Focus

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