VISTAS I /

IS IT PAST?

Curated by the festival team.

Metamorphosis’ Chantings or That Time When I Incarnated as Porpoise

Ainá Xisto, Portugal/Brazil, 2024, DCP, colour, 11'27'', english/slovenian subtitles

Driven by the will to give life and the realisation that the spiral of time cannot be avoided, an abyssal record guided by more-than-human connections journeys through inner landscapes and genuine conversations to restore the flow of metamorphosis: leaping from being to being as new ways of saying I.

Green Grey Black Brown

Yuyan Wang, South Korea/China/France, DCP, colour, 11'30'', no dialogue

A synthetic realm unfolds, meticulously engineered by global startups. Everything is bound together by a dark slime – an oily, recurrent presence that merges Jurassic-era flora with plastic plant decorations destined for shopping malls. Petroleum, in both refined and unrefined forms, opens up a portal to the gory logics of petro-capitalism and global extraction practices, revealing the flawed rationale behind techno-solutionist visions of the future.

The Flowers Stand Still Witnessing

Theo Panagopoulos, GB, 2024, DCP, colour, 17', slovenian subtitles

When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land.

Images de Tunisie

Younès Ben Slimane, GB/France/Tunisia, 2025, DCP, black-white/colour, 15'11'', english/slovenian subtitles

Images de Tunisie reclaims and recontextualizes archival footage from 1940s newsreels produced by Les Actualités Françaises, and combines it with new footage filmed at the same vernacular architecture sites in the Berber villages of southern Tunisia.

Man number 4

Miranda Pennell, GB, 2024, DCP, colour, 10', slovenian subtitles

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker.

In Retrospect

Mila Zhluktenko, Daniel Asadi Faezi, Germanya, 2025, DCP, black-white/colour, 14'29'', english/slovenian subtitles

Immigrant workers built a shopping mall for the Munich Olympics 1972. In 2016 this same place becomes the site of a racist shooting. “And now this hate,” concludes a woman in Sohrab Shahid Saless’ film Addressee Unknown (1983).

SKRFF

Corrie Francis Parks, Daniel Nuderscher, Austria, 2024, DCP, colouri, 7', no dialogue

A graffiti wall in Vienna becomes an archeological site and a sgraffito sculpture, as skrffologists activate traces of the past with stopmotion animation. But can history ever be remembered clearly in all its complexity?

Screening in the presence of the filmmakers.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Ainá Xisto (1991, Brasil) is a filmmaker and visual artist, has a Master's degree in Cinema from the School of Arts of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa and uses her creations as psych magic instruments and an update to immemorial connections. Sharing pedagogies and imaginaries of transmutation, health and creativity, her works overflow from the intimate with the essence of the inexplicable, a trance-manifest of the future that already is.

Yuyan Wang (1989, China) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work examines images at the point of production and the atmosphere cultivated by media regimes within the attention economy. Both poetic and political, her productions underscore the diversity of the effectual matrix that exists between suspense and action.

Theo Panagopoulos (1995, Greece) is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker, film programmer and PhD researcher based in Scotland. His creative and academic work explores themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identities and archives. He works between documentary and fiction and has directed multiple short films that have screened in festivals internationally such as Sundance, IDFA, True/False, Slamdance, Doc Lisboa, London Short Film Festival...

Younes Ben Slimane (1992, Tunisia) is a Tunisian artist and filmmaker. His architectural background has a major influence on his approach as an artist. Working in film, video, photography, drawing and installation, he establishes a permanent dialogue between architecture and visual arts, where different mediums coexist and reflect each other’s potentialities and limitations.

Miranda Pennell (1963, UK) is a London-based artist-filmmaker whose films often rework images from British colonial archives to reflect on contemporary situations. Her work emphasises the role of the imagination in the interpretation of historical documents. Her award-winning films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Berlin IFF, FID Marseille, Viennale, Rotterdam IFF, London IFF...

Mila Zhluktenko (1991, Ukraine) studies documentary film directing at the University of Television and Film Munich. Her films have been screened and awarded at numerous international festivals, including IDFA, San Sebastian FF, MoMa DocFortnight and Dok Leipzig, where her film Opera Glasses was awarded the Golden Dove. Her film Aralkum (co-directed with Daniel Asadi Faezi) won the award for best international short film at Visions du Réel in Nyon.

Daniel Asadi Faezi (1993, Germany) is a filmmaker. He studied directing at the University of Television and Film Munich and National College of Arts Lahore, Pakistan. His films have been screened and awarded at numerous film festivals, including Berlinale, Locarno, IDFA, Visions du Réel, DOK Leipzig and BFI London.

Corrie Francis Parks (1987, US) received her BA from Dartmouth College and her MFA from University of Southern California. Now an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Parks continues to research frame-by-frame movement from a practitioner's perspective. Her book, Fluid Frames: Experimental Animation with Sand, Clay, Paint and Pixels explores the tactile nature of moving malleable materials directly under the camera.

Daniel Nuderscher (1982, Austria) works with many possibilities for artistic expression, such as photography, film, sculpting, light installations, text, pa- inting, visuals, and land art. He has presented his work in various exhibitions in Vienna, Lower Austria, Hanoi, and South Tyrol; the short film SKRFF has been shown in competition at festivals like Annecy, Animafest Zagreb and Ottawa, amongst others.