VISTAS I /
VISTAS I /
Curated programme by the festival team.
Daria's Night Flowers
Maryam Tafakory, Iran/Great Britain/France, 2025, DCP, colour, 16', English subtitles, Slovenian video subtitles
Daria has written her first manuscript about falling in love with a mysterious girl called 'abi' [blue]. The night flowers in her garden hide the secrets of a country that has turned love stories into routine crime scenes.
Hemispheres
Eric Stewart, USA, 2025, DCP (shot on S16 mm), colour, 8', no dialogue
Filmed over the course of several years in southern Colorado, Hemispheres is a quiet study in pattern and place, as observed through the window of my living room. Shot on Super 16mm film, the project layers multiple time-lapse exposures of cacti and seasonal light, capturing subtle shifts in color, atmosphere, and rhythm. Like the inlay of a sundial meeting a garden’s creeping vines, what emerges is not a photograph of a singular view or moment, but a composite drawing of duration – using light to trace the intersecting cycles of growth and dormancy, brightness and shadow, warm and cool, seasonal progression and retreat…
The Garden Of Electric Delights
Billy Roisz, Austrija, 2025, DCP, colour, 12', no dialogue
The garden of pleasure and torture that the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch conceived and visualized as a surreal triptych over five centuries ago was given a beautiful title by posterity: “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Billy Roisz has given her latest production a variation on this name, and it is a logical one: her Garden of Electric Delights offers pleasures that seem less earthly than “electric”. - Stefan Grissemann
Odamado
Émilien Dubuc, France, 2025, DCP, colour, 26', English subtitles, Slovenian video subtitles
A family picture in the garden, a recording of my grandma singing, a letter written to her one year after she died: 200 kB of data stored in synthetic DNA, the hard drive of the future. Odamado, an imperfect manual for storing memories into DNA.
J-N-N
Ginan Seidl, Germany/Iraq, DCP, colour, 19', English subtitles, Slovenian video subtitles
Ginan Seidl’s essayistic splitscreen film/three channel installation ‘ج ن ن’ is based on family conversations during a trip to Iraq and an intensive research on Jinn. The Jinn are ephemeral entities that are deeply interwoven into the culture of Iraq. The 2-channel video installation is a visual journey through the desert of Iraq, from Ur via Babylon to the secluded living rooms in Baghdad. It fragmentarily questions a culture and society that has been torn apart by ongoing wars, civil wars, repression and terrorism in recent decades. Cosmovision is linked with historical events and private experiences. While the work carries out an experimental arrangement from the outside and attempts to comprehend these experiences, it simultaneously circles around the void of the unspeakable, the in-between, on a personally affected level – bouncing off its vehemence.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Maryam Tafakory is an artist-filmmaker working with textual and filmic collage, layering poetry, speculative nonfiction, and archival fragments. Her practice traces quiet acts of erasure upon bodies, intimacies, and histories. She looks at what is often dismissed as trivial or excessive, moving through historical gaps, unspoken rules, and concealed queer stories. Her films have received numerous awards, several Oscar-qualifying, including the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival; Best Documentary Short at the 72nd Melbourne International Film Festival; the Tiger Short Award at the 51st IFF Rotterdam, and the Cinema & Gioventù Best International Short Film award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. They have also screened at NYFF (New York), TIFF (Toronto), and BFI London Film Festival.
Eric Stewart is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist and educator. For over ten years he has been teaching analogue filmmaking workshops and creating 16mm experimental films. He was awarded the 2015 Mono No Aware Award for Excellence in Filmmaking at the Haverhill Experimental Film Festival and his films have shown at: The Yerba Buena Center for Fine Arts (SF), Yale University, Crossroads Film Festival (SF Cinematheque), 25fps (Zagreb) and The Florida Experimental Film Festival. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Digital and Interactive Media Arts at Western Connecticut University. Being an advocate of grassroots community building, he spends his free time slinging tofu at the Brattleboro Food Coop and contributing to the AgX Boston Film Collective.
Billy Roisz (1967) lives and works in Vienna. She does video and sound experiments in performance, installation and cinema. She executes her projects solo or in collaboration with experimental musicians. The short film Bring Me the Head of Henri Chrétien! (2013), co-directed with her life partner Dieter Kovačič, is part of Vertical Cinema a compilation programme consisting of ten experimental films on 35mm celluloid made for projection on a monumental vertical screen. She was also a co-organiser and programmer of REHEAT Festival.
Émilien Duboc (1987) originally studied biochemistry in France and then in the Netherlands, focusing on the emergence of life on Earth, before turning to photography and film. While at the KASK & Conservatorium/School of Arts in Ghent (Belgium), he developed a practice based on film, the chemistry of images and sound reconstruction, with which he bid farewell to synchronicity. At Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, the conjunction of scientific and artistic research is fully effective.
Ginan Seidl is a video/installation artist and filmmaker based in Halle/Saale, after she studied plastic arts in Halle (Saale), Berlin, and Mexico City, she participated in the Professional Media Master Class and Master Class Lab of Werkleitz e.V. in 2012 and 2016. She has won several art awards and had residencies in Istanbul and Mexico. Her work has been shown in international film festivals, exhibitions, and art festivals. She is a member of the collective Rosenpictures.