Featuring a new visual identity, while remaining faithful to its core territories – memory, archive, and ethnography – the festival once again affirms itself as a vital platform for exploring alternative forms of cinematic creation, fostering dialogue between cinema, other arts, and fields of critical thought.
The main focus of this year’s edition is dedicated to the work of American filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, an essential figure in contemporary experimental and archival cinema. Twice nominated for an Academy Award, Rosenblatt has created over thirty-five films across three decades, delving deep into emotional and psychological terrain with an aesthetic that is both intimate and universal. The festival presents a selection of seventeen short films, made between 1990 and 2025, offering an expansive view of his body of work. The program also includes a conversation with American researcher Jaimie Baron, one of the most prominent contemporary thinkers on cinema, memory, and archival practices.
The competitive section maintains its established structure, organized around two main thematic strands: “Lives and Places”, exploring the aesthetic representation of daily life, environments, and biographies; and “Memory and Archive”, focusing on temporality and the poetic appropriation of testimony and found footage. As in previous years, there is also space reserved for fiction, broadening the festival’s aesthetic and narrative scope. A total of twenty-two films from eighteen countries have been selected, to be screened across nine competition sessions.
