Artist Biography

Elinor O’Donovan (*1995) is a visual artist based in Cork, Ireland, working with film, installation, digital collage, and sculpture to create playful and speculative answers to questions about knowledge, memory, and truth. Using pop culture references and familiar tropes, O’Donovan creates humorous works that often blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, exploring how cultural narratives shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

By examining how micro-details reveal macro-narratives and testing the disjunctive relationships between symbols and imagery, O’Donovan creates glimpses of speculative worlds where things might be different. An aesthetic of neoteny, typified by unresolved or juvenile forms, characterises her presentations, with sculptures propped on tripods, playful collages loosely fixed with masking tape, and sketchy drawings. This approach embraces indecision and uncertainty as an inevitable response to a fragmented, hyper-connected world.

O’Donovan completed her BA in Intermedia Art at Edinburgh College of Art in 2019. Since then, she has exhibited in solo and group shows in Ireland, the UK, Portugal, Italy, and Mexico.). Recent commissions include projects for the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork Midsummer Festival, and the National Sculpture Factory. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Golden Fleece Award.

Film Description

Filmed in Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland, the film is a playful response to the poem ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver, contemplating the extent to which the universe is concerned with our individual problems. Featuring Barry Manilow, cosmic nihilism and the self-involved thoughts of Wild Geese, this is a tongue-in-cheek consideration of the relationship between our natural surroundings and our imagination.

Dyke Dreams (2024), shot on 16mm analog film, takes the form of an erotic commercial that gradually transforms into a horror movie, where the characters claw their way through each other’s bodies. The work draws inspiration from Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) and can be seen as a tribute to his iconic piece. The film touches on the local oil industry, the Americanization of Norwegian culture, and queer loneliness. It plays with a fictional historical oil past in Stavanger, blurring the lines between reality, dreams, and fiction.

Dyke Dreams is a project developed both in Stavanger and Canada. The text, sound, and editing were developed during an artist residency at the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers in Toronto. The film was shot in Stavanger with performers Pia Dahl, Torunn Larsen, Nathalie Wiberg, and Miriam Teshager, with special effects by Michael Wallin.

The project was made possible with support from the BKH grant and the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers in Toronto.

What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
I started doing simple DIY films with what digital cameras were available to me when I was around 16–17 years old. It was before I knew so much about film or art. It was a way to question my surroundings and express myself creatively, investigate the political and poetical. I would say that now, but at that moment I had no clue what I was actually doing. I was just trying to figure out my life as a teenager and young adult. Before this I made films with my two older sisters, we would make music, small films and just have fun together. There was no goal for our engagement, it was not a ‘project’. I never thought I would work with film and art growing up. I would also film my friends or conversations, even my best friend the moment she was falling asleep. Adding sounds to them became even another layer to express and experiment. Since then, I went on to study at an art and film school in Lofoten, where I initially claimed to never really wanting to make films since I felt alienated with the focus on film industry and technology rather than expression. Luckily at this school that was no issue, as we could do whatever we wanted. It was an open, free and critical education. 

I feel very differently now regarding many of the things I was against before, for example analogue film has now become something so special to me. I think this is also a part of growing as a person, one can remember and evolve. I grew up with digital media, so I think the boundaries that come with analogue film makes me hyper focused, as I try to get as little useless footage as possible. 

I am not didactic in any sense, so I see myself also working with digital cameras again in the future. Depending on what the project's thematic and conceptual framework is. Right now, I am working on a trilogy project, all in analogue film. Much because of the references and the feeling I try to evoke with the project, which is a lot of 70s experimental film and building parallel fictive alternative historical pasts. Also where I am at right now in my life it just makes more sense to investigate these subjects more. 

Can you speak about the potential that dreaming and altered states of reality offer individuals and societies? How do you feel this is reflected in filmmaking and in your artwork specifically?
I often think of my projects as building fictional parallel realities. Where the mental and real world merge. My works also have an aspect of horror and psychological drama to them. I love how horror and the theatrical can be a way to subvert our heteronormative and bourgeois culture. It goes beyond “acceptable" behaviour, and in that I think there is a potential of cathartic release when making films together with others. Or at least it feels meaningful. We can show the brutality of living and suggest a different world at the same time! I often work with friends and extended family, or just people I meet at the bar and get a sense that we share some common ground, maybe just an openness and curiosity. It is very intuitive and exciting. These connections make it feels like we are doing something special together, we share a dream of a different world. Very immediate and locally in our hometown, but also emotionally and in a wider political sense. Coming together with fellow freaks in my small town means a lot to me! It feels very rewarding and important to be able to work in a setting that is not alienating, but rather spacious and collective.

