Archives

January 2026 Issue

ARCHIVES opens the year by delving into the layers cinema leaves behind. This Issue gathers films that engage directly with existing material—found footage, family recordings, scientific logs, forgotten reels, reclaimed fragments, or entirely reimagined remnants. Whether through preservation, reinterpretation, decoding, or radical transformation, these works question how memory is constructed, erased, or invented on screen.

ARCHIVES also expands the very idea of what an archive can be: not only historical or institutional, but biological, ecological, familial, and embodied. Cells, landscapes, gestures, oral histories, and data become repositories in their own right—living archives shaped by time, care, and decay. In doing so, these films ask critical questions about authorship and access: who gets to record, preserve, distribute, and own memory, and under what conditions.

Shaped by the films that came to us, this Issue embraces a wide range of voices, geographies, and practices, allowing representation and inclusivity to emerge organically from the material itself. Together, these works form a larger body—an ecosystem of traces—where personal, scientific, political, and speculative archives coexist.

As Labocine enters its tenth year, ARCHIVES also becomes a moment of reflection—an opening chapter that looks backward and forward at once. From the residue of time to the fiction of remembrance and the afterlives of images, this Issue invites all forms of cinema that probe the material and immaterial remains of experience.

Loving In Between

Jyoti Mistry Austria, South Africa 2023
FILM

File No. 2304

A.S.M. Kobayashi Canada, United States 2024
FILM

Nsala (2025)

Mickael-Sltan Mbanza Democratic Republic of Congo, 2025
FILM

Eautopsie

Mahda Purmehdi United States, Iran 2024
FILM

How to Download a Forest

Annette Jacob Portugal, Hungary, Belgium, India 2025
FILM

Lost Fragments of a Seizure

Michael Martinez Colombia, United Arab Emirates 2025
FILM