Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Synopsis

An experimental documentary that unfolds as a ceremony of queer belonging, inheritance, and sound. At its heart is a dialogue with Afro-Cuban priestess and musician Amelia Pedroso, whose legacy is invoked through archival traces, letters, and performance. Narrated as a letter to an ancestor, the film situates the search for connection within an interior, oceanic dreamscape where water, memory, and ritual become both setting and subject. Cinematically, MODUPE moves between a stylised ensemble rehearsal and a sacred library-archive. The ensemble of voice, drum, and dance provides the film’s pulse, collapsing rehearsal and ritual into one. Deep blue light, reflective surfaces, and submerged imagery create a sensorial architecture that is both intimate and expansive, with water presence throughout evoking both flood and transformation. Formally, the film resists linear storytelling, privileging atmosphere, rhythm, and sonic immersion. Objects, archives, and sacred materials hold the same cinematic weight as bodies in performance, reframing the archive as altar and sound as shrine. Narrative unfolds through resonance rather than resolution, drawing the viewer into a space of listening and reflection. MODUPE proposes cinema as a vessel for inheritance, where identity is fluid, memory is alive and liberation is lived through sound.

Synopsis

In isolation on Iceland’s Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Nigerian-born modular synthesis artist Colloboh transforms glacial and oceanic recordings into sonic compositions - uncovering a dialogue between ice and sea that reshapes his understanding of consciousness, ecological collapse, and humanity’s place within both. As his process unfolds, Colloboh transforms these sounds into layered sonic works that blur the boundaries between observation and communion. The film culminates in a haunting gesture: he plays the completed composition back to the landscape itself, completing a dialogue between artist and environment. A meditation on impermanence, consciousness, and the fragile bond between humanity and the natural world. Official Selection SXSW 2026 - World Premiere

Synopsis

At midnight, two lab assistants study an unknown substance using machines and procedures that are unclear to us. They pursue knowledge through the strict logic of the laboratory. As exhaustion settles in, one of the assistants brews Turkish coffee for the other, and the night shifts. The process becomes a fortune-telling, and the scientific gaze gives way to intuition. Moving from analysis to foresight, the two women imagine another method of knowing, a space where rational inquiry and intuitive perception coexist. Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2026 - Forum Expanded - World premiere

Synopsis

Drawing on a location test filmed in Uganda and an email exchange with the scout, this short film captures cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with colonial imaginaries, binding the fiction of filmmaking with state-building. Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2026 - Forum Expanded - World premiere

Synopsis

After C. P. Cavafy. Dedicated to the body, to remembering, to forgetting. When blinded, the senses can cross-pollinate so that they become more closely bonded. Likewise, they can also disassociate and lose contact with each other. Desire transforms things into other things. The erotics of absence and suggestion direct attention away from the materialism of pornography. Longing is described through cinematic space as distance and proximity. Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026 - World premiere

Synopsis

THE WALNUT OF KNOWLEDGE turns Niyaz and Jonah’s yearly travels to Iran into a layered home movie. Based in a family garden outside of Tehran, we spend time with Jonah: watching his quest finding treasures beneath an old Walnut tree. The 80 year old Walnut tree has been a witness to many events from war to revolution, generations coming and going. Jonah hears these voices whilst he tries to understand his connection to this land. We hear mother and son’s reflections on life, history and belonging. Official Selection London Short Film Festival 2026 - World premiere

Synopsis

1985 was a difficult year for me. My mother had died, an attempted love affair went badly wrong, I hadn't made a film for five years. I bought a video camera and went to Cuba for three weeks. Music and memory play important parts. I first heard this particular music in Louis Malle's LES AMANTS (1958) when I was a teenager.

Synopsis

A multi-layered crime drama set in contemporary Europe and beyond, inspired by real events and personal experiences. The film follows interconnected characters whose lives are shaped by loyalty, moral dilemmas, and the consequences of their choices. The story spans five countries - Poland, Japan (in the heart of Tokyo), Myanmar, Ukraine, and the UK (London). It draws on true experiences: the main character spent three years in a martial arts monastery in Japan during his twenties, and a war reporter who was kidnapped during the conflict in Ukraine, prompting a tense rescue mission. These events form the backbone of a story the characters never meant to tell. Through parallel storylines, BASTION explores the complex web of relationships, conflicting interests, and personal responsibilities that define human behavior. Grounded in realism and driven by authentic characters, the film delivers an intense, emotionally resonant narrative where every decision carries weight. This drama presents a gripping, uncompromising portrayal of courage, loyalty, and moral choice, revealing the story they never meant to tell and offering a rare glimpse into human experience across continents under extreme circumstances.

Synopsis

“It” is difficult to talk about, so there's an asterisk in place of the “i”.

Synopsis

Now AGAIN is the first filmic interpretation of Marcel Proust's entire novel 'À la recherche du temps perdu'. Part Two encompasses the volumes of THE GUERMANTES WAY. The first filmic interpretation of Proust's entire novel, Philpott stretches narrative form into rich and varied experimental territories, providing a visual feastand sonic immersion, using AI and unique digital production techniques, to reveal the vast panoramic structure of Proust's great masterwork and provide a 21st century foundation for this timeless 20th century epic. A new form of story-telling for a modern age. Closer to documentary invention, rejecting costume drama. Closer to art than stage. Writing in pictures and music.

Synopsis

In extreme cold, the human body can turn against itself through paradoxical undressing: failing nerves mistake freezing for heat, compelling the dying to shed their last protection. In 水托邦 HYDROTOPIA, hydrophones frozen into ice capture the material disintegration of their frozen body as a projected film gradually emerges into clarity. The film follows British-Chinese artist Jamie Man suspended by hooks pierced through flesh in a winter landscape, practising rituals rooted in Shiva-dedicated traditions that explore a state of perpetual non-being. As the ice surrenders its form and the image sharpens into focus, transformation itself becomes the subject: matter abandoning one state for another, the body held suspended between dissolution and emergence. Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026 - World premiere

Synopsis

A feature documentary journeying into the depths of the COP climate conference in Dubai. Are these enormous get-togethers all about false promises that hinder change? Or are they the only hope we've got for world-saving unity? With his innocuous selfie-stick, filmmaker Josh Appignanesi moves unnoticed through Dubai's seductive slickness to reveal the talks, meetings and backroom parties behind the strange mixture of global cry for help and political jostling that is a COP. Lost in translation, he comes face to face with the irony of an oil baron hosting this last-chance climate saloon in a techno-utopian leisure city -- that, er, happens to be built in a burning desert. But then the business-as-usual is ruptured by a searing encounter with indigenous voices from the frontline of climate injustice…