Mimesis Documentary Festival 2025

<p>In Spring 2022 Masha prepares to leave Russia - her homeland that has changed. It turns into a chain of unexpected farewells: her mom dies of cancer, her lover flees army conscription, everything including her own old self is falling apart. Her way to cope with the grief is to fixate everything with her camera. Her anger guides her to inner emigration to the local underground scene, which became an escape for young russians. This kaleidoscope of shards chronicles not only the spirit of the time, but the director&#39;s personality crumbling against the backdrop of global turmoil.</p>

<p>In Excess examines labor, capital, and displacement in modern America through the lens of one city&rsquo;s trash &mdash; in sewers and streets, waterways and workplaces. It&rsquo;s a gritty dive into the inner workings of a city&rsquo;s infrastructure that embraces different formats, weaving newly digitized archival material together with surveillance footage and contemporary vignettes of people at work, communities in flux, and waste in motion. Observational, off-beat, and open-ended, the film finds harmonies and dissonance in patterns of creation, consumption, and renewal. (Selected for Jihlava New Visions Forum - U.S. DOCS 2023)</p>

<p>In this workshop, Featured Artist Melissa Langer leads a conversation on experimental filmmaking as an expanded process of gathering media for building a world over time. She shares methods for exhibiting multimedia installations and micro-screenings during the years-long process of making a feature-length film, recounts her experiences working as part of an artist collective, and shows how expanded cinema can keep us creatively sustained along the way.</p>

<p>Oriviades relives stories, songs, and moments with her mother as he inhabits her space between dreams.</p>

<p>Filmmaker Jos&eacute; Cardoso&rsquo;s deeply personal&nbsp;<em>Flowers</em>&nbsp;is an exercise in sense-making, led by both his conscious and unconscious mind. Navigating the barrage of online news images produced each day, he transforms these into an unexpected web of connections that link an Amazonian community threatened with the destruction of their land to an extreme right-wing Brazilian President who justifies the exploitation of the Amazon by the rising price of resources precipitated by the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Buddhist monk Th&iacute;ch Nhất Hạnh teaches us to make our enemy the object of our compassion, and the filmmaker&rsquo;s three-year-old son marvels at the frogs and flowers growing in the garden.</p>

<p>Two young sisters guide us through a meditation on time, play, and nature&mdash;using the present moment as a spell against acceleration.</p>

<p>Whether it be doing yoga with ants, printing with plants, observing the quantum physics of cats, or considering the travel of an apple: not all teachers are human in a bustling Spanish farmhouse. While instances of interspecies care are enacted beneath the cool stone arches of this rambling structure, the ecological niches (or roles) of various beings shift along with their unexpected environmental relationships. In a heavily altered landscape composed of serrated mountains and meticulously-maintained olive groves, human intervention is readily apparent; however, sometimes trees bear knowledge in addition to green fruits, and humans shape and are shaped by their environment in equal measure.</p>

<p>The film explores the interplay between aging bodies and eros, reflecting Bliss&rsquo;s ongoing interest in how older psyches engage desire and embodiment.</p>

<p>Amid Portugal&rsquo;s disappearing rural villages, an aging couple, Adelaide and Manuel, remain&mdash;tending to their land, their animals, and each other. Observed with patience and reverence, their lives unfold in quiet moments: hands worn by labor, songs sung to the wind, the unspoken wisdom of a lifetime shared. With intimate observation, this film attempts to capture the significant beauty of a world slipping away, offering a meditation on time, resilience, and the spiritual weight of a vanishing way of life.</p>

<p>Scientists and philosophers encounter the limits of their own vision through the eyes of animals.</p>

<p>Combining archival and everyday footage, Bruno examines his relationship with obsessive-compulsive disorder through the perspective of a close witness&mdash;his wife.</p>

<p>Restaging Kathy Acker's volume of the same name, this 16mm essay renders dying landscapes and burning light leaks to contemplate the social isolation, psychosexual crisis, and interior reckoning precipitated by a diagnosis of breast cancer.</p>

<p>Combining super 8mm and 16mm tactile filmmaking processes, this film weaves North Carolina&#39;s hostile legislature towards abortion together with personal anecdotes, and anecdotes from women of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This film incorporates knowledge from traditional medicinal practices with present-day access to reproductive healthcare, and hopes for a return and honoration of matrilineality in tribes. Made as a part of the Abortion Clinic Film Collective.</p>

