16MM FILM FESTIVAL 2025
SCHEDULE
Friday, 28th November
7:30 - 9:00 PM
16mm analog film performance(s) *films made in front of a live audience
Define Dancing | Keyuri Bhogale
Untitled performance | Karan Talwar
Come experience an evening of expanded experimental cinema!
And an open house party after 🙂
Saturday, 29th November
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Lab Open House | Harkat Lab tour
Get a curated and interactive walk-through of the Harkat lab. Explore all that goes on here, things we play around with. You will get to play a bit too. If you’re interested in our world, this is the best intimate space.
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM A Play of Textures *short film programme Camera-less films, light and shadow manipulation, handmade film techniques and darkroom play.
Films:
Moonglade | Griffin Conner
Light and water give way to a world of glistening gemstones hidden underneath the river’s surface.
Compendium | Francisca Duran
Full of lush shapes and vivid hues, this film loop was handcrafted using the techniques of phytography and optical printing.
Velella Velella | James DeLisio
A cameraless film in the tradition of Stan Brakhage’s “Mothlight,” which takes celluloid as the medium for an encounter between the moving-image, and the materiality of San Diego’s shoreline ecosystems.
A Poem | Vasilios Papaioannu
In an underground garage, a voice message becomes the testament of a love left in limbo, while fleeting images allude to the moment that led to it.
Radiances | Evantias Chaudat
Radiances” explores how the dead haunt us with their light. The director’s voice, evoking her own ghosts, blends with Super 8 shots of sparkling light, which act as a symbol of the link between what fades and what endures.
Lessons on flight | Araneda Cecilia
Shot on 16 mm film, eco-processed with olives and hand coloured on site in rural Chile, lessons on flight examines the flight patterns of the green-backed firecrown hummingbird.
On The Glue | Dave Johnson
From the depths of London England’s Barracks district amongst the derelict weapons huts, comes a public service expose from the 1970’s revealing “THE HORRORS” of kids participating in the act of glue sniffing. The visual treatment exposed the footage (and the filmmaker) by gluing pieces of film together then ripping it apart.
summer school | Josh Weissbach
Along the banks of the salaca river in rural latvia, a haven emerges where analog film wizards and aspiring apprentices unite. at this pop-up school, the art of filmmaking intertwines with botany, folklore, and magic, weaving a tapestry of creativity and tradition.
Wherever Street Piece | Panu Johansson
“Wherever Street Piece” is a found footage film that describes impersonal and fragmented memories that cannot be directly linked to the life of one particular individual. Simultaneously the film documents the way these past realities – forgotten people in forgotten situations – blend together from the perspective of the present.
…in darkness there is light. | Daniel Maldonado / Mike Vernusky
Embracing the eternal harmony of light and darkness’ ephemeral dance, “…in darkness there is light” draws upon the fragility of life and celluloid. It is a handcrafted film elegy told as a textured visual haiku centered on the iconic #7 subway train in New York City. A literal manifestation of sound and light, It is also a portrait on healing through time, bathed in silhouettes and locomotion.
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
What's around is within *short film programme
Land, earth, water, flowers and film.
Films:
Red earth black earth | Agnes Perrais
Four motifs of an island landscape: dunes, grasses, stormy sky, sea. These motifs are declined and intertwined by several laboratory operations: successive generations of copies, flat printing, overprints, chemical curves, make the fixed, deserted planes flicker to create an imaginary landscape where elements and materials come together.
Alpine Tundra | Kathleen Rugh
At an elevation of 14,264 feet above sea level, the peak of Mount Blue Sky is too harsh for trees and common vegetation. Instead, the ground is covered with fragile tundra grass, weak soil, and rock. In this harsh climate exists the highest paved road in North America, that allows visitors traveling by car to partake in striking views and a sense of awe in the extremes of nature.
Gone Too Soon | Israel Irby
Hand made on 16mm archival footage and black and clear leader, “Gone Too Soon” explores Glacier National Park’s relationship with film. This film presents a dichotomy between nature and consumption, especially film consumption, utilizing sounds from the methods used to alter the 16mm (burning, freezing, taping, cutting, scratching, painting with makeup, spraying, etc).
Learning to Walk | Hugh Hopkins
Shot in first person, the viewer is taken on a walk through the wilderness, where the grayscale of the ordinary gives way to a primordial vision. In a display of otherworldly colors, the positive and the negative strive to be seen simultaneously. Step by step, the delicate structures of silver and color dyes are dissolved with bleach, exalted with developers, and amalgamated with toners until the film reflects the mind looking back at it, learning to walk in two places at once.