What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you? 
I am now working on a film project titled Stoner Queen of Hearts. This is the third film in what I see as a trilogy, building on the film projects Love and Greed and Pain and Lust (2023) and Dyke Dreams (2024). 

Stoner Queen of Hearts is an experimental costume drama that follows a fictional local monarchy in my hometown. I will work with many of the same performers as in my previous projects. It will include drama, love triangles and a revolution. Even a ball scene! One of my inspirations for this project is the book Zapatista Stories For Dreaming An-Other World.

This film project will be shown for the first time at Kunsthall Stavanger in February 2026 for a solo show. https://kunsthallstavanger.no/nb/exhibitions/anette-gellein 

Historical films like Braveheart paint a completely white, completely virtuous picture of precolonial Scotland. This is beautifully disrupted by the 9th century records of the fir gorma. The Old Irish term for Black people, ‘fir gorma’, directly translates as ‘blue men’. References to fir gorma in ancient Irish chronicles are thought by historians and folklorists to refer to North African people enslaved by Vikings in the 9th century and brought to Ireland and the Scottish Hebrides. As a Black English woman living in Scotland, I’m interested in how this displaced community might have constructed their own Scottish identity.

After speculating that some fir gorma escaped captivity, fled to an uncharted Scottish island, and formed a clan, my work has taken the form of an extended trailer for a fir gorma fantasy blockbuster. It atmospherically draws on the rousing, melodramatic, trailer for Braveheart and its depiction of blue-painted warriors, symbolically connecting the blue people to favourable traits of courage, honour, and chivalric romance. I’m interested in film trailers as analogies for nationalistic self-mythologising - cherrypicking the most enticing parts of a film, or a national history, to construct the most enticing self-image.

Using over-sentimental, absurdly jingoistic performance to camera, I hope to challenge the supposed newness of the Black presence in Scotland. By hypervisibly layering greenscreen and camcorder footage, revealing the construction of the trailer, I'm considering the artificially layered construction of national identity. This also references the jarring visual effects common in Nollywood, connecting the blue people to their contemporary African diaspora.

The video interrogates contemporary Scottish identity from a close, but not fully embodied perspective, contributing to wider discourse about the rise of nationalism in Western Europe. This is important in the context of Black Lives Matter when the art world must ask itself which histories it memorialises. This is especially true as we comfortably, warmly, safely witness countless colonialism-fuelled, genocidal atrocities in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and more, as our world leaders allow Black and brown bodies to pile up.

Kialy Tihngang is a multidisciplinary Glasgow-based visual artist working in moving image, sculpture, textiles, performance, writing, and prints involving elaborate handmade sets, costumes, graphics and props, often in close collaboration with other artists.

As a British-born Cameroonian, Tihngang’s research-based practice focuses on the global misrepresentation, extraction, and demonisation of Black, and particularly West African cultural practices, but also on her own misremembering, misreading, and romanticisation of said practices, primarily by designing artefacts from reimagined histories and speculated futures.

These artefacts combine the dark humour of Nollywood with the aesthetics of retrofuturism, and satirise the visual language of advertisements, films, and products aimed at mass Western audiences. Tihngang uses these tools to explore Blackness, queerness, Britishness, and the crushing structural oppressions that surround these personal themes in absurd ways.

Lullaby’s Fault (2025) explores the interior of a fractured and incoherent psyche. Set in rural Lithuania, it follows twin brothers whose vivid imaginations turn innocent play into violence. Rather than depicting violent acts directly, the film shifts its focus to their aftermath. Alternating between past and present, it explores the surreal, fragmented logic of a mind struggling to process trauma and find healing.

Mykolas Valantinas is a Lithuanian artist based in Vilnius. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Vilnius University and a Master’s degree in Photography from ECAL (École cantonale d'art de Lausanne) in Switzerland. Valantinas’ practice traverses film, photography, and multimedia installation, deeply rooted in personal and collective memory.

