelona, Spain), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (USA), Imperial Belvedere Palace (Vienna, Austria), MUSAC (Leon, Spain), BB6 Bucharest International Biennale (Bucharest, Romania), B.P.S. 22 (Charleroi, Belgium), 5th Thessaloniki Biennale (Thessaloniki , Greece), Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City, Mexico), Canada Contemporary Art Museum (Montreal, Canada). His work can be found within significant public collections: ARTIUM (Spain), MACBA (Spain), Fondation Francès (France), ARTER (Turkey), CAC (Spain), Maison Particulière (Belgium), Ministry of Culture of Spain, Progress Art (Saudi Arabia), National Belgium Bank (Belgium), 21c Museum (USA), MAK (Austria) among others.

A pilgrimage taken by a group of readers to the ancestral house of a writer (a house that haunts all of his stories ) nested in the heart of a city , turns into an exploration of the city , into an exercise in mapmaking…into a hallucinatory encounter with the real. Told through the eyes of a stranger, a newcomer, walking through a modern bustling city, blanketed by a dream made of ancient lore's ,stories and signs, the film tries to explore the alchemical process behind the art of storytelling, that transmutes the 'real' that inspired it . And the impossible mirages a body of work can create in an obsessive readers mind which compels him to chase it ...

Born and brought up in Quilon India , Shahi A.J is An Alumni of Film and Television Institute of India , where he specialized in script writing and direction. His students work has been shown at various film festivals including Clapstick Kolkata, Signs Kerala, Hong Kong Film Festival etc. He teaches filmmaking St Joseph College . He is a recipient of the Practice Grant form Indian Foundation of Arts(IFA). His work has been shown in Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022 and the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSSFK). His debut feature premiered at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam 2023 .

It is April 7th 2020, 8 months has passed since Emine Bulut was murdered by her former husband. There is a letter which is written to her, and to all femicide victims around the world; a letter which questions femininity, how it feels to be a woman in Turkey…

Özge Akarsu was born and raised in Turkey. She currently lives in Belgium where she also studies animation film at Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK), in Ghent. Before starting studying animation, she achieved a master's degree in Human Rights Law, specialized in Political Philosophy, in Istanbul. After three years of doing a PhD research on Spinoza and modernity at University of Antwerp, she got interested in animation and filmmaking which helps her to express thoughts, feelings, ideas, instincts that cannot be explained solely in words.

Impressions of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These countries, going through a change, which have lived a similar story since the war are still very scarred by this event deep in the roots of the ground going now different ways. A trip at the end of summer into the debts of winter, from the German border to Moscow.

Born on June 6, 1950, Chantal Akerman comes from a Jewish family of emigrants from Eastern Europe. Her mother was deported, and her film making is a constant link with this family trauma. She is accepted at the Institut Supérieur des Arts but her stay is short. She leaves for the United States and it is there, from the American avant-garde, that she draws most of its inspiration. Since then her career has taken her to France, the United States and Belgium, but also Germany and Russia, her country of origin. Specialist in experimental documentaries she embraces a more academic cinema with two films, the Appointments D `Anna and a Couch in New York, with Juliette Binoche and William Hurt. In 2004, the Pompidou center of Paris devotes an exhibition to her works. Akerman is also an actress on certain occasions, in films made by other film makers and he has also composed several pieces of music and films scripts.

Captain Gervasio`s Family is a 16mm black and white silent portrait of a Spiritist community in Palmelo, a small town in the interior of Brazil. It?s a town of 2000 inhabitants, half of whom are psychic mediums. The film refers to a map drawn by a Spiritist woman in Palmelo, charting twenty astral cities hovering above the whole of the Brazilian territory. Cities ?like those on earth, but infinitely more perfect?. The Spiritists in Palmelo practice what is known as `the magnetic chain?, a legacy from the German physician Franz Mesmer, the founder of Spiritism Allan Kardec, and the French botanist François Deleuze. The film is a collaboration between the artists Tamar Guimaraes (BR) and Kasper Akhøj (DK).

