Experimental Cinema

Water Dream Memory. Exploring Fluid Intersections. Exhibition until June 28th - Palazzo Zorzi, Venice "The exhibition WATER DREAM MEMORY is hosted at Palazzo Zorzi, headquarters of the UNESCO Office in Venice, in conjunction with the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition explores water as a threshold element: unstable, elusive, and suspended between presence and disappearance. This liminal condition mirrors today’s ecological crisis—fragmented, often invisible, yet deeply shaping our societies. Organized by WAMU+NET and curated by Eriberto Eulisse within the framework of the S+T+ARTS AQUA MOTION project, the exhibition brings together artistic practices that translate scientific research into immersive and poetic experiences, namely through the works Thermal Alchemy, by Sara Bonaventura, and Intermittence, by Lukas Taido. Both artists translate scientific data into visceral imagery and spatial tensions, allowing water – whether present, absent, or remembered – to emerge as a critical and sensitive force. Through this aesthetic inquiry, the exhibition aims at reconnecting individuals and communities with water as a shared heritage and a collective responsibility. Eschewing traditional narratives of catastrophe, WATER DREAM MEMORY creates immersive zones of attention. It invites viewers to slow down and engage with water not as a ‘neutral resource’ but as a living matter shaped by time, circulation, and care." /site/en/events/water-dream-memory-exploring-fluid-intersections

Experiments in Film: A Focus on Gabriel Abrantes. May 30th & 31st - Barbican Cinema, London "The Barbican’s Experiments in Film series turns its focus to Gabriel Abrantes, whose work moves freely across film, performance, digital media and installation. Drawing on an eclectic mix of references, from internet culture and political satire to melodrama, animation and contemporary art, Abrantes creates films that are as visually playful as they are disorienting. Presented alongside Bardo Loops at Gasworks, the two events showcase a practice shaped by collage, hybrid forms and unexpected cultural collisions." /site/en/events/experiments-film-focus-gabriel-abrantes

A Sleepless Night: A Devon Narine-Singh Retrospective. June 1st, 19h - Filmmakers Co-op, NYC "On MONDAY, JUNE 1st, at 7pm, join us at The Film-Makers' Cooperative (475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor) for a retrospective screening of the films of longtime FMC artist-member, and current FMC Advisory Board member, Devon Narine-Singh. Devon Narine-Singh is an experimental filmmaker, curator, and scholar based in New York. Narine-Singh's areas of interest include found materials and explorations of addiction and recovery in mass media. Narine-Singh is currently working on several projects and articles, and their films have screened internationally at venues such as Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, The New School, and The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. He has presented at NYU Cinema Studies, and curated screenings at The Film-Makers' Cooperative and Maysles Cinema. This hour-long program features four of Narine-Singh's films and includes the New York premiere of their latest work, A SLEEPLESS NIGHT, as well as a screening of their NEW YORK TRILOGY, shown for the first time as a single piece. Narine-Singh will be in attendance to introduce the films and answer audience members' questions!" /site/en/events/sleepless-night-devon-narine-singh-retrospective

Rest in Peace VALIE EXPORT (May 17, 1940- May 14, 2026). An absolute legend of art and cinema. 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤

💥AN INCREDIBLE MOMENT FOR CINEMA 💥Cannes 2026 @festivaldecannes presents 5 newly restored films by the great Armenian director ARTAVAZD PELECHIAN. These new restorations will burn brighter than ever and include Land of the People (1966), The Beginning (1967), We (1969), The Inhabitants (1970), and The Seasons (1975). The director attends in person! The long arc of Pelechian’s career, already legendary in the history of film, now returns in radiant clarity due to the extraordinary efforts of @coproduction_office and film restoration masters @cinetecabologna Although Pelechian’s films have remained difficult to see, Media City Film Festival has been an enthusiastic champion of his cinema, screening programs of his work in their original 35mm formats and online. In 2017, MCFF curated The Circle of Time: A Tribute to Artavazd Pelechian, in partnership with @tiff_net to launch the book, Artavazd Péléchian: Une symphonie du monde. The films of Artavazd Pelechian are among the most stunning documentaries of the postwar Soviet era. Key to his filmmaking is his theory of distance montage, in which thematic links are made over the course of a film rather than across direct cuts; as he explained, “Eisenstein’s montage was linear, like a chain. Distance montage creates a magnetic field around the film. It’s like when a light is turned on and light is generated around the lamp. In distance montage, when the two ends are excited, the whole thing glows.”The Circle of Time was composed of three of Pelechian’s most important films, including his masterpiece The Seasons, made in collaboration with the great cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov @vartanovart (a long-time ally of Sergei Parajanov @parajanov ). The Seasons is Pelechian’s supreme celebration of the interrelationship of humanity and the natural world. Pelechian’s films are indispensable. MCFF encourages EVERYONE to see these restorations as they screen around the world. In association with Armenian Film Commission, Armenian Public Television, VGIK, Belarusfilm, ZDF / ARTE France, Arma Media Production, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and UGAB France.

