Red Moon

Director: Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

Year: 2024

Throw away all common sense and tap into your madness as you follow Dr. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian - a London-based artist and educator of Armenian and Algerian descent - on a fascinating journey to build a new civilization on the moon. Along with her doppelgängers, Myriam and Lucia, Nelly challenges us to defy power structures and reject planetary exploitation by letting go of the constraints of borders, gender, and religion to embrace what diversity could be in the vast landscape of our imaginations. Prior to their mission, Nelly and her parallel version of self speak with a wide-ranging collection of experts. There’s an LGBTQ+ rights activist, an astronomer, a political scientist, an archaeologist who also makes wine, a theoretical physicist, an environmental designer, a horror filmmaker, and a mathematical economist. They are all crucial to their quest to uncover the key to a queer, eco-feminist future devoid of generational trauma, colonization, and imperialism. However, as the analog space mission takes unexpected turns, the future remains as uncertain as the condition of Schrödinger’s Cat. Featuring the music of Pussy Riot and Colin Self. Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2024 - World premiere Official Selection Munich Film Festival 2024 - European premiere

Director: Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

Year: 2019

"To act is to begin something new" said Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest thinkers of all time. Arendt, who passed away in 1975, coined the concept of the ‘banality of evil’. This documentary attempts to explore the thinking processes and mechanisms of activism and risky thoughts, unravelling some of the reasons why Trump, Le Pen and others have captured people’s imaginations by reviving past ideologies. Your guide in this adventurous journey is the alternative educator Nelly Ben Hayoun, who armed with puppets and dressed as Hannah Arendt, teases the greatest thinkers of our age whilst challenging them to an impossible pursuit; the search of the origins of knowledge. Featuring contributions from political activist Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Hannah Arendt’s students: Arjun Appadurai and Leon Botstein, nonsense-artist Novbumichi Tosa of Maywa Denki, robot maker Hiroshi Ishiguro, Japanese Living National Treasures: Bunraku puppeteer – Kanjuro Kiritake II and Noh Theatre master – Hisa Uzawa, former Lord Mayor of Sheffield Magid Magid, cyborg artist Neil Harbisson and more. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Documentary Competition - World premiere

Director: Tatiana Collet Apraxine

Year: 2028

You awaken on a fog-shrouded shoreline and meet Echo, a strange child with a hole in their stomach. Together you cross a lantern festival where the veil between worlds is thinnest, sail into an ocean that opens beneath you, and descend through a portal into the Underworld. The Underworld moves through different facets of grief: a rave where silhouettes dance in slow motion, indifferent to Echo's attempts to reach them; a frozen sea where giant statues crack open to release a buried memory of a lost mother; a shadow theatre where an anger monster is unleashed, reducing everything to embers. From the embers, a boat carries you into a vast darkness, where Mother appears, and they are finally reunited. You sail together to the Tree of Life, a bioluminescent, cosmic jungle. Echo begs her to return to the World of the Living, but ancestors appear and surround you. She cannot come back - the journey was never about bringing her back. Echo, revealed to be your own child self, dissolves around you as the hole fills with light.