<p>Documenting the death of his father and birth of his daughter, CABINET presents a delicate conceptual space between nascency and expiration. So, a body starts, ends, and remains deeply interred: afloat, aloft.</p>

<p>On the eve of her 18th birthday, Mariia has a feeling of déjà vu as she and her mother, Liubov, travel from their snowy village in Finland to France&mdash;only ten months earlier, they had made the difficult choice to flee from Ukraine to Finland after bombing in Kyiv came desperately close to their home. Studying in Paris has long been a dream of Mariia&rsquo;s, one her mother is determined to help her realize, so they are relocating again. Director Juho Reinikainen combines a poetic and tender observation with a delicate score to good effect. Mother and daughter explore the city and settle Mariia into her dorm, but ultimately, they must part ways. As they say their goodbyes at the train station, we see that it isn&rsquo;t just one life beginning anew but two.</p>

<p>A &ldquo;Texas Switch&rdquo; is a cinematic sleight of hand where one performer is swapped for another in a single shot, often hidden in plain sight. This experimental short stages bold acts of substitution, toying with visibility, presence, and what slips past the viewer&rsquo;s gaze.</p>

<p>A personal story about intergenerational Japanese American experience that speaks to the muddled facets of immigrant identity.</p>

<p>An examination of the words correction/augmentation/alignment in relation to both medical augmentation and transgender alignment. A back and forth conversation.</p>

<p>Letters to a maternal ancestor reflect on ethnic heritage while embracing notions of family beyond bloodlines. Weaving images and sounds from two cities&mdash;Detroit and Beirut&mdash;the film poses the central question: how do we belong to each other?</p>

<p>A fragmentary 16mm portrait of the lonely lives that haunt Chicago&rsquo;s underground rap scene. Alienated youth seek transcendence amid chaotic crowds, deafening noise, and occult aesthetics. The gaze of surveillance, both real and imagined, affirms their indignation.</p>

<p>Written, directed and edited by Julian Castronovo, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued could easily become a cult item for those fascinated by detective stories, cinematic experimentation and research strategies. It begins when the narrator comes into possession of the belongings of a filmmaker and starts reconstructing his movements: the story of a search. Through clever work with different narrative levels, Castronovo&rsquo;s debut feature manages to be both an oblique self-portrait (with a good dose of playfulness and delicious wit), and a speculative fiction about Fawn Ma (a Chinese art forger and performance artist).</p>

<p>Sunset Seduction stars a liberal philanthropist yearning for his next fling with radical politics. Made as the Palestine solidarity movement escalated in 2024, the work unfolds in essayistic fragments considering ideas of freedom, violence, and the seductive capture of revolutionary ideology. This is an evolving project that places a film alongside site-specific contracts and discussions that materialize the particular responsibilities of cultural workers in the global north.</p>

<p>The act of writing collapses the past and the present into the dissonant experience of witnessing the colonization of the body.</p>

<p>The Chilean artist and filmmaker Mart&iacute;n Baus assembles a political object that can be found below and to the left, in the same place where Latin America is located (if we place Europe in the centre of the map). Guerrilla radio broadcasts, voices from Godard&rsquo;s first film or photographs of the Ecuadorian tropical forest compose his resistant found footage, a cocktail of old sounds and slogans that reverberates in contemporary times.</p>

<p>This film was shot in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in March 2022&mdash;during the first month of Russia&#39;s invasion of Ukraine, which continues until today. It ponders the silences and small acts of resistance by anti-war individuals at a time when mass protest fails and mass migration begins, when the state introduces military censorship, and the full-scale war is not experienced directly.</p>

<p>Stitch the Ruin weaves microscopic views of used textiles, focusing on stitching and tags. It explores time, labor, and the socialist structure of feeling shaped by workers, alongside a list of shut factories&mdash;some named after heroines of the Antifascist Women&rsquo;s Front.</p>

<p>The Call is an eco-revenge film featuring unlikely instigators who were observed and filmed over three years at airports across the United States.</p>

<p>Adapted from a 1968 essay by the socialist and political activist David E. McReynolds, the short archival film takes the images and sounds of the American war in Vietnam to reflect on the feedback loop between militarism abroad and at home &mdash; and the people who resisted it.</p>