A shifting pattern | Isaac Sherman
A collected geography of local flora; appearing, disappearing, reappearing, enmeshing. Afterimage becomes before-image, physiology and pathology at play. The will to walk aimlessly, rejuvenated, as stasis turns to movement and back again.
Objectionable Fruit | Hogan Seidel
Objectionable Fruit is an experimental documentary examining the Ginkgo tree—a living fossil celebrated for its resilience and unique capacity to change sexes, defying human-imposed binaries. Using the Ginkgo as a metaphor for fluidity and endurance, the film weaves together themes of gender identity, ecological interconnectedness, and the nuanced complexities of trans existence.
a traveller’s lament | Faye Shu
a seagull made a bet.
Looking into the distance | Marta Lara Pérez
Looking into the distance is a film shot on the island of Lanzarote that focuses its narrative on the observation of the horizon.
The film is structured on the basis of a series of camera movements (ascending and descending) and proposes different encounters between landscapes-frames, as well as a rhythmic progression that tries to exhaust all possible combinations until confusing what is below with what is above, the sky with the earth, the dark with the bright.
4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Magic beans *short film programme
Here or here | Collectif Hasard
A hand looking for a key opens the door to a possible return home. But in the course of this search, memory wavers, past and present merge in the face of an impossibility. Here or here.
You have no mother! | Yoonseo Lee
‘you have no mother’ is the text that appears in Lady Vengeance(2005) directed by Park Chan-Wook. Geumja’s daughter looks at the sky and the clouds turn into the shape of ‘you have no mother’. These three women are a family. They are not blood-related but a ‘chosen family’ that people usually say these days. They are cute. They go through horrible things with their cuteness. They know how to attack with their cuteness.
Parallel Botany | Magdalena Bermudez
Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.
Repertoire of death | Guadalupe Arellanes
A lucid dream leads to a dance with Death.Featuring rarely heard music from the personal archives of Yma Sumac “Queen of Exotica”, Repertoire of Death questions the binaries of life/death and waking/dreaming.
Cherry B | Ornella Hawthorn Gardez
It’s 1969, a housewives soiree, drinking cocktails, whilst summoning up an old dead friend. When a spiritual message prompts adolescent Lilith to respond, it alerts us to the demon that lies within.
6 PM - 7 PM
Part Of A Whole *short film programme
Stories that are passed down
Buseok | Kyujae Park
A man searches for memories of his family’s past, alternating between Geomeunyeo, Buseok Temple, and his grandmother’s house, all of which are located along a straight line on the map.
Api (April, 1949) | Harper Stone
Too often, we forget what and who has come before us. Do we exist because of our corporeal forms, or have we long existed in our ancestor’s dreams and prayers? A one-take recorded translation of a man’s proposal letter and firm vision of life through love.
Ndu´na, sketches for building a home | Isay Peña
During the construction of a house, my father reflects on family, belonging, the notion of “home” and the search for his place in the world. Filmed in Super 8, this documentary seeks to evoke nostalgia and the impermanence of memories while exploring the relationship between physical space and human identity.
Sse-sse-sse | Estelle Yoon
쎄쎄쎄 (sse-sse-sse) is an homage to intergenerational love, as a grandmother and her granddaughter connect through the traditional South Korean lullaby 반달 (ban-dal).
6 PM onwards The upstairs cinema A two-person cinema built on the terrace of Harkat for screening some special tiny films.
“N” | João Minatti
“N” is a synesthetic manifesto on technological modernity and its silent impact on the erosion of human relationships. A narrative expressed through music, photography, and contemporary cinema.
Inundation | Dominick Rivers
Inundation is a non-representational film that submerges the viewer in the ephemeral interplay of light and shadow. Employing cyanotype and eco-coloring techniques, the piece captures fleeting impressions and refractions, where illumination emerges only to be swallowed again by darkness.
Sunspots | Meza Abinadi
Pulsing solar forms dissolve into the delicate architecture of retinal veins; sunspots mirror the floating specks across our vision. This film exists in a space between the vast and the intimate – where drops of blood become celestial bodies, and fractures in film emit light like distant stars
The Visible Material | Ryan Marino
Through means of rephotography and refracted projection, the movements and luminescent surfaces of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz are transformed into vibrant fields of moving color.
