“A Flock Of Thunder” by Mariana Mendivil | Mexico | 9’ | exp | 2025 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
An inner journey that delves into female identity, fragmenting and resignifying its representations by intervening images through stop motion collage, in search of freedom.
Mariana Mendivil:
Mariana Mendivil (Hermosillo, Sonora, 1995) is a Mexican visual artist and filmmaker. She graduated form the Escuela Nacional de Artes Cinematográficas (ENAC-UNAM) as a film director and from Bande à Part in Barcelona, where she completed a diploma in screenwriting. Her work explores collage, animation, and experimental cinema, addressing themes such as the body, memory, and displacement. She is the director of the experimental animation short film Memory of a displaced body (2024), winner of Best Short Film in the “Aciertos” section at FICUNAM and selected at festivals in Mexico, Germany, Croatia, China, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Portugal, Italy, and among others. Her collage work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Mexico, Italy, and Croatia, participating in biennials and festivals focused on analog techniques. She was co-director of Incrustaciones, a medium-length film developed with the Cátedra Gloria Contreras (UNAM), whose video installation was presented at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC).
“Kobika” by Nadia Otshudi | United Kingdom | 8’ | exp | 2025 | World Premiere
Synopsis:
Kobika drifts between memory and abstraction, moving through images that breathe more than they explain. Guided by voice and silence, it listens to the spaces between gestures. Where echoes, movement, and fragments of sound speak what words cannot. Through its shifting textures, the film reveals how pain and tenderness can coexist, how healing begins in the act of remembering. “Kobika” unfolds like a whispered ritual. A meditation on embodiment and loss, where silence becomes both witness and release, for those still learning to listen.
Nadia Otshudi:
Nadia Otshudi is a Congolese French director, visual artist and photographer based in Barcelona. Her work moves between film, photography and political memory, focusing on Black life, Congo and diaspora. Her films explore trauma, listening and resistance, using a DIY, intimate visual language rooted in protest and care.
“A drone story” by Laura Menassa | Lebanon | 10’ | exp | 2025 | International Premiere
Synopsis:
Beirut, November 2024.
The weight of silence gives way to a constant buzzing within the city’s noise, growing until it becomes unbearable. Through fragments of daily life, the film unfolds as a quiet dialogue with an unseen force: one that watches, and haunts everyday, revealing how war seeps into routine, thought, and body.
Laura Menassa:
Laura Menassa, Beirut-based photographer and filmmaker, explores body, memory, and routine, weaving intimate stories with political realities to unveil hidden lives and forge spaces of quiet resistance.
“Stolen Sealskin” by Sarah Lou Kinneen | Ireland | 7’ | exp | 2025 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
Drawing from the Migratory Legend of the Seal Woman, or Selkie, this experimental short film reimagines an enduring tale that drifts between myth and memory.
The film traces the lines from mythic captivity to lived experience, reading the Selkie’s loss of autonomy through the lens of Ireland’s own histories of coercive and biopolitical control. Stolen Sealskin explores the body as a vessel of governance and resistance. At its heart lies choice, or the theft of it, and the eternal rhythm between freedom and belonging.
Sarah Lou Kinneen:
Sarah Lou Kinneen is an emerging visual artist from Co. Wexford, Ireland. Her practice draws from site and is rooted in the ritual of daily walks and slow looking. She engages in a collaborative dialogue with the natural world, using an embodied approach that incorporates alternative photography, site-specific sculpture, dance, and moving image.
“Portrait of desire” by Nina Degraeve | Belgium | 14’ | exp | 2025 | World Premiere
Synopsis:
For one night, artist Romina Remmo invites us to experience the sensation of her suggestive work, imbued with eroticism and femininity. Exploring the imagination and the hidden side of the artist, the film takes us into a labyrinth of thoughts and fantasies where desire brushes up against violence and where seduction borders on suffering.
Nina Degraeve:
After a documentary experience at Northern Irish television RTE-NEWS Belfast, Nina Degraeve began film studies in Directing and Producing at HELB – Ilya Prigogine in Brussels, from which she graduated in 2017.
Passionate about contemporary art, she dedicated her first student documentary to Belarusian painter Igor Tishin. She then directed Boris Lehman: Portrait of the Unfinished, focusing on the Belgian filmmaker. During her final year of studies, she worked as a production assistant at Les Films du Fleuve, under the direction of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Her graduation film, Ray Richardson: Our Side of the Water, about the London-based artist, was selected and screened at several festivals around the world, where it won eight awards.
