🎞 save the date(s)! 🎞 we’re happy to annouce that the next round of exf f. this year takes place from 10-13th of september. one main focus will be on japanese filmmaker Utako Koguchi, a program we’ve put together in close dialogue with Ute Aurand. while heating up the machine again & finalizing the rest of the programs, that we’ll release bit by bit in the weeks to come, there will be two other screenings of exf f. before the festival. so you don’t have to wait too long! 𝗲𝘅𝗳 𝗳. x 𝗡𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 📅03.06.2026 📍Pupille – Kino an der Uni as a little foreshadowing on our focus on Koguchi, we’ve put together one program of works on super 8 & 16mm by other japanese female experimental filmmakers from the 1980s/90s. with films by animation artist Yuko Asano, Mari Terashima, whose work brims with a vibrant eclecticism of surrealism, goth, & gender-fluid symbolism, as well as Hiromi Saiki & Junko Wada, who use their own corporeality to expose & subvert their (personal) experiences of gender-based violence with filmic means. another program is an homage to Takahiko Iimura, one of the great pioneers and tireless innovators of experimental film & media in japan. through a selection, ranging from the found-footage classics to the cerebral structuralists works of the 70s & 80s, the program explores Iimura's documentation & reflection on the bodies of cinema. 𝗲𝘅𝗳 𝗳. 𝟭𝟲𝗺𝗺 𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗶𝗿 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗺𝘀 𝗯𝘆 𝗪𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗿 𝗡𝗲𝗸𝗲𝘀 📅 14.07.2026 📍Pupille – Kino an der Uni our yearly contribution to Pupille Kino’s summer open air – this time with films by Werner Nekes. the program will feature a selection of rarely screened landscapes films from Hamburg to Sweden. @pupillekino @nipponconnection

this years edition of exf f. was the most wonderful 5-year anniversary imaginable 🎁 thank you to all the filmmakers, archives, curators, the festival team, projectionists - and finally you, the audience, who has come from all over the world to join us in frankfurt. ❤️ we’re super happy with how this intense edition turned out, and hope to see you again next year!! many thanks to @ingwerteemann for the analog pictures and working hard on the multiple exposures @chicagofilmsociety @lightcone_officiel @arsenalberlin @kinothek_asta_nielsen @canyoncinema @dff.film @pupillekino

last but not least, we want to highlight today our program on hille köhne & uli versum, put together by karola gramann and heide schlüpmann. köhne & versum are not well known figures. like so many figures of experimental cinema - and especially of german experimental cinema - they have been forgotten to history, their names only figuring in articles and catalogues published in the 1980s. by making these names resurface and by endowing the films of köhne & versum with a new visibility, karola gramann and heide schlüpmann pursue their now decade-lasting committment to resurgitating the gaps of film history, especially in regards to women's filmmaking. köhne, wo belongs to what alf bold has called the "braunschweig foil school", worked with coloured foils whose transparency absorbs and intensifies the celluloid, making the colours glow, turning the screen into a space of pure cinematographic possibilities. the fantastical turns into the playful and comedic in versum's films, in which wit conceals its dark side beneath a strikingly spectacular surface. the program will be introduced by karola gramann and heide schlüpmann, and will be followed by a discussion with hille köhne. & as a special treat, there will also be a small exhibition in the foyer of pupille kino 🍋🍋🍋

look at this beautiful gem from our dear friend luisa mielke (@luisa.mielke )!! 1000 thanks for creating this year's poster again for us 💛

we're happy to finally share our catalog with you!! 🤸‍♂️ this year we asked, besides the people curating programs, friends to contribute texts to this year's edition. so a big big big thank you goes to arindam sen & daniel swarthnas, to karola gramann & heide schlüpman and kyle westphal but also elena duque for her beautiful texts on ute aurand, enrico camporesi for his on rose lowder and borja rodriguez for writing something about milena gierke! see you next week! 💕 @__doublenegative @chicagofilmsociety @elenaduque @enrico_camporesi @urbanborja_

