VISTAS lI /
VISTAS lI /
Curated programme by the festival team.
Gerhard
Ulu Braun, Germany, 2025, DCP, colour, 10'05'', English subtitles, Slovenian video subtitles
An ecstatic biopic about the world’s most successful living painter. In vivid images, this AI hybrid film sheds light on the social role of painting in the tension between creativity, capital investment, and spirituality. We are currently in the transition phase from analog to artificial reproducibility. Gerhard’s unique painting techniques, especially squeegeeing, have triggered worldwide hype. His techniques and ideas are being adapted, refined, and improved by global “protagonists” and then flooded the markets and social media. The myth of the “genius” writes itself into the DNA of an increasingly uncontrollable creation chain as a fabulous and controversial homage.
Their Eyes
Nicolas Gourault, France, 2025, DCP, colour, 23', English subtitles, Slovenian video subtitles
How does a machine learn to read the world? Testimonies and screen recordings introduce the experience of online micro-workers from the Global South: their job is to teach the AI of self-driving cars to navigate the streets of the Global North.
Ndjimu
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, DR Congo/USA, DCP, colour, 31'33'', English subtitles, Slovenian video subtitles
In the claustrophobic depths of the Mutoshi mine in Katanga (DRC), Ndjimu follows The Rememberers – a community labouring in unsafe and brutal conditions to extract coveted minerals from the ancestral soils to feed global tech empires, to their own detriment. Set to a soundtrack of metallic rock being crushed, Ndjimu is an invocation and a descent into the earth’s memory, beneath the noise of extraction and the myth of progress. –
Sixty-seven Milliseconds
fleuryfontaine, France, 2025, DCP, colour, 15', English subtitles, Slovenian video subtitles
In search of a bullet whose trail has been captured on surveillance camera footage, the film follows its trajectory and those of its main protagonists. Blending the early cinema technique of chronophotography with CGI, Sixty-seven Milliseconds questions the legitimacy of policing in France and warns of its excesses.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Ulu Braun (1976) works and lives in Berlin and Lieksa. From 1996 to 2005 he studied painting and experimental film at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Film University Babelsberg. Ulu Braun has been using the medium of video to explore the field between the visual arts and auteur cinema since 1997. He is one of the key figures who have transferred painting into video art and has played a significant role in defining and further developing the genre of video collage. He often uses humor and fantastic narration to build subversive portraits of our time.
Nicolas Gourault (1991) is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris (FR) with a background in visual arts and visual studies. He has worked with Forensic Architecture before graduating from Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts. His work is imbued with this double training, navigating between online open-source investigations and the critical use of new media as documentary tools. His films and video installations explore the power relationships embedded in technologies and tries to build counter-narratives through the use of situated testimony and experimental image-making. His artworks have been exhibited in film festivals and contemporary art venues.
Mwalimu Ndaliko Katondolo (1974), was born in Goma, DR Congo and is a filmmaker, educator and an ancestral ecologist. His multi-genre artistic works are acclaimed for their decolonial Africanfuturistic style, which engages historical content to address contemporary sociopolitical and cultural issues. In 1994, he co- founded Maideni, an ecological youth movement. In 2000, he co-founded Yole!Africa and in 2005 he founded the Ishango Encounter (formerly known as Salaam Kivu International Film Festival). Ndaliko Katondolo teaches and consults regularly for international organisations, addressing social, ecological and political inequity among marginalised groups through culture and Art.
fleuryfontaine is the artist duo of Galdric Fleury and Antoine Fontaine, graduates in architecture and Le Fresnoy. They examine artificial environments that shape bodies and behavior through installations, films, and performances. Their film Constrain (2020) was showcased at major festivals such as Vision du Réel, Annecy Film Festival and IDFA.