<p>Migrating from the Amazon basin across northern Illinois, a flock of chimney swifts flutter without perching, using a natural form of radar to navigate. The pulse of infrasound from deep ocean waves vibrates the ground and emanates up, guiding the birds amid disrupted air.</p> <p>Open space heard becomes turbulent, resonant space. Various forms of tuning elicit a strained acoustic ecology between altitudes.</p>

<p>In Wisconsin Dells, the water park capital of the world, foreign students are employed on summer work visas. This program, presented as an immersion into American culture, is also a way to take advantage of cheap labor. An inspired portrait of contemporary America through the eyes of this young generation.</p>

<p>A reflection on personal and systemic failures woven into an analysis of The Department of Human Services hold music utilizing archival footage of Jimmy Buffet, Duran Duran, Steely Dan, Paula Cole, late night cable erotica, and more.</p>

<p>Catia, one of the last residents of the self-built neighbourhood 6 de Maio in Lisbon, fights to keep her home as the community faces evictions and demolitions.</p>

<p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">Fragmented records reveal a concealed history of Cold War&ndash;era human radiation experiments, surfacing through a haze of manipulation and embedded studies. Desert dust settles into teeth, inscribing a residual record. Contaminated images conjure the unseen.</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">&nbsp;</p>

<p>As Long As We Can captures a day-in-the-life of an Arizona reproductive health clinic trying to navigate the turbulent aftermath of the 2022 Dobbs decision. As the entire abortion care system struggles to figure out what is now legal and what is not, extra poignancy was thrown onto this particular clinic by an Arizona Supreme Court decision to uphold an 1864 law criminalizing all abortions. That decision has garnered a national spotlight, and the issues faced in Arizona are national in nature. The film also captures the warmth, courage, and sheer bustle of a clinic trying to simply stay open and serve its clients. In a moment dizzying with opinions on women who seek abortions &ndash; and the people who care for them &ndash; As Long As We Can brings us their voices; the voices of people in the path of a hurricane upending the lives of women all over the nation.</p>

<p>Bringing together a trove of archival materials from first wave harm reduction and syringe exchange on the west coast, this archive is not a scene of redemption, but rather, a cinematic apparatus that can teach us about durational love.</p>

<p>Bringing together histories of feminized labour with ethnographic scenes of stenographers captioning for d/Deaf students in the classroom, this experimental film considers how captioners and their clients make sense of demands for invisibility, neutrality, and access. Formally, by interrupting the normative coherence of sound and image, the film reflexively undermines the fluency of its own audio track to make palpable the nuanced interpretive work that goes into transcribing across modalities.</p>

<p>Birds looking anxiously at a threat beyond the frame, and then the threat arrives. Mixing a found footage educational film with sci-fi and horror traditions and hand-painted manipulation of the film stock, a familiar narrative is inverted, recontextualizing the fear of others through the anthropocentric eye.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, and the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.</p>

<p>&nbsp;</p> <p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People congregate at a well on the southern edge of the desert. In a brutal drought, the vast majority of livestock have died. The nearest village used to be spotted with grass huts along the horizon, but these have been taken apart to feed cattle.</span></p>

<p>This film captures the backbreaking process of packing and burning lime kilns, offering a look at a trade that is being pushed out by industrialization.</p>

<div class="bWpjlr m8n62o-0"> <div class="gMVtla m8n62o-2"> <div class="jfqruF zt30or-0"> <div class="css-13pmxen"> <div class="css-5i4b3s"> <div class="css-1i9v584"> <div class="quill"> <div class="ql-container ql-disabled ql-snow"> <div class="ql-editor"> <p>An unsanctioned observation of [redacted]&rsquo;s largest oil refinery, processing 440,000 barrels of crude oil a day. By night, the complex becomes a heaving edifice of flame and fog. We observe its operation from afar as the inferno slowly engulfs the frame, accompanied by an original hypnotic soundscape by UK club experimentalist Loraine James. A vision of industrial desolation in which dread turns to awe.</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="bWpjlr m8n62o-0"> <div class="gMVtla m8n62o-2"> <div class="css-0"> <div class="css-175av2d">&nbsp;</div> </div> </div> </div>

<p>A journey across the former coalfields of Las Animas County in Southeastern Colorado. In the early 1900s the region witnessed one of the bloodiest labor uprisings in U.S. history known as the Coalfield War. The conflict culminated in the Ludlow Massacre where 21 strikers and their families were murdered by the National Guard and CF&amp;I pinkertons. After the decline of mining in the area, most former extraction sites were gradually converted into wilderness areas or flooded. It is believed that the coal fires from that era still burn somewhere deep below the landscape. &mdash;Matt Feldman</p>