After completing her thesis on the work of filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev, Nina was invited in 2021 to the Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia to lead the conference “Loveless by Andrey Zvyagintsev – Context in Music and Silence”.
In 2023, she directed her first feature-length documentary entitled The Heart of Heritage, about Belgium’s Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (RICH). In 2025, she completed the Art film Portrait of Desire, featuring the artist Romina Remmo, who invites viewers to immerse themselves in the sensory and suggestive world of her erotically charged work.
“Azkena” by Ane Inés Landeta, Lorea Lyons | Spain | 9’ | exp | 2024 | Regional Premiere
Synopsis:
Lorea's reference points are her mother and her grandmother. Through these two generations she observes the bond that women have experienced around motherhood. Now it is up to her to decide whether or not to become a mother herself and to look for answers to pending questions.
Ane Inés Landeta & Lorea Lyons:
Ane Inés Landeta Born in Bilbao in 1996, she graduated in Fine Arts in 2018. From 2019 to 2021 she worked in the audiovisual department of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. From 2021 she works in the Area of Culture of the Bilbao City Council in production and as a cultural programmer, among others in the Fant, Festival de Cine Fantástico.
In addition to production and photography work, such as the registration of the Zinegoak film festival in Bilbao, she has participated as an animator in the production of several short films with the HauAzkena Animation Group, including Miraila.
Lorea Lyons Born in Bilbao in 1996, she graduated in Audiovisual Communication in 2018. Since then she has worked mainly in cultural management and production. In 2020-2021 she worked in the Creative and Cultural Industries department of the Bilbao City Council. In 2022 she worked in the communication and production departments of the Getxophoto festival. She is currently working in the communication and publication agency Sormen Komunikazioa as a content creator.
She has also participated in short films such as Petite Con (201 7), winner of the Zinebi New Talents and Bitabe awards and selected in the official sections of the Zinegoak and Huhezinema festivals; and Instrucciones para caminar por la ciudad (202 1), participant in the animation short film coordinated by Begoña Vicario.
“In The Depths” by Nadia Louis-Desmarchais | Canada | 12’ | exp | 2023 | European Premiere
Synopsis:
IN THE DEPTHS is an immersive exploration of the meanders of black consciousness and corporality. A multi-format alliance, oscillating between archives, voice messages and mise-en-scène, the film explores the interstices of representations of the black body and delves into the heart of the intergenerational traumas that have shaped it.
The film explores in depth the question: how does one become black?
Nadia Louis-Desmarchais:
Nadia Louis-Desmarchais is an Afro-feminist director who aspires to give a voice to those we too often refuse to hear. Drawing on the interstices of her personal experiences, she brings to life poignant, intimate, and luminous stories. Showcasing a deep and unique sensitivity in her work, Nadia has directed several short films, a documentary series and a fiction series.
With In the Depths, the director introduces us, for the first time, into her experimental universe.
“Dirty Care” by Isa Schieche | Austria | 16’ | exp | 2024 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
The essay film “Dirty Care” describes resistance to transphobic violence as work that those who are affected have to do. It not only shows how to defend oneself, but also asks: Who is allowed to defend themselves?
Isa Schieche:
Isa Schieche lives and works as a visual artist and filmmaker in Vienna and Raab. She creates participatory objects and installations out of wood. In her sculptural and filmic work, she addresses folklore and crafts, games and dance, sisterhood and queerness. In 2024 Isa Schieche received the Max Ophüls Preis - Best Short Film for Die Räuberinnen and the Dorothea-von-Stetten Art Prize. She is part of the program board of the Festival der Regionen, which took place in Braunau am Inn in 2025.
“Pandora” by Margarita Ivanova | France | 15’ | exp | 2025 | National Premiere
Synopsis:
In an ancient Palace in Fes, ten men dream of the cheikhats, forgotten popular singers. Through their portraits, Pandora explores the feminine alter-egos of the actors from the Jouk Attamthil Al Bidaoui troupe.
Margarita Ivanova:
Margarita Ivanova, born in Moscow, currently lives and works in Paris. Her documentary approach focuses on characters who step outside the frame, carrying unique dreams. She seeks to offer them a cinematographic space-time to express themselves, using artistic forms that blend photography, sculpture and installation. A graduate of Gobelins in photography and INA in documentary filmmaking, her works include Osman Hotel (feature documentary film, in development) and Pandora (experimental documentary short film).