what could a de-hierarchized cinema look like, a cinema that de-anthropologized the act of seeing, opening up the frame to the millions of forms of life that inhabit the planet? these are some of the questions that Sílvia das Fadas has been negotiating in both her curatorial and filmic practice and which lie at the heart of 'Light, Blaze, Fulgor – Auguries for a Non-Hierarchical Framing and Flourishing', a three-projector live projection / performance that das Fadas has been working on since 2017. the project was sparked by the anarchist António Gonçalves Correia and his communal experiments – first, Comuna da Luz (the commune of light), in Vale de Santiago / Odemira (1917-18), followed by Comuna Clarão (the blaze commune), in Albarraque / Sintra (1926). engaging directly with the portuguese region of Alentejo, 'Light, Blaze, Fulgor' engages directly with the land its images are birthed out of, staging an ever-moving, shape-shifting community of images of sounds of resistance. thanks, Sílvia (@cinema_fulgor___ ) for sharing your beautiful work with us 🦎

dear exf f. friends, as promised, we have finally managed to put our complete program with all the texts on the website, which you can now read through in full length (a big thanks goes to simon bugert (@simonsimonb ), who helps us with the web design). thanks also for the wonderful (co-)curating and beautiful texts of our programs: arindam sen @__doublenegative and daniel a. swarthnas for our hutton/lapore, elena duque (@elenaduque ) for ute aurand, enrico camporesi (@enrico_camporesi ) for rose lowder, karola gramann and heide schlüpmann for hille köhne & uli versum, borja rodríguez (@urbanborja_ ) for milena gierke, kyle westphal for edward owens (@chicagofilmsociety ). thanks also to teoman yüzer @ingwerteemann and jonathan mackris for helping with translation and proof reading. we have now reached the hot phase of festival planning (the booklet is going into print, films are arriving and being checked) and we are thrilled to be able to watch all the wonderful films together with you in a few weeks at the pupille (@pupillekino ) and the dff cinema (@dff.film ). so: order your festival passes (if you haven’t already done so) and plan your trips to frankfurt! we look forward to seeing you all in september!

...aaand the unveiling continues 🥁🥁🥁: we are especially happy to have Ute Aurand as our guest! she will present two programs of her films at exf f. over a period of now 45 years as a filmmaker and programmer, Aurand has become a mainstay of the international film festival circuit and one of the driving forces behind the valorization of women's filmmaking in germany. in the tradition of the diary film, Aurand's work as a filmmaker testifies of a profound attentiveness to the splendor of the moment and the beauty of the minute movements that animate objects, people and animals. the deeply felt subjectivity that Aurand unapologetically embraces is maybe best expressed in the title of a film she completed in 2013: "To Be Here". Aurand's films, wherever they are filmed and whomever is being filmed, are precisely about this "being here" - being here, guiding the 16mm bolex as an extension of the body, filming.

Ein Programm wie eine Bewegung – vom Ursprung der Schöpfung über die Materialitäten der Natur zur Unbegrenztheit des Kosmos. In Philippe Cotes Ether »fließen« die Bilder und durch Mehrfachbelichtungen werden sie zu reinen Lichterscheinungen, vom Zwang der Repräsentation befreit. In Stan Brakhages Creation existieren das Abstrakte und das Figurative im Einklang: die blaue arktische See und die weiße Gletscherlandschaft bilden eine stille Symphonie. Mit Resistance von Laurence Favre schmilzt diese Idylle, erodiert, zerbröckelt – und widersteht doch. Wenn die Nacht hereinbricht, blicken wir schließlich zu den Sternen: Observando El Cielo von Jeanne Liotta bannt das Chaos und die Wunder des Universums auf den 16mm-Filmstreifen – ein Werk von materialistischer Erhabenheit. Mi, 23.07.2025, ca. 21:30 Uhr EXF F. 16MM-SOMMERKINO 1. Vom Ursprung Ether FR 2003 Philippe Cote 16mm 9 Min Creation US 1979 Stan Brakhage 16mm 16 Min 2. In den Felsen gebaut Resistance CH 2017 Laurence Favre 16mm 11 Min 3. Zu den Sternen Observando El Cielo US 2007 Jeanne Liotta 16mm 19 Min Open Air Sommerkino | Campus Westend, Wiese vor dem Random White House | Eintritt frei, wir freuen uns über Spenden! #pupillesommerkino #pupillekino #experimentalfilm #exff #analogeprojektion #16mm #frankfurtammain #campuswestend #unikino #unifrankfurt