<p>Minimalist frontiers proliferate from acquisition. Larping utopia, shedding skins, forging new luxury amidst shards of past lives. Embracing shadows, sculpting stagnant futures in the flicker of ancient flames.</p>

<p>An exploration into the relationship between music and sound consisting of interviews with Dr. John Drumheller.</p>

<p>Malcolm Le Grice&#39;s Berlin Horse (1970) is reimagined for a time of AI-enabled editing software and digital-analogue hybridity. Looping and phasing in Le Grice&rsquo;s film are replaced with a concern for masking and speed.</p>

<p>An observational documentary following Brigitte Lochhead, one of the few female chainsaw carvers working in the professional circuit.</p>

<p>The self-portrait. The sacred icon. The incarnation. 16th-century Europe is at war with itself over questions of faith and form. Counter-Reformation observes these trends and tribulations, but observation soon gives way to self-reflection in this deeply personal 16mm meditation on religion and the moving image.</p>

<p>After an eagle fell from the sky into the back of a man&rsquo;s pickup truck, the man, his dog, and the eagle all died. Their deaths are diffracted through the memories of the man&rsquo;s sister, over the well in the basement of their family home, and between the pine-slatted walls of the local eagle rehabilitation centre.</p>

<p>An account of a scientist trying to teach machines how to infer depth from two-dimensional pictures. A parable of a prince trying to resurrect his lover by fashioning a chair out of his lover&rsquo;s things. A question about the need for human beings, and the things they are in need of.</p>

<p>This work offers visual and literal poetry&mdash;poetry that cannot be reconciled with the brutality of history, with the death of a poet and the sleep of reason. Inescapable nightmares of the past are reflected in the present.</p>

<p>An artist collects and processes images of their mother&rsquo;s restaurant kitchen and their grandmother&rsquo;s daily life, reanimating memory and embodied knowledge through various image formats: 35mm portraits on oscillating lenticular prints, laserjet prints of 35mm film transferred onto 16mm loops, and photographic prints on polystyrene. An intergenerational critique unfolds.</p>

<p>Let&#39;s take a dark room. Celeste Rojas Mugica and her father Lucho lock themselves in it to develop images of the past. This past is Chile during the Pinochet years. Lucho Rojas was a photographer there but also an opponent of the regime, and therefore clandestine. His life oscillated between taking photos of the present and making himself invisible &ndash; between light and shadow. &quot;The exercise consisted of, and still consists of: closing your eyes and imagining a place&quot;: the method and discipline of the clandestine. This sentence, the first in the dialogue between father and daughter that constitutes the framework of Une sombra oscilante , also formulates the theoretical hypothesis of the film: considering the image not from the point of view of the visible object, but from the faculty of imagination. In this singular dark room, development is no longer a solitary technical operation of revelation, but a poetic and political process of imagination for two. Developing the image means describing it not to exhaust its meaning but to flush out its parts of shadow, uncertainty, and therefore power. It is to extend it through words to imagine the story of the past, or to do it in one&#39;s head, with one&#39;s eyes closed, to project a future. The game is serious, but also very joyful: plastic inventions and ideas follow one another at an astonishing speed, all punctuated by an editing that combines freedom and rigor as rarely before. Brilliant and seductive, Una sombra oscilante profoundly renews the filmic approach to the photographic archive by inventing a cinematographic form that seems to be born from the very process of creating images &ndash; taking, developing. A dark chamber music, with four hands and two voices, draws the spectator into a captivating oscillation between the possible and the real, between what has been and what could have been, what is and what could be. In our dark times, here is a film that projects a light that is all the more joyful as it is intermittent &ndash; ​​it does not forget the shadow from which it comes.</p>

<p>This film moves across the emotional landscape of memory, as the filmmaker responds to the documentaries, notes, sketches, and photographs left behind by her father. As she reflects on her present as a student of film, she begins to see both documentary and her father anew. A silent conversation of images and emotions emerges.</p>

<p>An experimental documentary exploring family and memory &ndash; how we record our personal history versus how we live it &ndash; through the director&#39;s interactions with his grandfather who has Alzheimer&#39;s.</p>