Kasper Akhøj was born in Copenhagen, Denmark where he lives and works. He studied at the Czech National Film School (FAMU), Städelschule - Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. He is also a former participant of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. He is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam and has exhibited widely at major museums and biennials, both solo and in collaboration with Brazilian artist Tamar Guimaraes, most recently at last years 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace. Tamar Guimarães was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds a BFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and MFA from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. She is also a former participant of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. She is represented by Galeria Fortes Vilaça in Sao Paolo, and has exhibited widely at major museums and biennials, both solo and in collaboration with Danish artist Kasper Akhøj, most recently at last years 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace.

In the video, the artists combine pseudoscience with repetition to investigate the connection between technology and truth. An E-meter device was exploited as a crude polygraph machine. Its pseudoscientific function is to "detect lies" in order to monitor a statement`s progression from lie to truth. Statements were read to and repeated by the participants. Through continuous repetition, the subjects built a relationship with the spoken words, which over time, matured into experiences and finally beliefs. All of the combined elements resulted in mettre en abîme the transformation of a political affirmation into a belief.

Edward Akrout is a Franco-British artist that works between London, New York and Paris. His practice, which largely includes painting, drawing and sculpting, is best described as abstract expressionism. Personal website: EdwardAkrout.com Representation: Lahd Gallery Jakob Boeskov is a Danish-Icelandic artist and filmmaker that works between New York and Copenhagen. Having graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, his pieces have been shown in museums such as New Museum, Science Politiques, Moscow State Academy Art Institute and the Stedelijk Museum. Personal website: JakobBoeskov.com Representation: The Scandinavian Institute

They go to a day trip to an island next to Istanbul. They find themselves captivated by the never ending cityscape and sink into a contemplation on urban decay. Living in a concrete jungle is their future.

Born in Istanbul in 1987, Eren Aksu is a Berlin based filmmaker. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film& Television and currently studies Arts& Media at Berlin University of the Arts. His short films include Aydınlık (2013), Cosmorama (2015), İki Yer (2017).

Joining a recent wave of immigration from Turkey to Germany, Asli is new in Berlin. She auditions for the voice of the audio guide for an archaeological museum, facing her with objects from her home country, including a monumental Zeus Altar. Her encounters during the rest of the day further reveal the absurdity of out of placeness.

Eren Aksu is a director and editor based in Berlin. He was born in ?stanbul and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film&TV from Istanbul Bilgi University, Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts Degrees in Arts&Media from Universität der Künste Berlin. He took part in Talents Sarajevo as s director and his films were screened at many international film festivals such as Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, Dresden Short Film Festival, Akbank Short Film Festival. His latest film “Other Than That, I’m Fine” won 3sat promotional award in 66. International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

"Close your eyes and imagine: ARBEIT" is an experimental video project in which we searched for positions, perspectives, contradictions, wishes, utopias and imaginations around the term "work" together with young people from the Marienfelde transitional home in Berlin. We were inspired by the film "Workers Leave the Factory" by Harun Farocki and remixed it with our own voices, perspectives and images.

We are a group of friends with different interests and work focuses that came together in 2019 around Christian Limber, Miriam TrostorfChristian Diaz Orejarena und Lara Dade. Since then, we have been connecting with more and more friends and colleagues - also in an international context. We work and think together on a mediation practice that transcends disciplines and is located at the intersections of visual art, social work, film, art education, activism and curating. Partly we realize projects together, in smaller groups or alone - but always in exchange and dialogue with each other.

'Coco's Bed' is a short film created for viewing on the iPad mini, commissioned for the X-apartment installation series by producer Matthias Lilienthal. X-apartment audience members follow Hassan, the protagonist of the film, to his own apartment where they find him in the flesh as well. 'Coco's Bed' was available on view for three days in July 2013 in the Bourj Hammoud district of Beirut. The neighborhood began as an informal refugee camp for Armenians fleeing the genocide in Turkey. It now additionally houses a large and diverse population of immigrants and asylum seekers from countries including Syria, Ethiopia, and the Philippines.

