Mindfulness

The documentary Shamata is a project that is born out of the latest neuroscience research that took place inside the Deprung Loseling monastery. It came to being out of a collaboration with the Salamanca University and the monastery situated in the South of India. It is vital to collaborate across d

The dream is the best proof of the fact that we are not enclosed so firmly in our skins as it seems. Jo is working as a trainer at the Fitness Company MIND YOUR BODY. His consciousness is slipping into the body of a customer and he is doing their sports program for them. During this session Jo is no

When an astronaut ponders on the quietude of space, he comes upon a startling self-realisation. The truth is written in the stars, but what will he uncover?

The queer art of Body modification took center stage in 1989 when Fakir Musafar's "Modern Primitives" movement hit alternative cultures around the globe via the punk subcultural magazine Re/Search. A photographer, performance artist, and ritualist, Musafar's work mobilized an entire generation of ar

The night where Victor Frankenstein just achieved the creature, an hallucinated dream disturbs his sleep. A true fantasy of incest, this dream awakening both the memory of a childhood love and the ghost of his dead mother, scares Victor just as much as the creature waiting for him behind the curtain

A fantasy about a reclusive woman who searches for meaning in the mysterious documents that keep appearing to her, turning her home into an archive. As realities collapse and intersect around here, she must make a final choice: is she a free agent, or just a tool of the archive.

A young woman dances in a devastated forest. Then a miracle happens.

Isolated in her warehouse apartment, Jodiiie plays a VR guided meditation video game to calm her escalating anxiety. The game, run by a next generation AI algorithm, adapts its gameplay to the player's emotions as they navigate twelve levels on a quest to achieve the ultimate goal: transcendence. Jo

A visual praise poem honoring the mother of the sweet waters, Oshun.

Peering through tiny holes that beetles have chewed through a now-dead bark, a spruce monoculture in decline slowly reveals itself. Besides an ecological-economic history, it also carries a spiritual legacy: semicircles of oak poles aligned with the solstices bear witness to a prehistoric sun observ

A market and playground in Queen, New York, a borough of New York City, become the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier's Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film i

The film showcases medical records of posthuman patients in an imaginary hospital through experimental digital images.

A grieving flamenco dancer experiences five stages of grief triggered by female ancestors.

Sequential images sourced from dozens of massage books are activated to reflect on recent public conversation from this past year surrounding bodies, massage, and trauma. Ease the pain from past physical and mental distress. The body remembers. Aches may linger. Lay prone, breathe deeply, release te

In the space of a moment, inside a cabinet, perception embarks on an epic journey through the terrain of memories that form the identity of an American born Asian.

Sun, beach, the sea: Most people associate them with carefree days off work, being freed of civilizationís demands. In Siegfried Fruhauf´s Tranquility an image of a woman lying on her back in the sand, next to her an abandoned beach toy and nothing but sun and wind above, represents the

WINNER OF SYMBIOSIS 2024 Noumenon (noun) a "thing-in-itself" — an objective reality that will always be inaccessible to human perception." – Immanuel Kant Noumenon is an experimental short film reflecting on the relation between reality and perception from a neuroscience perspective, and

In Confessions on a Transmission Line, we wanted to explore the audiovisual process of feedback as a spiritual practice in relation to Camp and queer potentiality. Using real-time signal processing tools and improvisational strategies, we set up a performance space where our persona interacts with a

An experiment in meditative and stripped down cameraless filmmaking, each frame is handmade using selective bleaching and spraypaint. It was edited and sequenced using machine learning models. Sound design by Kamuter.

Sofia is panicky, again. The Universe decides to contact her. An other-wordly dialogue. A planet symphony for Mars, where people dream awake and fight for love.

A tired young man spends the night performing menial office tasks to try to understand the reason for his insomnia.

I invite you is a sensory journey that illustrates the challenges that the brain faces in our everyday conversations, where the linguistic signal is often unclear, disrupted or obstructed.

After discovering that his terminal illness is no longer manageable, Daniel leaves the hospital, wandering through landscapes in search of a final resting place.

