Focus

In 2024, Artūras Barysas’s rebellious chronicles of the Soviet regime were finally screened again in his hometown of Vilnius, after gathering dust on the shelves for many years. Posthumously, the Lithuanian avant-garde legend reclaimed his rightful recognition.

Championing the legacy of filmmakers like Harun Farocki and Chris Marker, contemporary filmmakers reclaim the computer screen as a site of reflection and resistance in a time when algorithmic culture and censorship define our mediatised society.

The growing presence of surveillance practices has been a source for filmmakers for years. In this essay, Sarah Fensom examines how subverting the datafication of human life can be turned into political resistance.

Olivia Popp examines the blurring of lines between documentary and fiction, as exemplified in short films that linger on the intersection of both.

Video essays offer various possibilities for cinematic reflection, criticism and artistic expression to intersect. Kevin B. Lee, Dana Linssen, and Eric Hynes discuss the format’s origins and its current place in the film distribution ecosystem.

For more than a decade, Babylon’13 has been documenting the war in Ukraine. In over five hundred films, the association of documentary filmmakers has adapted the camera to act as a weapon. Their work achieves the purest form of documentary cinema as a creative treatment of current events, according to John Grierson's infamous definition.

Austrian filmmaker Antoinette Zwirchmayr shapes her unique work around human bodies, natural environments, and their entanglements with both personal histories and collective narratives.

Chantal Akerman’s short films tell the story of a life engaged in an ever-changing relationship to the city, and to cinema.

This year’s Discourse: Europa programme at Filmfest Dresden inspires acts of defiance, as seen in short films from the Basque Country and Catalonia.

A look at how the Kurdish artist and filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub glues together ‘inside’ and ‘out’, inspired by her recent retrospective at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2022.

First encountering Atsushi Wada’s animations can be a transformative experience. With his latest film, Bird in Peninsula, it’s our hope that new audiences are exposed to this unique figure of contemporary animation.

In Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur’s Country in Focus Programme, Kosovar histories are retraced, reimagined and repurposed