Open Call - SET II: THE CHEMISTRY IN US

Living things, artificial things, geometry shapes, and lines. When these different things meet, a new direction is born.

Caves of Our Insides explores our connections to the Earth, tracing how iron links human bodies to planet's core. It reflects on iron’s dual role as both a life-giver, essential to blood and breath, and a force of destruction, forged into weapons that disrupt various forms of beings. 

Sabīne Šnē (b.1996) is a visual artist living between Riga and London. She has a broad interdisciplinary practice that combines video, 3D animation, sound, sculpture, and drawing. Her works have been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions across Europe, the UK, and the US. Her video works have been screened at various venues and events, including RIO Cinema (London, UK, 2024), the short film festival 2ANNAS program for the cultural forum White Night (Riga, Latvia, 2024), ReFest (NYC and online, 2024), and BELDOCS (Belgrade, Serbia, 2023 and 2021). 

A dark, tactile and contaminated film. Toxic chemicals and pollutants build up within the human body. A spray painted animation on paper. 

Benjamin Fox – Living & working in London. An award-winning experimental filmmaker creating small, spirited slices of cinema exploring a tactile, alchemical universe. In 2015 he received the ICA Best Experimental Short Award at the London Short Film Festival. 

The titular "Funga Goddess" is a shapeshifting deity with an incomprehensible power. The work dedicated to her consists of animations based on a series of hundreds of drawings and electronic music created from recordings of the artist's stomach sounds.  

The piece is an attempt to come to terms with individual powerlessness in the face of a global ecological catastrophe. It is a film about the end of the world that becomes a new beginning.  

Fungi consume the human structure of time, decomposing us after death and locking us forever in the cycle of matter. Through decay, they lead us to eternal life. The world is made of repetitions, and the cycle of matter is a form of return. We are enclosed in a process—yet only by stepping away from ourselves we can expand our perspective and realize that, as a species, we are merely part of a greater whole.  

Fungi base their life on diversity. We - humans - should learn from them and turn towards the idea of cooperation. Coexistence is the natural state of the rest of the world. Shifting the focus from the external and elevating spirituality to a pedestal is the only solution to the pressing problem of the ecological crisis. To save ourselves and the planet, we must literally turn ourselves inside out.  

Only fungi can save us from ourselves. In this work, they gain power, completely stripping humans of the right to control the world as a whole. They have been given the opportunity to fix our mistakes and start everything anew. Dealing with the future has its place in the past. So, let us begin again, with a revolution against the destructive civilization. Let us build a world based on sensitivity and imagination. The key to saving humanity lies in saving nature. 

Olga Michaluk – She graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In her work, she primarily explores the theme of micro/macro structures. She constantly searches for recurring forms, norms, and principles in the world around her. Nature, both in the context of flora and fauna, as well as human nature and the sources of human decision-making, is her main inspiration. Michaluk works within sculpture and installation, as well as video, animation, and bioart, with drawing and painting as the foundation of all her activities. The results of her creative work have been

Alike Kin unfolds in a future where strange new life thrives in the remains of the present world. Stop-motion animation combines mud, metal, plants, and tech scraps into an ever-evolving, pulsating network. This tactile, handmade aesthetic creates a vision of a world that is raw, collaborative, and constantly in motion.  

Twin brothers Michel and Jannis Esselbrügge have been creating short films and comics together since their youth. With their artist collective Fan Art, they explore experimental storytelling across media. They also lead creative workshops for children and teenagers. 

Allergies are irritating. It keeps everything from being done. There are many ways to solve it but none of them is ‘the’ solution. The stress builds up, and the tension grows. Eyes watery, head spinning, but then there is "the perfect solution. 

Jung Hyun Kim (South Korea) is an independent experimental animator living in Tallinn, Estonia. With her background in fine arts, Kim works with expressive colors and textures. Her first animation, Hootchu, received Best Film Animation award at 12th One Minute Film and Video Fest and Premio Visione Arte at Corti in Cortile. Animation Nights New York nominated the film among its 2016 Best of Fest, and numerous festivals around the world have been screening the film, including Annecy International Animation Festival. As of September 2016, Kim is a Master's of Arts candidate in animation at Estonian Academy of Arts. 

The Protagonist is a psychiatric survivor. Facing to hospital institution recalling a Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, situation with no exit. Just the decision to break through thorny bushes of reality appears as a rescue. The Protagonist meets alternative views of persons-birds focused on changes. The choice is a path divided for two. She can agree with actual situation or further batle, based on the causes for fight, including redefinition of mental disease.  

Dorota Skupniewicz – Filmmaker based in Belfast (Northern Ireland). Grown up during start of brutal capitalism in Poland, after systematic change in her country. This strongly affected her view of the World and the Art. Most of her life focused on activism connected with Human Rights and the Earth. Graduated Animation faculty on the University of Arts in Poznań. Connected with organisation IDHA NYC. 

Karen Lips is researcher and lives for several years in a tiny little shack in Costa Rica to observe frogs. When she leaves the cloud forest for a short time and returns, the frogs are gone. All of them. Karen sets out to find them – and encounters a horrible truth. 

Volker Schlecht works as an illustrator, artist and filmmaker in Berlin. He studied communication design at the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle and worked for several years as a graphic designer at moniteurs, Berlin. After that he became an assistent teacher at the animation department of the Film University Konrad Wolf Potsdam-Babelsberg, before he changed to the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule (BTK, now part of the University of Europe network) as lecturer, later as a professor of sequential illustration. Since March 2022 he is professor of drawing and design foundations at the architecture department of the Hochschule Anhalt in Dessau. Together with Alexandra Kardinar he founded their collaborative label Drushba Pankow in 2002. Schlecht is born in 1968 in Radeberg, close to Dresden. 

To touch and be touched, to reveal and conceal. Pencil lines exploring skin, an inner world made visible on the body’s outer layer. Movements and gestures become manifestations of the relationship between the body and my drawings. 

Faces, bodies and actions are juxtaposed endlessly. Fragmented pieces of the woman come together and form the volume of what has been her image in the history of cinema; one marked by the routinary domination and exploitation of her body. A short film homage to Laura Mulvey and her contributions to feminist film theory.  

Carlos Velandia – Colombian film curator and moving image artist whose work focuses on feminism, anti-colonialism, expanded animation and new technologies. He has been invited as a curator and jury member at events such as the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Montréal and the Bogotá International Film Festival, besides being selected as an Emerging Latin American Film Programmer by the Locarno Film Festival Industry Academy International and by Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires. His work as an artist has won the Grand Award at ZINEBI - International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao, the Silver Lynx Experimental Award at FEST - New Directors | New Films and has been showcased in festivals such as Annecy International Animation Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, among others. Additionally, his work has been exhibited in Colombian museums like Museo la Tertulia, Museo Rayo and the Bogotá Cinematheque. 

„Immature” to barwny animowany dokument badający płynność i złożoność tożsamości płciowej. Film zagłębia się w zmieniające się doświadczenia transpłciowego geja, ukazując niuanse jego procesu samopoznania.