Stefan Tarnowski is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University’s Anthropology Department, Institute of Comparative Literature and Society and Institute for Comparative Media. His research focuses on Syria since the 2011 revolution, and in particular on the relations between technology, political economy and social imaginaries. He has a degree in Middle East Studies from Oxford University. His ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian media activists and civil society organisations was also funded by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation 2018-19, and his most recent publication is a translation of and introduction to Dork Zabunyan's The Insistence of Struggle (IF Publications, 2019). Liane Al Ghusain (b. 1987, Kuwait) is an artist based in Abu Dhabi. Currently enrolled in the MFA program in Art & Media at NYUAD; she works primarily as a performance artist exploring various literary and craft forms. Born in Kuwait to a Palestinian family, Liane has focused on theater and writing throughout her life, having received a BA and MA in English with a focus on creative writing from Stanford University, with interdisciplinary honors in feminist studies. She has worked as an arts administrator, copywriter, language instructor, and yoga teacher.

Growing up in Kuwait close to an oil refinery by the sea, the artist would create stories for the distant petroleum operation while passing by on a traffic bridge. As she envisioned an expansive panorama of lights, fire, smoke, and towers, Al Qadiri imagined it was a city-metropolis—"filled with beings and phantoms from another world.” This dream-like film hearkens back to these childhood memories, fusing eerie, slow views of a reconstructed miniature refinery with lines from poems about city lights and industrial landscapes. Crude Eye blurs reality with speculative memory, and we are unable to tell if the scene is a real place or a fantasy. The artist says: “The work attempts to reconcile a sense of childlike wonder with the toxic environmental destruction that the refinery inherently represents.”

Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983) is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. Spanning sculpture, installation, film and performance, Al Qadiri's multifaceted practice is mainly based on research into the cultural histories of the Gulf region. Her interpretation of the Gulf's so-called "petro-culture" is manifested through speculative scenarios that take inspiration from science fiction, autobiography, traditional practices and pop culture, resulting in uncanny and covertly subversive works. She is currently based in Berlin.

After the first Gulf War in 1991, countless oil fields in Kuwait were set ablaze during the retreat of invading forces. Those months following the war were nothing short of the classic image of a biblical apocalypse: the earth belching fire and the black scorched sky felt like a portrait of hell as it should be, an almost romanticized vision of the end of the world. Werner Herzog, lured by the surrealism of this present-day hell, shot his docu-fiction film “Lessons of Darkness” there which placed images of the oil fires alongside Christian biblical texts and a Wagner soundtrack. Inspired by his endeavor, this video re-explores the cataclysmic event and attempts to expand its meaning, especially as the idea of imminent doom is even more omnipresent today. Amateur VHS video footage of the oil fires is juxtaposed with audio monologues from Islamic television programs of the same period. At the time, the tools used to represent religion were geared towards visualizing god through nature. Trees, waterfalls, mountains, and animals were the visual staple of religious media, and the narration was not that of the Koran, but of Arabic poetry recited by a skilled orator with a deep voice.

Monira Al Qadiri is a Kuwaiti visual artist and film maker born in Senegal and educated in Japan. In 2010, she received a Ph.D. in inter-media art from Tokyo University of the Arts, where her research was focused on the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle-East region stemming from poetry, music, art and religious practices. Her work explores the relationship between narcissism and masculinity, as well as other dysfunctional gender roles. She is currently expanding her practice towards social and political subjects. Al Qadiri has taken part in exhibitions and film screenings in Tokyo, Kuwait, Beirut, Dubai, Berlin, New York and Moscow among others. She is also part of the artist collective GCC, who has recently held a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2014.