we proudly announce that the programs are ready - you can now find the screening schedule and overviews of all the programs on our website. time to prepare your trips to frankfurt! 🚣‍♂️🚴‍♀️🏄‍♂️ the texts for the programs will be released in the weeks to come. with films by peter hutton & mark lapore (curated by by arindam sen @__doublenegative and daniel swarthnas), edward owens, ute aurand, milena gierke, hille köhne & uli versum (curated by Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann), rose lowder, sílvia das fadas (@cinema_fulgor___ ) and nicole remy (@nikhol___ ). with loads of thanks to @lightcone_officiel , @canyoncinema , @arsenalberlin and the @chicagofilmsociety for providing the prints and @hessenfilmundmedien , @institutocervantesfrankfurt , the cultural affair office of the city of frankfurt (@ffmculture ) and the asta (@astaunifrankfurt ), as well as the school of the art institute of chicago (@saicpics ), john m. flaxman library (@saic_library ), the new american cinema group, Inc. and the film-makers‘ cooperative (@filmcoop ) for supporting us. and, last but not least, of course the venues @pupillekino and @dff.film for having us again 💛

we are particularly pleased that peruvian filmmaker Nicole Remy (@nikhol___ )will join us for our closing program to place her work in dialogue with two double projections by Rose Lowder we already announced yesterday! Nicole was born in lima and is based in madrid since 2021, where she studied at @l__a_v_ . her work focuses on a structural cinema, working with the limitations and, therefore, the possibilities of the film camera and film support. in addition to CON CIERTA LUZ, a 16mm double projection, Nicole will perform CONSTANT, COPRESENT, a new super 8 double projection, for the first time. „'Con cierta luz' is a journey through different processes of capturing light using pinhole cameras, accompanied by a cassette recorder during my residency at nanolab (daylesford, australia). it represents a step between the interior and the exterior, between moving forward and going back. it is about the space i inhabit, the one i walk through and draw over and over again. (…) 'Constant, copresent' is an ongoing process of moving around different trees, in different places — from madrid to the rainforest of tambopata — exploring how to draw and capture their stillness, volume, and presence. filmed in super 8 over the past year, these choreographies are an attempt to translate what is, in fact, constant and present, and encapsulate it through movement.“ (N.R.) thanks a lot to nicole for sharing her work with us! 🦎

ever since its inauguration, one of the main ambitions we have pursued at exf f., was to create a space where new creations from young filmmakers would co-exist with classical works of seminal artists of experimental film. thus, we are very happy to announce that rose lowder - a true maverick of independent filmmaking and the promotion of experimental film - will travel to frankfurt and present two programs of her works. lowder, of french and peruvian nationality, has been making films for almost 4 decades, tirelessly filming and editing her visual studies. lowder's seemingly small films reveal a breathtaking depth and mastery of the tools of filmmaking, each one operating as a sort of ontological intervention - what her works reveal, is that the basis of cinema lies in the individual frame out of whose material entity an endless universe of possibilities arise. in addition to a program showcasing the variety of lowder's practice over her career, as a special treat, we will be featuring two rarely screened double projections in the second program. 🌿🌸🌼🌷🌼🌸🌿 thanks a lot to rose & to @lightcone_officiel for providing the prints!