Quadratura | Sara Bonaventura
Inspired by dark ecology and the Mandel’štam’s poem of the voice over, the 16mm film evokes the loop of systemic predator-prey models, starting from microscopic beings – didinium and paramecium – passing through plankton, jellyfish, insects, fish, crustaceans and human apex predators. The found footage comes from a collection of educational films by the American Coronet, Ecological biology, an attempt to spread ecological thought at the end of the 70s.
Nearer to thee in a triptych | Matt Whitman
eyes set down, lots love for a locked door, the silhouettes are the same, but the faces have changed, you know I can’t go home this way, came here to say the same.
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Analog about analog *short film programme
Films about Films about Film
Analogue Natives | Bernd Lützeler
In 2010, a 106-year-old dilapidated residential building is on the verge of collapsing in Mumbai, the financial capital of India and the heart of the Hindi film industry. Three years later, a whole industry collapses in Mumbai. An expanded multi-genre documentary within the constraints of the so-called Masala Formula, popularly known from Indian cinema.
Deux Champs (Two Fields) | Kevin Obsatz
This short documentary is a reflection on the distant memory of that day in 1953, when a a double-exposed portrait of Marcel Duchamp is created by mistake, and everything that has happened since.
refrigerator hum | jade wong
An artist collects and processes images of their mother’s restaurant kitchen and their grandmother’s daily life. Memory and embodied knowledge is reanimated through various image formats: 35mm portraits on oscillating lenticular prints, laserjet prints of 35mm film transferred onto 16mm loops, and photographic prints on polystyrene. An intergenerational critique unfolds.
Sunday, 30th November
11 AM - 12 PM Analogue Dreamscapes *Artist talk by Miglė Križinauskaitė
Enter the tactile, sensory world of artist-filmmaker Miglė Križinauskaitė, where place, body, and memory converge. The event features a screening of her recent short films with filmic gestures shaped through Super 8 mm materiality, analogue textures, and embodied observation; followed by a discussion on her creative practice.
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Cross Stitch *short film programme
Exploration within the camera.
Saccharine Wonderland | Tushar G
A two-channel 16mm fever dream that filters queerness, desire, diaspora, and dislocation through beat-driven montage and personal ritual.
Choreography of Light | Homa Sarabi
The mechanical production of the camera is articulated through the mechanics of the body. This choreographic journey of a film strip overlays the physicality of the analog filmmaking process and the anatomy of the human body.
Endings | Phil Hoffman, Isaiah Medina
`Trees, farm fields with animal livestock, ponds and plants, and natural artefacts disappear in the flicker effect of landscape compositions where sweeping branches carve moving structures into the viewer’s memory, and the transformations of living image threads remind us of the inexhaustible visual exuberance of meadows and grain.’
Tan/Vatan | Meenakshi Garodia, Homa Sarabi
Tan/Vatan -Body/Homeland- is a collaborative experimental film. It is a conversation between two women and their intimate experiences of love and life. Artists utilize the language, the medium, and their bodies to connect and visualize their experiences while engaging with the mechanical and physical experience of 16mm and handmade film.
La dureté du mental (Mental toughness) | Charles Coderre
Transforming Olympic wrestling and pole vaulting Soviet films from the 1980s into expressive, painterly imagery, the film appears as a film practitioner’s decathlon.
North | Hogan Seidel
The artist found a decaying print of Nanook of the North and continued its collapse through photochemical processes, confronting the violence of its legacy. North is not a restoration, but a reckoning—an act of holding damaged images until they blur, bleed, and refuse the gaze that once claimed them.
Dizzy Cavalry | patrick doyon
An 8mm reel of a Hollywood western flickers to life once more. As the first call of the bugle rings out, the cavalry charges—swift and chaotic—while the film strains to keep pace. It ripples, trembles and tangles, caught in the chaos of gunfire and the thunder of galloping hooves.
Konstantin | Hogan Seidel
Konstantin is an experimental film shot on high-contrast black and white 16mm film using a single 100ft reel. The film is an in-camera edit with triple exposures, creating a layered and complex visual language. Through this aesthetic, the piece explores themes of queer love and queer ecology.
3 PM - 4 PM Sleeping under a tree *short film programme To fell the earth.
This Dissonance | Christophe Katrib
Through poetic visual and aural fragmentation, This Dissonance navigates the emotional terrain of exile, colonialism, and resistance. The film weaves Palestinian and Lebanese voices with sweeping “American” landscapes, capturing the aching dissonance of witnessing U.S.-backed atrocities from afar, and resulting in a searing reflection on the generational toll of empire.