Ndidi is a lucid ritual of becoming — a visual poem that follows the inner world of a wounded healer moving through heartbreak. Guided by nature's quiet language, the film explores how grief can transform when held in stillness, sound, and movement. Through a blend of poetry, natural soundscap

"The face of my younger brother upon his death was my own." Shusaku Aota sees himself in the face of his deceased brother. Distant howling that comes from an unknown location. His younger brother's memories. His bedridden pupil Kaoru Nogi appears out of thin air. "It's me, after all." Shusaku loses

Running at 140 minutes, Schreiner´s Fata Morgana makes few concessions to conventional narrative formats or editing rhythms, staking out a territory beyond traditional distinctions of fiction and doc-umentary. He delivers an image of such breathtaking splendor, finds some unique configuration

Dreams are as wide as the desert sands, their treasures hidden beneath the dunes of sleep. Thousands of years ago, an unseen mentor advises a young woman newly anointed as her community's Khaleemah, or Dreamer, whose task is to divine truths from the visions she has during the deepest of the seven s

An ancient civilization develops complex computing technologies using only well-trained animals. Told through a psychedelic found-footage slideshow sourced entirely from 19th century stereoscopic photographs largely from the Keystone Stereoview Company of Meadville, PA. The photographs themselves ar

"Bury Our Hearts at the Bend of the River" follows three women as they journey along the River Lee, blending walks, boat rides, and spontaneous performances. The film explores the intimate connection between humans and the river, but this connection is disrupted by man-made structures like dams and

"This is not a love letter to this country. But to us inside this country." Author Jacqueline Woodson narrates Meanwhile, a docu-poem about white supremacy and a community of artists who share visions of resistance. Meanwhile, an immersive, nonlinear cinematic journey—where artists' expression

Release Date: July 1, 2018 With documentary audio material and Butoh dance, the multi-age performers are invited to take shapes, organize themselves in nightmare poses and free-form improvisations and create moving tapestries that allow our audience to create its own interpretation of the mysteries

Lured by the chance of being the protagonist of a documentary film, Buddha Dev, a 27 year old flamboyant cricketer from Goa, starts authorising unrestricted access into the most private parts of his life. The film explores the relationship between Buddha's real and digital self… and as such,

Our memories make up the foundation of who we are, but they are constantly changing. Like a living organism with its own personality, memory can be loyal and reliable, sneaky and surprising, or capricious and cruel. Shot primarily in 16mm film, this creature called Memory is made from museum objects

ONCE YOU KNOW is the intimate journey of director Emmanuel Cappellin across the abyss of a world at the edge of climate-induced collapse. His voyage into this uncharted territory is that of a whole generation turning to climate scientists, local democracy, grassroots initiatives, and mass rebellion

Miguel attends his first yoga class.

The Blue Flowers is an archival film born from a residency dedicated to home movies and private memories. Its starting point is a collection from the Bergamoni family, preserved and digitized by Cinescatti, accompanied by the original audio recordings in which the father commented on his own footage

How many neurons do you need to recognize your mother? "A Sentimental Science" explores the limitations of our understanding of how our experience is encoded in neural activity. ISFF13 Symbiosis

A fish dreams of a relationship.

A video about the proliferation of images and the disappearance of bodies. A series of physical and digital ruptures guides our protagonist through age-old questions on existence. For locations not captured by Google Street View cameras, people can upload their own photos to the map. These volunteer

A mythical short film that charts the journey of a priestess attempting to cross the threshold between mortal and immortal worlds in search of resources for her ailing world. In this liminal space, she meets a group of deities called Smoke Jumpers, who are custodians of ancestral knowledge who trade

The unnamed protagonist dies in a traffic accident, but as he finds himself still conscious, he realizes that there is still experience after death. After spending some time in a dark space with some sparse light animations, he realizes he can craft a new world out of his own imagination. As he star

My world was jolted by two shadow images: one, thrilling, the other terrifying. After a years-long effort—with 200 other scientists—we made the first image of a black hole, its shadow of no return. Then I fell into debilitating pain. A deadly shadow blot appeared on an MRI of my spine. F

Emulsion emerged as a concept while editing the footages largely composed of micro elements. It is an observational journey into the textures of existence and persistence seeking.