Valantinas’ work has been exhibited internationally, including at Radvila Palace Art Museum, Vilnius (2024) National Art Gallery, Vilnius (JCDecaux Prize 2023), Nida Art Colony (2023), Platform L Gallery, Seoul (2022), among others. Currently, he’s preparing his first solo exhibition due in 2025 at Medūza in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Dear Chalam can be read as a eulogy for a dear friend, a journey through the landscape of cinema, and of making and sharing films. A poetic assemblage, the film dips into Chalam Bennurkar’s powerful documentary practice, his involvement with the Odessa Collective and commitment to cinema as a people’s movement—all of which come alive as potent strands in a letter that forms the central thread of the film. The film moves beyond a personal remembering of a singular life to think more widely about cinema, and its potentialities in a process of constant recalibration and re-imagination.

Babu Eshwar Prasad trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Vadodara. Prasad's practice spans across painting, sculpture, sound, photography and film. His short films have screened at various venues and film festivals worldwide. Prasad's feature films Gaalibeeja (Wind Seed) and Hariva Nadige Maiyella Kaalu (A running river is all legs) have screened at MAMI, Bangalore International Film Festival, 3rd | South Asian Film Festival, Kochi Biennale, K21 Museum Dusseldorf, the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, the International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kerala and Experimenta Bangalore.

Rehearsals for Peace (2023) draws on various folk traditions for warding off evil spirits, such as the Transylvanian custom of Urzelnlaufen.

Imagine a pastoral landscape where the rhythmic grazing of animals seamlessly accommodates the military training schedule, resulting in a surreal coexistence of sheep and armored vehicles. This peculiar juxtaposition characterizes the daily life of Cincu, a Transylvanian village nestled in central Romania.

A tale from the 16th century narrates the story of Ursula, a female figure disguised as a man, who successfully chased away occupying intruders (at that time, the Ottomans) using the supersonic sound of a whip. This account purportedly originated in Cincu, which today houses one of NATO’s key combat training zones in Romania.

Rehearsals for Peace breathes life into Ursula's legend within the present-day controlled pastoral landscape, employing the sonic might of whip-cracking as a spell. The film portrays a contemporary Ursula facing the modern armoured vehicles, and harnessing the potential of the local ritual. She assimilates elements from the military's choreographic lexicon, like tactical hand signals, and intertwines them with the ancient practice of whip-cracking.

The video Rehearsals for Peace (2023) is co-produced by the n.b.k. Video-Forum.

Where are you from and how did you become interested in moving image work?
We're from Romania where the first revolution was broadcast on TV in 1989, demonstrating how moving images can influence how we remember and understand historical events. However, sound is just as important as images in our work. We're moved not only by the moving image but also by the way sound moves us. 

What inspired/influenced you to make the work?
Romania shares its longest border with Ukraine, which gives it a key strategic role in the ongoing war and hosts important military infrastructure. We're interested in how the military imagination shapes the world around us, landscapes, climates, and even entire communities. The idea for “Rehearsals for Peace” came to us during our trip back home to visit family in central Transylvania. It was hard not to notice how the rural landscapes had transformed into military training sites.  

What are you working on at the moment?
Right now, we're working on a script that explores the monologue of an unstable, confused uranium isotope, examining how it can be both vital energy and a destructive force, all while seeking to make "peace with the earth."

Using found footage from a 1994 video recording of his parents, Cocoy Lumbao explores how technology shapes the way humans interact and connect with each other. Intended as a love letter to their children back in the Philippines, the couple’s video message combines everyday parental advice with the delight of testing out “new technology,” in this case, a new portable video camera.

Cocoy Lumbao is a visual artist, writer, and curator based in Manila, Philippines. He has regularly curated shows and written for several galleries’ catalogs and exhibition notes. His artworks, which are primarily in the form of video, have also been shown both locally and internationally in art exhibitions like Futura Manila (2008) and Complete & Unabridged (2012) in Osage Gallery, Hong Kong; the traveling exhibition Move On Asia in Korea and Europe (2008-2014); ArtStage Singapore (2015) and The Surface of the World in MCAD (2015), in Manila. His writings have also appeared in the form of essays in several publications like art magazines, artist’s monographs, journals, and a book on selected contemporary Filipino artists.

He was the 2017 Filipino artist-in-residence to Gasworks, London, UK; was a writing fellow for the 18th Ateneo National Writer’s Workshop; co-curator of the Manila Biennale: Open City, and co-founder of Lost Frames, a screening platform for discussing artists’ moving image.