Las Animas | Matt Feldman
Hinterlands | Jude Byrne
Hinterlands is a short experimental film that explores a sense of place on the periphery. Filmed on 16mm color film and then digitally edited, Hinterlands examines rural Americana displaced by the design of American cities and interstate highways. A series of vignettes of small towns, layered and intersecting with shifting frames and edges, is set to an original score.
Sunny 16 Helsinki | Eve Le Fessant Coussonneau
On the border between Finland and Russia, lazy summer vibes become stifling. Under the burning sun, on an island, two beings rave. Tender wander or anxious waiting on a sensorial experience. What is there to fear from the horizon ? They seems to be the only ones foreseeing the upcoming disaster.
While they Speak We Survive | Premkrishna Akkattu
Filmed on 16mm, “While they speak, we survive” offers a stark, non-narrated glimpse into the everyday struggle of India’s lower income class, those left behind while political campaigns speak over them.
A Telephone for God | Nicky Tavares
Breathe in to receive. Exhale in a sharp burst through the nostrils to send. Quartz is the medium—amplifier, transducer, archive. Inspired by the teachings of Marcel Vogel—IBM research chemist turned spiritual scientist—A Telephone for God oscillates between past and present, tuning into frequencies of human-plant communication and energetic healing
4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Journeys *a short film programme
The world from a train window.
Tracks | Arne Körner
Light breaks, moves, reflects, sneaks through the density of landscapes and places. Tracks invites you to see and feel things with a new, more intense perspective.
My Canada Train Journey | WFG Distribution, Sandy Mclennan
50-plus years after a memorable overnight Canadian train ride, Sandy McLennan boards regional and remote lines, with main line and public transit between them. This time shooting Double 8mm film, the same format he fell in love with while screening family home movies just for himself. What was he thinking?
6 PM – 7 PM
Remember me by *a short film programme
Memories, nostalgia, heartbreak
Yours Faithfully | kanhaiya trivedi
Shot on 16mm, this portrait of London unfolds through the parting words of international students — exploring migration, the ache of departure, and the invisible culture they leave behind in the city’s folds.
Waiting Up To Meet The Wolf | Anthony Carr
This debut 3-channel short is a quiet call to action for humanity to reverse the decline of dark skies, told via memories from the director’s childhood and adult life. Coalescing the past, present and future, the film weaves these stories around those of the Moonlight Tower, a short-lived 19th century lighting technology.
Shot on 16mm and hand-processed using eco-reversal techniques that complement the subject matter and message, the film poses the question but leaves the audience to decide the fate of our attitude towards darkness.
That Bolex Thing | Paul Echeverria
That Bolex Thing highlights this fleeting occurrence of visual abstraction. The source footage is composed of brief instances containing the filmic “thing”. Within this tapestry, the subject matter offers a contrast between current and earlier devices of image capture.
Create | Tvisha Shah
A mini experimental short, revolving around the drive of wanting to create art and freeze memories and emotions in time.
Marking the ends | Christophe Chamberland, Garance Bauchet
Three women talk about the difficulty they have in recovering from their last breakup.
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
A giant collection of small explorations *a short film programme
Ek minute films, straight 8 India films & 2025 16mm residency explorations
⋆ WORKSHOPS ⋆
5th - 6th December | 10 AM - 3 PM Cyanotype Animation Workshop
Characterised by its signature blue, cyanotype is one of the oldest photographic printing processes. It is a camera-less technique that involves exposing a coated surface of iron salts to UV light, with various objects placed over.
During this 2-day workshop, participants will learn all the basics of working with cyanotype on paper, and eventually scan and transform their works into a moving image. By the end, each participant will have made a short clip that will be part of a larger film made collectively and screened at the festival.
7th - 8th December | 10 AM - 5 PM Moving Stills - a workshop by Luis Macias
Devised and facilitated by visiting artist and filmmaker Luis Macias, this workshop aims to explore different tools and possibilities around using multiple photographic slide projectors. It regards the projector as a tool and the slide as a non-static image.
Participants will learn how to shoot, develop and intervene black and white 35mm reversal film slides, and also explore creative ways of live projection with multiple carousel slide projectors, exploring different modifications, both internal and external.