Mounds Above the Earth
Jiayi Chen | China | 2025 | 7min 39sec
Mounds Above the Earth contemplates ecological cycles, perception, and environmental transformation, anchored in the rare emergence of two periodical cicada broods surfacing simultaneously for the first time in more than two centuries. The film follows the flicker of red—echoing the cicadas’ developing eyes, the blood moon, and a personal journey of vision correction.

Hiding Places
Magdalena Bermudez | USA | 2025 | 12min 
Women pretend to be rocks. Military operations masquerade as art education. One woman deserts to pursue a more radical act of unselfing.

The Recce 
Daniel Mann | United Kingdom | 2026 | 15min 7sec
Drawing on a location test filmed in Uganda and an email exchange with the location scout, The Recce captures cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with colonial imaginaries, x-x-binding the fiction of filmmaking with the fiction of state-building.

Trizas / Shards
Luciana Decker Orozco | Bolivia | 2026 | 15min
Two journeys intersect anachronistically: that of an English doctor in Bolivia in the 1930s and that of the filmmaker in London in 2024. The film approaches x-x-x-objects as unstable fragments, remnants of broader worlds, like mirrors that only allow themselves to be glimpsed momentarily. 

ELLIPTIC
Els van Riel | Belgium | 2025 | 30min
ELLIPTIC is a filmwork that considers an image as reflecting light. It looks at how brightly a beam of light is deflected as it hits an edge and transforms the image as it enters a lens. A delicately slow focus shift carries this movement along the cone of the visual field into a certain depth, and back again. Surprises appear slowly, and disappear to make place for a next one.