He is the lead curator for this year’s edition of Manilabang Show: The Metro Art Fair in One Ayala, Makati; and the curator for the upcoming Fotomoto: A Photography Exhibition for ArtFair PH in 2025.

He currently teaches at UP College of Fine Arts in Quezon City.

Levitations emerges at a pivotal moment in our region, where the status quo becomes increasingly untenable, especially in the face of unyielding and detrimental external forces. This short film explores the idea of dream states, both literal and metaphorical, probing the intricate layers of freedom within a context marked by ongoing genocide and escalating oppression. It confronts the profound challenges of realizing such dreams in the present moment, yet it also emphasizes the vital importance of maintaining hope—of envisioning a future where these dreams, however improbable, might one day become reality.

Dalia Al Kury is an acclaimed film director whose work navigates cross-genre storytelling. Her films explore the resilience and political unconscious of the everyday hero in the Arab World. In addition to her rich practical experience, Dalia is well-grounded in academic study; she holds an MA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a PhD in artistic research at the Norwegian Film School.

Dalia´s film practice is character driven and pendulums between staging memories and simulating past experiences , to staging dreams and hopeful speculation of our collective futures. Both approaches from staging in documentary to Speculating through fiction- are deeply rooted in pausing the question “what if” to offer another possible narrative. Dalia uses filmmaking not as a way to document reality, but as a way of commanding it, through active and radical imagining of justice and liberation.

Leymusoom Garden encapsulates Kwon’s spiritual journey and life trajectory from late 2022 to early 2024. Created in the digital realm, Leymusoom Garden incorporates 3D-scanned models of her grandparents’ land in Gongju-si, South Korea, alongside her home studio and garden during the production period, located on the unceded ancestral land of the Ramaytush Ohlone people (now known as San Francisco). Through this sanctuary, Kwon reflects on the complexities of relationships and life values, embracing acceptance and healing as she navigates unexpected losses and transformative transitions in her artistic journey.

Exploring Korean shamanistic perspectives through the myths of Dokkaebi (mythical creatures from Korean folklore) and Mago, alongside the Indigenous creation story of Skywoman, enabled Kwon to confront her maternal family history and personal experiences. Magohalmi (마고할미 or Mago 마고) is a powerful female deity from Korean shamanic mythology—a creator, progenitor, and sovereign of humanity, nature, and all geographical formations. In Leymusoom Garden, Mago is reimagined as Kwon’s paternal great-grandmother.

Heesoo Kwon is a Korean-born multimedia artist who considers art-making a socio-ritualistic, archival and auto-ethnographic practice. Employing 3D animation, modeling and artificial intelligence technologies as procreant, shamanic tools, she engages in the queering of familial relationships, the rewriting of mythic matrilineal histories, and the building of decentralized worlds and memoryscapes, as seen in her autobiographical feminist religion Leymusoom and her Firefly series of AI-augmented childhood photographs. In Kwon’s heterotopic hyperspaces, she abstracts (conceptions of) time and memory, transcending the burdens/legacies of sacrifice, trauma and patriarchal violence to offer instead transformative modes of liberated existence, love and community.

Selected exhibitions include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Buk Seoul Museum of Arts, Seoul, South Korea; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands; EFA Project Space, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose, San Jose, CA; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Blinkers Art & Project Space, Winnipeg, Canada; West Den Haag, Netherlands; and WMA Space, Hong Kong. She was awarded the 2023 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia and the 2025 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation

The Pond (2023) explores the relationship between transformation, memory, and the interplay of humans and nature through a metaphorical narrative. Drawing inspiration from 5,000-year-old votive vessels depicting frogs carrying one another, discovered in the Seyitömer archaeological excavations, and the contemporary migration of frogs crossing highways to reach the Palazoğlu Pond, the film intertwines traces of the past and present using AI tools.

Inspired by the metamorphosis of frogs, the film establishes a fictional world where villagers embrace this natural cycle with awareness, incorporating frogs into embroidery, beadwork, and everyday objects. This narrative mirrors both the cyclical rhythms of nature and humanity’s tendency to appropriate and transform symbols into cultural artifacts.

Visualizing the process of ideas transforming into words and words into images, “The Pond” showcases the creative potential of rapidly advancing AI technologies in 2023. With its visual and conceptual depth, the film invites viewers to reflect on themes of memory, transformation, and permanence, while also documenting the ability of AI tools to achieve documentary-like realism."

