5:00 min/sound/colour
Max Hattler, Hong Kong/Germany

Taking inspiration from 20th-century avant-garde experiments in graphical sound generation, the entire image in O/S functions as an optical soundtrack. Abstract motion becomes sound. What you hear is exactly what you see.

Max Hattler’s experimental animation works explore relationships between abstraction and figuration, aesthetics and politics, sound and image, and precision and improvisation. His work has been presented at museums, galleries and festivals around the world. Awards include London International Animation Festival, Annecy Animation Festival, and several Visual Music Awards. He has performed live globally including at KLEX, Sonar Hong Kong, Seoul Museum of Art, EXPO Milano and many others. He is a Professor at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

4:38 min/sound/colour
Raito Low, Taiwan/Malaysia

Stones are existences full of possibilities in nature, from sand to mountains, flowing on the land and embracing everything in the world. Let us re-understand stones from another angle and re-understand the firm but soft hearts of the Amis.

Raito Low Jing-Yi, an animation director from Malaysia based in Taiwan. Specializing in stop-motion animation. Currently studying at NTUA MAA master’s program, director of Raito’s Art Studio. Adhering to the spirit of experimental animation, using plants as medium to create visuals that combine humanities and nature. Personal work including <Fisso><Blüte><Blumentanz>, has been shortlisted in more than 100 film festivals. Published “Like Water, We Flow ” together with Ma Li.

03:35 min/sound/colour
Taha Long, Peru/Malaysia

On June 24, 2022, in Puerto Maldonado, a woman was photographed at her home, her workplace and within the Amazon rainforest. Contemplating the inevitability of death she feels a sense of isolation and vulnerability. The camera offers the allure of immortality while subjecting her to scrutiny. Just as Lizeth’s footprints faded swiftly in the jungle, the moments captured in the photographs are equally transient.

Taha Long (b. 1997) is a multi-disciplinary artist from Klang, Selangor. He graduated from School of Visual Arts with an MPS in Film Directing, and is an alumna of the Playlab Films’ 2022 Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Lab. Across the arts, his work interests itself in community, how it is maintained and sometimes vanishes. Taha has been the recipient of the Krishen Jit Fund, Hai-O Arts and Culture Grant, PBS Latino Public Broadcasting Grant, and Katharina Otto-Bernstein Grant. His projects continue to be featured on publications, such as Dance Magazine, Asian Movie Pulse, News Straits Times, Tatler Asia, and more.

10:48 min/sound/colour
William Delgrande and Elie Bolard, France

Today’s farmers work with a lot of different robots. Maybe one day these robots will work on their own. Unless farmers are already robots.

William Delgrande and Elie Bolard were born in Pontarlier (France) in 1999. After graduating from Université Panthéon Sorbonne for William and from Villa Arson art school for Elie, they both work as independent artists.

5:45 min/sound/colour
Sandrine Deumier, France

Inspired by existing natural environments and carried by the notion of porosity of temporal planes and crossing of geological surfaces, this work is a dive into intermediate landscapes, neither natural nor artifi-cial, beyond human memories. It attempts to answer the question of what kind of technological fictions can be imagined to steer the present time towards viable futures.

Sandrine Deumier is a multidisciplinary artist working in the field of performance, poetry and video art whose work investigates post-futurist themes through the development of aesthetic forms related to digital imaginaries.

03:35 min/sound/colour
Silvia De Gennaro, Italy

Why look for artificial worlds when we already live in a world full of wonder?

Silvia De Gennaro lives and works in Rome, Italy. For twenty years she has been dealing with digital art, video art and animation. Her works have participated in several video art exhibitions and film festivals around the world.

7:46 min/sound/colour
Sim Hoi Ling, Malaysia

This video work navigates the enigmatic intersection of physicality and spirit, where the body, stripped of its civilized veneer, transcends its human confines and edges into the realm of the spectral and otherworldly. The filmmaker uses the intersection between day and night to address these transformations, subtly revealing the primal and creature-like metaphors that lie beneath the surface of the human identity.

