Every face is a shape that looks at us
| Argentina, 7:12, 2023 |
- Agustín Telo

"Every face is a shape that looks at us" starts from a systematic intervention and analogical-digital manipulation on my National Identity Card. Taking this card as a plastic materiality, I begin an endless journey through my own face, looking to find some form or stain that speaks of what I apparently am or think I am. From this identity exercise, conceived as a struggle against the immutable and the established, I find at least one answer: after all, transforming myself into a dark, diffuse and vibrant stain, with countless eyes dissolved among them, deeply reassures me.

Agustin Telo is graduate of Image and Sound Design, in the Buenos Aires University (UBA), with courses and seminars of photography, cinema and visual arts. His work goes through diverse techniques (motion images projections, animation and digital video) and different supports and materials (objects, textil, ice or thrush installations). In recent years he makes various video installations: "El armario" / “El Lumenario” / “Dilusión”. In the last years he worked in experimental short films participating in various national and international film festivals.

Negative / Positive Film
|Italy/Canada, 14:00, 2023 |
- Federica Foglia

Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials.
An abstract remediation occurs - female bodies are dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body slowly merges with the body of insects and flowers.

Federica Foglia is a transnational visual artist and writer. She holds a BA in Multimedia Languages and Digital Humanities: History of Art, Theatre, and Cinema from the University of Naples L'Orientale, an MFA in Film from York University, Toronto and is currently a Ph.D. student in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. She is interested in migration, citizenship and identity, displacement, women of the diaspora, migrant temporalities, and finding a visual language to investigate these experiences. Her practice revolves around tactile filmmaking, recycled cinema, amateur filmmaking, archives, ecofeminism, and materialist cinema.

It matters
| Singapore / Italy, 0:25, 2023 |
- Sara Bonaventura

Reconstructing matter as having dynamic agency between a structuralist loop and a quote, this analogue short is a tribute to Donna Haraway and her seminal "Staying with the trouble", evoking women labour in the knitted content of the textual image: the frame depicts women hands knitting and is manipulated and scratched with knitting needles by my own hands. The nature of matter itself is a problem for women (for feminist theory). Thus this is a non-camera film, realized with anonymous found footage, which I hope suggests that knowledge is indeed an embroidered fragmented dynamic multi-layered and embedded quilt, as much as matter.

Sara Bonaventura (1982) is an Italian visual artist and educator. She works at the intersection between visual and media arts, lens based media and new media. As independent videographer she has been collaborating with performers and musicians, directing clips, ads, curating visuals. Her video works have been screened worldwide; at the NYC Anthology Film Archives, the San Francisco Independent Short Film Festival, at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Asolo Art Film Festival, at Studio 303 for the Montreal Nuit Blanche, the Miami New Media Festival, the Athens Digital Arts Festival, at Rome MACRO Museum, the Cinemateca do MAM in Rio for Dobra Festival, the MOMus in Thessaloniki for Videolands curated by Miden Festival, the itinerant Time is Love screening curated by Kisito Assangni, the Mexico City CODEC festival, Other Cinema at San Francisco ATA Gallery, the LA Echo Park Film Center, the Boston Cyber Arts Gallery and more.

1976: Search for Life
| United States, 4:00, 2023 |
- Tess Martin

A new father visits the hometown of his mother in 1976, accompanied by his wife and baby. At the same time, the NASA Viking lander is sending the first images back to Earth from the surface of another planet. Using the father’s travel journal as a guide, and re-contextualizing archival footage and photographs, this film explores our yearning to bridge the gap: the gap between parents and children, between points in space and between the present and the past.

Tess Martin is a film and visual artist based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She brings her perspective as someone who was raised between cultures to exploring themes of belonging, identity and connection. Her short films, videos and installations address our vulnerability: in relation to nature, the onslaught of time and the precariousness of memory. Tess has both a classical fine art and an animation background and these come together in her work: she pushes the conceptual potential of hand-made animation and the narrative potential of site-specific pieces.

I Would've Been Happy
| United States, 8:41, 2023 |
- Jordan Wong

"I Would've Been Happy" attempts to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family's domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic or reason to a broken home.

Jordan Wong
A collector of souvenir state spoons and overpriced Uni Alpha Gel lead pencils, Jordan Wong is a Chinese-American experimental animator and nonfiction filmmaker driven by emotional honesty and analog processes. He received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video at Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts, and was most recently a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022. His films have screened internationally, including DOK Leipzig, NewFest, Animafest Zagreb, Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where he was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker for the film Mom's Clothes.

(green before "green")
| United States, 16:36, 2024 |
- Atticus Echeverria, Paul Echeverria

(green before “green”) documents these contrasting stages of optical perception. Within Atticus' collection of stills and video, it is possible to observe an uninhibited exploration of movement and freedom. In comparison, my meager collection of Polaroids displays a visual awareness encapsulated within the margins of the frame. The photographs are interpreted via the limitations of storytelling and spoken language. (green before “green”) contemplates the complex intersections between family, parent, and child. Furthermore, the film attempts to authenticate the contrast between structured and unstructured points of view. Namely, does visual perception change through the acquisition of language?

Atticus Echeverria is a student at Bishop Elementary in Ypsilanti, MI. He enjoys exploring nature, riding his bike, and collecting Star Wars toys. (green before "green") is his first film. Paul Echeverria is a filmmaker, digital artist and educator. His research and creative practice examine the formative dynamics between childhood, parenthood and the family structure. In addition, he produces work that contemplates the inevitable collision between humans and technology. Echeverria works with multiple forms of media, including film, video, performance, augmented/virtual reality, social media, data manipulation, podcasting and e-literature.

Male Gazing
| Belgium, 7:30, 2024 |
- David Verdeure

A professional news photographer, confined to his apartment due to a broken leg, kills time by observing his neighbors from his wheelchair. His neighbors themselves also spend ample time at their respective rear windows, looking out over the shared courtyard. The photographer’s casual voyeurism takes a darker turn when he starts to suspect that something escapes his spying eye. What vanishes from sight when he trains his male gaze on the adjacent apartments?
Male Gazing reimagines Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window. This version turns the tables on the film’s male characters. Hitchcock’s signature suspense spreads like wildfire as characters fall victim to the gaze of the photographer. The lively courtyard is depopulated, then repopulated with new inhabitants.

David Verdeure has been making experimental short films and video essays since 2015. He publishes and releases his videos using the moniker Filmscalpel. His work was screened by film festivals in Spain, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the US and other countries. His video essays were published in peer-reviewed journals and shown during academic events in the US and the UK, Germany, Spain, Scotland and the Czech Republic. Over the years many of his videos were lauded on Sight & Sound's yearly survey of Best Video Essays.