Ahmet Rüstem Ekici and Hakan Sorar form a multidisciplinary artist duo exploring the intersections of archaeology, body, space, and digital media. Their collaborative practice integrates augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3D modeling to reinterpret cultural heritage, focusing on the narrative potential of surfaces and objects.

Ekici’s expertise in architecture and his interest in optical perception inform his exploration of spaces shaped by experience, gender, and the body. Sorar, with roots in photography and digital imaging, examines identity and the boundaries between physical and digital realms. Together, they merge traditional storytelling methods with cutting-edge technologies, creating immersive works that challenge the definitions of space, form, and perception.

Their projects have been showcased on international platforms such as Istanbul Modern, Ars Electronica, Mardin Biennial Invited, YARAT Contemporary, Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival, and Sonar +D. As the early adapters in integrating AR and VR within contemporary art, producing works like “Hamam” and “Through the Skin,” which question the evolving relationships between humans and their environments.Combining their expertise in architecture, engineering, and design, Ekici and Sorar offer a conceptual approach that bridges archaeology and emerging media, inviting audiences to engage.

SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo was developed in Belvì, Sardinia. The artist proposes a collaborative initiation/action with the local polifonic female choir from the rural village. It stems from an encounter with the archetype of the gongilo in ‘Letters from Prison’ by Gramsci, a native of Sardinia, and in the Museum of Natural Sciences in Belvì. The Gongilo is a small reptile, a snake with short limbs, featured in narratives midway between science and belief. Naldi Rossano explores the universal archetype of the snake in connection with the cult of the Mother Goddess. The film brings together some scenes taken inside the abandoned Natural Science Museum and others of the action held in the village by Naldi Rossano together with the group of women. The artist designed a wearable loom-woven textile as a transitional objet to perform together, made in collaboration with the traditional female artisans cooperative Le Murmuri. The action through moving image symbolically became the initiator to propose an alternative museum of natural history for the village of Belvi and to reactivate ancestral knowledge as generative for a new beginning for the community, strongly marked by increasing depopulation, starting from the regenerative feminine element. The community of Belvì, with its oral and scientific knowledge, is invited by the artist to be in relation with the traditional oral histories from the Mediterranean around sacredness of nature, with the intention of reactivating the museum as a container of diverse narratives.

Raffaela Naldi Rossano (b. 1990, Naples) is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores a wide range of media, including installation, video, sculpture, text, drawings and performance. Her research has its roots in her psychology studies centred on Jungian and Gestalt Theory, after which she received an MA in photography and moving image at Goldsmiths, University of London; its premises are her investigation of memories and intergenerational transmission. Her artistic practice thrives at the intersection of new archeology, desire and collective unconscious, domesticity, interspecies kinships, craft and queer theory, together with the reinterpretation and re-writing of mythologies, in the context of the Mediterranean area starting from her hometown Napoli in Southern Italy.

Within the realm of her artistic expression, Naldi Rossano’s work seamlessly weaves together fictional, historical and autobiographical narratives, alternative knowledge, intuitive thinking, spirituality and science and collective actions. Her artworks are research-driven and process-based, intended as relational vehicles, intermediary spaces that seek to trigger new possible relationships, both psychological and socio-political, between spaces, bodies and objects. They operate as platforms, transitional objects that activate new forms of production and circulation of horizontal and shared knowledge and materialize multiple communities and temporalities.

Raffaela Naldi Rossano is part of the 16th edition of the Sharjah Biennial with a newly commissioned installation. Raffaela Naldi Rossano is the winner of the XIX edition of Premio New York, promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Ministry of Culture, with ISCP, Italian Cultural Institute and Columbia University. Her film WARP (2022) was awarded the Special Prize for an Emerging Talent at SMAFF St. Moritz Film Festival and has been exhibited at Fantasmagoriana, LIAF22, Lofoten Biennal curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi and at Cinema Galleggiante in Venice curated by TBA21Academy and Barbara Casavecchia.