Sim Hoi Ling is an interdisciplinary artist whose praxis is influenced by photography, with her subject often revolves around themes of decayed and daily absurdities. She enjoys exploring unconventional ways of image-making and has exhibited works in the form of printmaking, media/video art, installation and performance. Her work was presented at festivals across Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, also collected internationally by collectors from the United States, Canada, Germany and Malaysia. She loves collecting sound in her free time and occasionally releases her experimental sound works under the group name DSGN.

08:04 min/sound/black & white
Noelani Kidder, USA/Spain

The second chapter of a longer film with the same name, Carmen Magellan was filmed in New York City during the coronavirus pandemic. Searching for safe locations to shoot, I spent a lot of time out of doors, on the NYC ferry, in my community garden, and attending outdoor concerts as much as possible. I started to study flamenco singing online in 2020 with maestro Alfonso Cid, and asked him to be in my film. My film reflects our grief and love for New York City during a very challenging time in our city’s history. It was a time when human vulnerability and resilience came to the forefront. It is clear that we are quite powerless with respect to nature, and also responsible to it in ways we may have never realized before the pandemic. My short film is a love letter and a plea to humanity, in all our suffering and joy, and in a great hope for the future of the planet.

Noelani Kidder was born and raised in Upstate New York and Kauai, Hawaii and has been working as a filmmaker in New York City since 2006. Noe studied filmmaking with Tatsu Aoki and Chris Sullivan at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has served as a board member of Millennium Film Workshop in NYC. Her films have been shown at venues such as Anthology Film Archives, Le Petit Versailles and with Port Actif in Gent, Belgium and the Nice Dance Film Festival in Nice, France. Noe is an active community gardener and organizer and she enjoys making and learning about flamenco music in her spare time.

11:40 min/sound/colour
Jacklyn Brickman, USA

Murmuration asks how myth perpetuation can be enacted to think forward by weaving archival material from the Folger Shakespeare Library with artificially intelligent and generative moving images to wrestle with the social and environmental misconceptions about starlings and their contested arrival in America.

Jacklyn Brickman is a visual artist whose work entangles science fact with fiction to address social and environmental concerns by employing natural objects, processes, and technology. Her work spans installation, moving image and performance, with a special interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration and social engagement. Fellowships include The National Academy of Sciences, Chaire arts et sciences, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Emergency Grant), Folger Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and Erb Family Foundation. She has exhibited her work in the US, Canada, France, India, and Slovenia. Brickman resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan and is Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Western Michigan University.

05:45 min/sound/colour
Carme Puche-Moré, Spain

What is left of the witches that were burned? What lies behind a word that is often used in a banal way? Witches have nourished the audiovisual imagination with stereotypes that rarely resemble the women who died under this accusation. Humble women, some dissidents, and often slaves of the new order that was built to stay. ‘Ashes’ explores the video-to-video technique in a piece that confronts stereotypes through the claim and the spell: say ‘I’m a witch’ three times and you’ll be a free person. Do you dare?

Carme Puche-Moré (Barcelona, 1977) is a director and screenwriter. She has worked in journalism and communication for more than fifteen years before dedicating herself to audiovisual productions. Her career as a filmmaker began with “Camille” (Best New Screenplay, Sitges Film Festival 2011) and in the field of fiction has explored the fantasy world, horror and inner monologues in pieces such as “Ferrying Fee” , written by Erin Donovan (The Mentalist), “The Welcome” (selected at more than 20 international festivals) or “The Feathers”, in the distribution phase. In 2014 he premiered the documentary “The Jump!” at the IN-EDIT Film Festival. As a freelance director, she has worked for museums developing visuals, and as a screenwriter she has collaborated with Folch Studio, working on Ada Colau’s campaign. Her last work was selected by the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) to be part of the project City Simphonies.