Tokyo Dreams

Director: Nicholas Barker

Year: 1998

Unmade Beds is a black comedy about vanity and desire in modern America. Set in the sexual jungle of the New York singles scene, two men and two women frantically pursue their impossible dreams. Equipped with ample provisions of self-delusion, misogyny, anti-semitism and homophobia, Brenda, Michael, Aimee and Mikey are on the road to heterosexual fiasco. Barker hired a research staff who combed New York for potential characters. Their search led them deep into the New York singles scene. They attended singles events, played the personals, and ran ads in the back page of the New York Press. Disguised as singles on the prowl, they canvassed bars and cafes in Manhattan's diverse neigh-bourhoods, until they found the 'cast'. Employing his unique brand of 'real-fiction' Barker then directed his 'cast' under feature film conditions during the summer, fall and winter of 1996-97. During this period he wrote and rewrote his script in response to the unfolding events in their lives. 'I'd say 90% of the script was based on the actual behaviour and language of the four principal characters' says Barker. 'The rest is a pack of lies'.

Director: Jing Zhao

Year: 2025

After being ghosted by a romantic partner during a trip to Bangkok, the artist situates a contemporary act within a timeless Southeast Asian ghost cultural gesture, transforming personal heartbreak into a surreal exploration of ghosthood while reimagining its embodiment through ten playful yet haunting guidelines. Shifting between satire and introspection, the film contemplates the fragility of relationships and the futility and opacity of communication in the hyper-connected digital age.

Director: Rosario Hurtado, Roberto Feo, Stuart Bannocks

Year: 2025

AS TIME SWALLOWS TIME weaves fragmented narratives into a poetic dialogue between two entwined inquiries. The first engages with the curatorial focus of BIO28 (Ljubljana Design Biennale), which interrogates the historical symbolism linking women to flowers - figures of fragility, sensuality, and objectification - and the ways these associations have been reclaimed and subverted. The second unfolds as a speculative exploration of time and temporal perception as forces shaping human consciousness and evolution. Together, these threads compose a meditation on transformation, perception, and the cyclical nature of existence. Constructed through the juxtaposition of narrative fragments, the film layers scenes in a manner that invites viewers to navigate and reassemble its temporal and conceptual terrain. The film presents a dialogue between the Ljubljana Biennale’s curatorial theme, “Do You Speak Flower?” which explores the historical contexts in which women have been symbolically linked to flowers—figures of fragility, sensuality, and objectification—and how those associations have been reclaimed and subverted, and this theme directly, and the authors speculative exploration of time, temporal perception and post humanity.