Book Launch & Screening: Zoe Beloff's "Life Forgotten". May 15th, 19h - Filmmakers Co-op, NYC "ON FRIDAY, MAY 15th, at 7pm, join us for a screening at The Film-Makers' Cooperative (475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor) of Zoe Beloff's new film LIFE FORGOTTEN (2026) and the launch of her accompanying book of the same name! Life Forgotten (2026, 50 minutes) asks, how does everyday entertainment bring people together and act as a catalyst for social change? Situating archival film in parallel with reenactment, the film conjures up New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, and centers on a real storefront cinema, Frank Seiden’s Variety Theater. Here silent movies were anything but. Frank and his sons improvised dialog for the films and sang Yiddish ballads to an audience that didn’t hesitate to join in or argue back. It was a welcoming space for women and the film follows a group of radical young garment workers who gather here to figure out how to fight for workers rights. The book, Life Forgotten, is a companion piece to the film. It includes both Beloff's artwork and historical documents, and brings together multiple perspectives: oral histories from the Lower East Side, an essay, "Intellectuals between Critique and Power" by the historian Enzo Traverso, and Beloff's notes on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Angel of History, our time of catastrophes. The book poses questions and offers a few signposts. How does history grow out of and weight upon live experience? How can people without power or influence change their world? How can we reach out to comrades across time? Beloff will be in attendance to introduce and discuss her film and book, and answer audience members' questions." /site/en/events/book-launch-screening-zoe-beloffs-life-forgotten

VIDEOEX 2026, Zürich: Artist Focus - Kevin Jerome Everson. May 22-31 "Kevin Jerome Everson is one of the defining voices of contemporary experimental cinema. Working with a handheld 16mm camera, he observes everyday Black life: labour, neighborhoods, gestures, movement, and meteorological phenomena. Precise, poetic works of striking formal clarity. Everson brings together aesthetics and the politics of seeing. His films reflect on history, migration, and resistance beyond conventional modes of representation. Scratches, light flares, long takes, and the materiality of analogue film become carriers of meaning in their own right. Curated by Greg de Cuir Jr, the Artist Focus brings together works spanning more than two decades — from early films to recent productions. Five film programmes, an installation, and an artist talk will be presented at VIDEOEX in Zürich from 22–31 May 2026. The artist and curator will be present. IFO, 2017. ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures" /site/en/events/videoex-2026-z%C3%BCrich-artist-focus-kevin-jerome-everson

Scratch Projection: UNDERGROUND: DISRUPTIVE, ERUPTIVE – GUEST PROGRAM BY J. HOBERMAN. May 28th, 20:30h - Luminor Hôtel de Ville, Paris "In collaboration with the film collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou Light Cone extends an invitation to the American film critic J. Hoberman to present a film program in connection with his latest book, Everything Is Now (Verso Books, 2025). Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop argues that a new vanguard arose from the subterranean cross-fertilization of unruly, if not transgressive, modes. The first underground movies produced in New York were closely related in attitude and strategy to other current artworld tendencies, notably Junk Sculpture (assemblages) and Happenings. Thus, Ray Wisniewski’s Doomshow (1963) turns the deinstallation of a gallery show of so-called “No!Art” into a kind of ritual performance, Ken Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1959-63) fuses elements of Happenings and home-movies while asserting itself as a film-object, and Michael Snow’s New York Eye and Ear Control (1964), which parodies the underground picaresque, is powered by the improvisational energy of Free Jazz. Subsequent movies were more aggressively norm-shattering as well as performative in their use of what was then called “Mixed Media”. Jud Yalkut’s D.M.T. (1966) preserves a pioneering light show by Jackie Cassen, Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963-65) was exhibited as a kinetic installation, and Yalkut’s Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967) documents the happenings that propelled Yayoi Kusama from the gallery into the streets, and from the artworld into the counterculture. All three films are by or based on the work of female artists and need to be seen in the light of Andy Warhol’s contemporary activities. – J. Hoberman" /site/en/events/scratch-projection-underground-disruptive-eruptive-%E2%80%93-guest-program-j-hoberman

Teo Hernández: A Pomegranate Orchard and the Bitter Well. May 14th-26th - MoMA NYC "In only 23 years Teo Hernández, one of the central figures of Paris’s queer avant-garde film scene of the 1970s and ’80s, produced a monumental body of work that reveals how myth and zealous desire are inextricably knit to our everyday lives. Across more than 150 Super 8mm films, encompassing portraiture, urban landscapes, and diaristic cinema, he ceaselessly forged radical alternatives to linear time and perspectival vision, entrancing audiences with a visceral style that affects both body and spirit. Hernández conceived of the moving image as a pulsating expression of life itself. Hernández used to say that two opposing bloodlines ran through his veins. Born in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, in 1939, he left the country in 1965. After 10 years of extensive travels through Central and North America, Europe, Morocco and India, he settled permanently in Paris in 1975. His first feature films pioneered a staunchly local, Super 8mm avant-garde approach focused on the affectionate exploration of objects and queer bodies as a locus for transcendence. His sprawling œuvre, including thousands of written pages and photographs, was cut short by his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992. This series, the first monographic presentation of Hernández’s work in the United States, comprises 19 films that trace some of the through-lines of his filmography—from early features inspired by folkloric or mythological iconographies, to the ecstatic variations on autobiography, portraiture, city rambling, and dance he made throughout the 1980s. The series includes the two films he made as part of MétroBarbèsRochechou Art, an informal collective he integrated with Gaël Badaud, Jakobois, and Michel Nedjar, along with a selection of films by Jakobois and Michel Nedjar. Taken together, these selections provide a glimpse into the creative community that accompanied Hernández until the end of his life." /site/en/events/teo-hern%C3%A1ndez-pomegranate-orchard-and-bitter-well