Sitting quietly and being present in the trees of Griffith Park, Priscilla N. reads a poem called "The tree is my metronome." Directed by Priscilla Mars. Looking and listening closely at the landscape.

Eva Giolo, a Belgian artist whose work explores the possibilities of film, video, and installation, presents us in her second appearance at the festival with a lyrical portrait of Fogo Island in Canada, re-situating us in nature, in the act of observing and waiting, while we meditate on the relation

DESCENDING THE MOUNTAIN takes us on a journey of mystical revelations, experienced through meditation and psilocybin. To understand how psychedelics reveal the nature of consciousness, psychiatrist Franz and Zen master Vanja guide experienced meditators – who have never used psychedelics befor

Near the busy stop and go of a traffic intersection, a group of snails inch toward their destination.

On the road to spiritual transcendence, a voice over artist gets lost in the forest. He makes some commercials along the way.

"Travels in Reality" is an experimental art film that explores reality and consciousness, taking viewers on a journey through time, space, and awareness. It uses ideas from quantum mechanics and excerpts from books and poems as a starting point to explore this theme. Scientific ideas and theories no

Dr. Richard Davidson, a brain specialist, experiments with meditation and yoga as a means of helping soldiers with PTSD and children with ADHD.

A historian with a gift of clairvoyance roams in streets of an old City of Lights. He sees in the Falls of Shawinigan a meditation on the human history and it's loss of meaning.

Featuring Indigenous women of various generations, Pidikwe integrates traditional and contemporary dance in an audiovisual whirlwind that straddles the border between film and performance, somewhere between the past and the future. The film explores the links between the intoxication of the Roaring

Filmed over the past six months following the LA wildfires, the 10-minute experimental film plunges viewers into the heart of Los Angeles' last remaining urban wetland, unfolding a vivid exploration of biodiversity through the extraordinary science of animal vision and the fluid manipulation of time

An inspired collaboration between filmmakers Peter Mettler (The End of Time) and Emma Davie (I Am Breathing) and radical writer and philosopher David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous), Becoming Animal is an urgent and immersive audiovisual quest, forging a path into the places where humans and other

The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and you—beside— Emily Dickinson A sociologist and a neurologist walk into a park…and a meditation on the mind's ability to meet obstacles and form new

Cyber-religious architecture and ancient spiritual traditions merge in this essay by Singaporean multidisciplinary artist Shi Yun Teo. Remixing extensive archival sources in her computer, from found footage to 3D-rendered animations of deities, she configures a map of the material and the immaterial

They say freedom's only possible when there's nothing left to lose. But what, in the end, is the real cost of living? In a city framed by capital and loss, ten unruly Londoners navigate their wild and wayward way, travelling on their own terms towards a co-existence far stronger than 'community'. On

The Kelly Street Garden film explores the core mission of the garden to provide healthy food and community programming to our local South Bronx residents free of charge. The community's effort not only feeds people physically, but mentally and spiritually as well. Through Art workshops, Qi Gong, Yog

This is a travelogue of sorts, as two friends whose lives intersect and diverge, look at the road and the vessels we use as means to traverse landscapes both contemporary and historical, and of the spirit and of the body. The title, inspired in part by Smokey Robinson's Just My Soul Responding, refe

Every life form originated from the same cells billions of years ago. First there was one cell that formed colonies, which became group of colonies that evolved into all kinds of species like trees, insects, giraffes and humans. All is connected, moves together and reacts to each other. There is no

Moss has grown all over a stone carved as a sleeping human face, reaching into the dark circles under its eyes. Is the stone frozen in millennial slumber or weighed down by endless fatigue? Satellite images trace the Earth's twilight line, revealing night and day, dawn and dusk, passing over places

My Mind's Eye: A Series of Video Interviews. Episode 1 - The Mind-Body Problem: An interview with Ned Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science at NYU nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/

The young Indonesian musician Anggi was given away as an infant and grew up among musicians practicing the traditional music phenomenon Reak. Reak is practiced in West Java and is a spiritual cultural form where both musicians and audiences go into trance and are possessed by the spirits of their an