Official Selection of Film Essays (119′)

May 28 (Wednesday) 18.00
Cinematheque

THE UNLIMITED WORLD (Apeiron Peri Kosmou, 2025)
dir. Lukas Berger, AT, 15’

In a world where the gaze has become a tool for the accelerated consumption of nature, The Unlimited World proposes a radical slowing down—a way of seeing that does not claim, but remains. Shot on 16mm, this short experimental essay-film moves through the endless landscapes of Portugal, where civilization exists only as a quiet disturbance: a shifting rhythm, a dulling noise, a tiring speed. Through slow takes and double exposures, the film constructs a fragmented structure that opens the image to another temporality, a dedicated gaze, and an affective resonance. Perhaps it is precisely in this slowing down that a different relationship with the world emerges—not one of intervention, but of patient presence. A relationship that does not seek to possess, but to stay with something long enough to truly see it.

May 28 (Wednesday) 18.00
Cinematheque

ACCIDENTAL ANIMALS (2024)
dir. Leila Fatima Keita, Felix Klee, DE, 10’

Accidental Animals is a short desktop film that uses the Google Street View service to explore moments when the machine gaze encounters something it doesn’t know how to interpret. Animals accidentally captured by the cameras—donkeys, dogs, spiders, pigs—open cracks in the assumption that the digital image can faithfully replace the human experience of space. Their presence creates illogical, sometimes comical situations that reveal the mediated nature of the panorama—full of breaks and gaps. The film poses a sharp and insightful question: can the algorithm, precisely because of its limitations, behave more ethically toward animals than the humans who programmed it?

May 28 (Wednesday) 18.00
Cinematheque

THE DIARY OF A SKY (2024)
dir. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, LB, GB, 44’

In The Diary of a Sky, Lawrence Abu Hamdan explores the sonic landscape of Beirut, marked by the hum of generators and the constant incursions of Israeli military aircraft violating Lebanese airspace. Using sound as both a political and forensic tool, Hamdan documents over 22,000 unauthorized flights—through UN data and citizen recordings—to present the sky over Lebanon as a space of surveillance, psychological pressure, and silent aggression. This 45-minute video essay, narrated by Lebanese rapper El Rass in the role of a “private ear,” exposes the militarization of the air and the fact that atmospheric violence has become a disturbingly normalized part of everyday life for many people—victims of a smoldering and deadly sonic war.

May 28 (Wednesday) 18:00
Cinematheque

LAST THINGS (2023)
dir. Deborah Stratman, US, FR, PT, 50’

In the experimental film essay Last Things, Deborah Stratman explores the history of the Earth from a non-human perspective, asking what it would look like if told by rocks and minerals. Abandoning the anthropocentric gaze, the film treats stones as archives of “deep time” that outlast humanity. Stratman blends scientific theory with speculative fiction, weaving together literary fragments, diverse visual material (16mm film, archival footage, digital textures), and suggestive ambient sound to chart an associative visual journey that confronts the viewer with matter as a living trace of a world in which creation and decay are one and the same process, and evolution flows through countless, unpredictable forms.