FRACTO 2026. May 27th.31st - ACUD, Berlin "FRACTO is an annual film festival held in Berlin since 2017, dedicated to fostering discourse around avant-garde and experimental filmmaking. The ninth edition in 2026 brings together filmmakers from Europe, North America, South America, and Asia. The program unfolds across five curated sections, three focuses, one dedicated section, and an expanded cinema work, comprising 61 films. The corpus of films inhabits a threshold: neither pure inscription nor formless abstraction, but a sensuous condition where the image exceeds description, opening onto a perceptual dimension. A central focus is dedicated to Cécile Fontaine (France), whose work engages film as material through collage, scratching, soaking, and layering, reworking found footage into tactile reassemblies shaped by minimal means. Her presence extends into a workshop, opening this practice to a shared, hands-on exploration. A further focus is centered on Peter Todd (UK), whose practice is grounded in attentive observation, assembling in-camera sequences into quiet constellations drawn from everyday perception. Another focus turns to Moucle Blackout (Austria), whose newly restored films bring renewed attention to a distinct position within the avant-garde, combining material processes, color, and optical transformation. The main selection brings together works by Ann Carolin Renninger & René Frölke , Chae Yu , Chanasorn Chaikitiporn, Clara Chapus, Douglas Urbank, Els van Riel, Emmanuelle Nègre, Emmanuel Piton, Eri Saito, Félix Caraballo, Jiayi Chen, Jangwook Lee, Joel Karppanen, John Winn, Magdalena Bermudez, Malena Szlam, Manuel Knapp, Matt Whitman, Nikita Baranov ,Pablo Useros & Deneb Martos, Robert Schaller, Shen Xin, Simon Payne,Sophie Watzlawick, Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Vincent Guilbert (Japan), Xiao Zhang, Yannick Mosimann, Yongha James Hwang and Yuliya Tsviatkova, forming a field in which images emerge and recede, bodies shift through inscription and exposure, and light gives form while opening the image. (...)" /site/en/events/fracto-2026

Millennium Film Journal 83 Launch Screening. May 18th, 20:15h - Close-Up Cinema, London "“In 2025 we endured the tragic loss of a pair of artists, who in life were united in love: Florence Jacobs, in June, and in October, Ken Jacobs. Together they were the prime movers behind our organization, putting sweat, ingenuity and vision behind a utopian idea that we all might be able to share the tools, knowledge, space, and resources required for filmmaking, and forge an alternative community of cinema opposed to the practices of capitalism and industry.” – Joe Wakeman Curated by Grahame Weinbren, Vince Warne, and the MFJ editors, this programmecelebrates the launch of MFJ 83. - Nissan Ariana Window (Ken Jacobs, 1968, 12 min) - Full Out (Sarah Ballard, 2025, 14 min) - Selected Works (@welcometo_blue , 2025, 5 min) - Object d’énigme (Chiara Caterina, 2026, 18 min) - Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain (Oscar Ruiz Navia, 2025, 15 min) - Repeat After Me (Part 2) (Open Group, 2022-24, 17 min, with audience participation)" /site/en/events/millennium-film-journal-83-launch-screening

MicroActs presents The Dream Portal • Short Film Screening. May 21st, 19h - The Bath House, London " Join us for a FREE screening of short Artist Films from around the world in The Hall at the wonderful The Bath House, Hackney Wick this May! ...short stories...small rebellions...mini manifestos...personal fables...snippets of memory... FREE ENTRY Welcome to the bizarre world of The Dream Portal, a night of short films taking you on a journey of whimsy, introspection & play. This international selection of experimental shorts explores feminist spaces, queer romance, food & altered states. Our lineup features films from Colombia, Czechia, France, Honduras, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the Philippines, UK & USA. Artist/Filmmaker List: Al Fraser • Charles Dillon Ward • Charlie Jimenez • Damian Kiernan • David de Rozas • Diane Nerwen • Eloïse Poulton & Callum Hale-Thomson • Emily Sasmor • Erica Schreiner • Erika Skyte • Guadalupe Arellanes • Harri Shanahan • Ishtar Paz • Jacques Sorrentini Zibjan • Jamal Ademola • Jitske Wadman • Katie Rejto • Lisa Danker • Michael John Pedrajas • Molly Valdez & Judson Valdez • Olivia Jiménez • Samuel Karow • Willow Senior" /site/en/events/microacts-presents-dream-portal-%E2%80%A2-short-film-screening