“ The Craft ”is a film that revolves around childish fictions laced with serious suspicions towards the real world. Using the lens of family history, the film dissects the artist’s own past to reexamine an uncanny relationship taking place in the shadows of her major life events: “ Were my parents conspiring with aliens behind my back ” Reality gradually disintegrates like quicksand around this central question, as paranoia and speculation begin to take hold. Futuristic architecture, popular culture, dream readings, junk food, alien abductions, geopolitics, international diplomacy, war and peace; all of these once solid staples of modern life now become tinted with a general sense of distrust, overshadowing everything. Like a ticking time bomb at the center of the nuclear family unit, the suspicion reaches a crescendo when the protagonist suddenly discovers that the American century has finally ended.

Monira Al Qadiri is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. In 2010, she received a Ph.D. in inter-media art from Tokyo University of the Arts, where her research was focused on the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle-East stemming from poetry, music, art and religious practices. Her work explores unconventional gender identities, petro-cultures and their possible futures, as well as the legacies of corruption. She is also part of the artist collective GCC, who held a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York (2014). Monira was recently based in Amsterdam, and underwent a two year artist residency at the Rijksakademie until the end of 2017.

Blind Oedipus, in older age, left Thebes as an exile accompanied by Antigone, who was both his daughter and sister. They sought refuge in Colonus of Athens. What if the tragic hero of Sophocles’ play 'Oedipus at Colonus' was a Romani nomad residing in today’s post-industrial outskirts of western Athens? OTWTC is a ‘docufictional’ VR film cast with Romani amateurs who live at the ghettoised toxic wastelands of Thriasian Plain, where Sophocles’ wandering hero is meant to have passed from. Consisted of a spatial sound design (ambisonics), the film's audio incorporates location sounds recorded inside the dwellings that merge “high” and “low” culture, often carrying with them the “eerie echoes” of dubbed TV series, speaking themselves about “Oedipal conflicts”, ‘absent fathers’, ‘incest’, murder and death.

Loukia Alavanou is a moving image artist and filmmaker. She is representing Greece at the 59th Venice Art Biennale with the exhibition “Oedipus in Search of Colonus. Alavanou holds an MA in Photography from the RCA in London. She was the winner of the 5th Deste Prize. In recent years, after receiving international acclaim, she started to be involved with the production of VR films and founded the first VR production company in Greece. She held a retrospective exhibition at State of Concept, Athens in 2018. For the years 2021 and 2022 Alavanou is a fellow artist at ONX Studio, organised by Onassis USA and the New Museum in NY. Alavanou’s work has been presented by institutions and festivals including KANAL Centre Pompidou, Accelerator, Stockholm, Gucci Garden, Kino Der Kunst, Palais de BOZAR, Palais de Tokyo, Athens Biennale, Moscow Biennale, Fiorucci Art Trust, The Museum of Cycladic Art, Benaki Museum. Her films are part of numerous collections including the Onassis Collection, the Dakis Joannou Collection, The Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe/ ZKM, PCAI/ Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative.

It`s summertime. A pilot and a copilot wander on lost roads, looking for absolute.

Another Gate Before The Law (HDVideo, B&W, 17m13, Michiel Alberts, 2017) Michiel Alberts is currently working on a series of K. Films. The films relate to different short texts by F. Kafka. Michiel Alberts performs and films his actions in order to transform the stories into a visual image bringing it to current and existential scenery. The film Another Gate Before The Law refers to the text Before the Law, by F. Kafka. The film is a dark poetic image dealing with the present state of our time and to current human conditions.

(Born The Netherlands, 1972. Lives and Works in Antwerp, Belgium.) Michiel Alberts is a Visual artist working with the media Performance, Film and Photography. In his film works he focuses upon his performative presence, movements with duration or repetitive actions. Through the usage of single angel point, the audience is invited to experience a frozen state and relate to existential questions and human conditions. His films can be described as a still picture moving, a state of presence unresolved. “ My physical presence functions as a performative tool to question human conditions, cosmic order, time and landscapes. Through forms of abstraction I bring my content from a specific happening, or a specific social context to a larger existential scenery." Michiel Alberts has studied Visual Art at the H.I.S.K. institute in Antwerp and Gent (2008). He also completed a Master of Arts at Dasarts in Amsterdam (2005) and completed the Acting School of Maastricht (1997)