Recent solo exhibitions are SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo, promoted by Fondazione Elpis as part of Una Boccata d’Arte, Belvì, Sardinia; Undomesticated Voices, double solo show with Lara Damaso at Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2022); How She Spins, solo show expanded curated by Sonia D’Alto, Damien and the Love Guru, Bruxelles (2022); I Confess, solo exhibition curated by Chus Martinez, der TANK, Basel (2019); Partenope, solo exhibition at Aetopoulos, Athens (2019). She was one of the participating artists in the 2020 edition of Quadriennale D’Arte, Rome, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Stefano Collicelli Cagol. Selected group exhibitions are: Spettri, curated by Kathryn Weir, Madre, Naples (2022); Utopia Distopia: il mito del progresso partendo dal Sud, curated by Kathryn Weir, Madre, Naples (2021); There is no Time to Enjoy the Sun, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2021); Waves between Us, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene (2020) ; Doing Deculturalization, Museion, Bozen (2019); May the Bridges I Burn, Manifesta, Palermo (2018). Her artworks are in the public collection of Museo Madre in Naples and private collections in Italy and abroad.

Sin Wai Kin’s The Fortress deconstructs the archetype of “Man,” the so-called rational subject of Western Enlightenment, whose self-appointed authority has shaped canons of knowledge and justified imperialism. Through a dreamlike narrative, Sin dismantles the illusion of his inherent and singular supremacy, exposing the unstable foundations on which his dominance rests and the catastrophic consequences of this constructed paradigm.

Set across two historically significant sites in Lahore, The Fortress follows Wai King, embodied by Sin Wai Kin, as he rehearses for the role of Man at Alfalah Theatre. His performance falters and he begins to fall apart,  forcing a reckoning with the fallacy of his universality. At Lahore Fort, he confronts his ghostly double - an echo of past selves and fractured histories. Between these spaces, the boundaries between self and world dissolve, exposing the fragility of his fabricated reality.

The Fortress takes its title from thirteenth century Sufi poet Rūmī’s Mathnawī, which calls for the walls of a fortress to be demolished to dispel a sense of othering. Exposing existence as fragmented and plural, the film unravels identity and power, critiquing Western-centric knowledge systems and challenging the notion of a fixed reality. In doing so, The Fortress rejects the hegemonic narratives of human experience, revealing its inherent inequities and multiplicities. If reality is constructed, it is also open to dismantling, reimagining, and remaking.

The work draws a strong reference from a book Insect singers: A natural history of the Cicadas (1929) and it creates its own new hybrid myth. It looks into speculative zoology/ Entomology, but predominantly the historical/biological attributes of Magicicada septendecim. Music and text for this experimental prophecy were written using references from the Orthodox chants, but deconstructed towards a different context, riddle- like, abstract thoughts about climate change, famine, anxieties, etc.

The film tells the story of a young child in Afghanistan who has a deep passion for dancing, turning this passion into a dream. However, this dream faces opposition from his older brother, who represents traditional beliefs and societal norms. The central drama of the film revolves around the struggle between individual desires and social constraints.

In a society where dancing – especially for girls – is restricted by cultural and social limitations, the child’s love for dance symbolizes freedom of expression and the search for personal identity. The older brother, as a representative of tradition and conservative family structures, tries to discourage him from pursuing his passion. This conflict is not only a family issue but also reflects deeper social layers.

With its minimalist visual style and subtle narrative, the film depicts a suffocating atmosphere where individual freedoms are curtailed by unwritten societal rules. By focusing on a child, the film highlights how even the smallest and most innocent dreams are affected by deeply rooted traditions and beliefs. This cinematic work offers a poetic and critical perspective on a society where personal dreams are easily suppressed, yet the hope for change remains alive in the eyes of a child.

Abdul Hamid Mandgar, is a young Afghan filmmaker who won the Best Director award at the Herat International Women's Film Festival and won 18 other awards. Hamid has made 8 short films, all about women, children and war in Afghanistan. After the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, Abdul Hamid now lives in France.

Social Media Handles: @hamid_mandgar (instagram)

Dystopian Patterns

Year: 2019

Medium: Shot in RAW, single-channel video with stereo sound

Duration: 6 : 43 minutes

Credit line: Produced by Fragments asbl and courtesy argos centre for audiovisual arts. Selected for AFI'25 by argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, Belgium.

Copyright: © the artist

Short Text:

Something happened to that city. Could be Beirut.

Long Text:

Made in 2019, the city symphony Dystopian Patterns reorders the rubble of a city left in ruins. It could be Beirut after one of its many disasters, tried and tested by external forces, but it could be any other city, void of human presence. By uncovering the disquieting mysteries that seem to have escaped our weary senses, the black-and-white time-lapse video of Isabelle Nouzha depicts a ‘waking nightmare’ rather than a dream.