<p>A diaristic exploration of masculinity after experiencing a schizophrenic breakdown. Static memories recur and dissolve in a search for understanding and quiet liberation.</p>

<p>A dialogue with ghosts.</p>

<p>A little vid that is about a dead dog, identity, and spirituality as processed thru the intangibility of the digital world.</p>

<p>A haunting exploration of familial bonds, intergenerational memory, and the enduring impact of shared narratives. Filmmaker Kamila Kuc steps into the emotional stream of inherited family history as the lines between documentary, testimony, and fiction blur. She performs acts of bearing witness not just for herself but also on behalf of her grandmother. Together, they testify to their experiences and the reverberations these stories have over time. I Was There is a palimpsest - a layered tapestry where past and present intertwine in the intimate process of activating memory and vulnerability as forms of resistance. It honors the testimonial object inherited from ancestors and the living connection that binds generations in the shared pursuit of justice and healing.</p>

<p>In the summer of 2023, the government of Jiujiang launched the Gan Tang Lake Cleansing Project. Nearby in Gan Tang Park, a boy wakes up in the rain.</p>

<p>The power is in your hands. An associative meditation stitched together from my last 10 years of iPhone videos.</p>

<p>Obsessed with forgiveness, filmmaker Abigail Holland builds a self portrait through men and objects they left behind.</p>

<p>This analogue short film explores the thoughts and feelings the protagonist experiences while looking at the squares painted onto a wall outside her therapist&lsquo;s window.</p>

<p>Apitherapy, or the use of honey bee products as medicine, can be traced back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and China. The use of honey dates back 4,000 years, it is documented in cave paintings, ancient Egyptian pottery and in numerous religious texts including the Vedas and the Bible. The Greek physician Hippocrates, known as the &ldquo;father of medicine,&rdquo; used bee venom to treat joint pain and arthritis. Several years ago I began experiencing chronic health issues that led me down a winding road of healing modalities from allopathic to holistic to straight up fringe. When these healing modalities failed, I began experimenting with live bee venom therapy (BVT) which, to my surprise, was instrumental in restoring my health.</p>

<p>Three generations of women, whose lived experience of migration is fundamentally different yet inextricably intertwined. What has been passed down from one to another is what connects them, but also precisely what sets them apart. With warm sincerity, this associative exploration of identity and memory interweaves family photographs, deep conversations, literary texts and playful performativity.</p>

<p>LANDFORMS unearths the physical remains of past and future geological strata. The film explores two landscapes, an industrial rock quarry turned recreational fossil hunting park, in which 380-million-year-old fossils were discovered beneath the rocks where once flowed a shallow sea, and a public waterway whose shore is dispersed with brightly colored fragments of consumer waste in the form of microplastics. Both landscapes reveal a process of digging and gathering, of collecting evidence of earth&rsquo;s pre-historic past, or intervening in humanity&rsquo;s toxic futures. The forms, of ancient sea creatures and broken plastic, mesh and intertwine into a meditation on deep time and a reflection on extinction.</p>

<p>An examination of the duality of glass as both an artistic expression and a scientific matter, as seen through the lens of the Littleton family of Western North Carolina.</p>

<p>A feeling of roaming, gnawing hunger. The knife&#39;s edge between decay and growth; the fertile potential for total destruction.</p>

<p>A frantic gaze runs through the convulsed Mexico City, a colossal metropolis sustained by the myth of miscegenation and other colonial violence. Past and present weave a flurry of images; fragmented memories of this territory.</p>

<p>The mechanical production of the camera is articulated through the mechanics of the body. This choreographic journey of a film strip overlays the physicality of the analog filmmaking process and the anatomy of the human body. This is a symbolic study of the mechanical reproduction of light and life through film. The film&#39;s final chapter is animating the dance notation motifs of the Leban technique, a unique language for recording the choreographic movement.</p>

<p>A televisual stream of consciousness assembled from archival footage set in the Black media explosion of the 1980s. A frenetic remix of public access television, video diaries, commercial mass media, and citizen journalism sequenced as short vignettes featuring musical and poetic performance, documentation of state violence, political theater and expressions of Black love. &mdash;Alexis McCrimmon</p>

<p>Homelanding as a verb: I jump on a trampoline in front of a Western backdrop of American military planes. Trying to get home, I get let down again and again.</p>

<p>A meditation upon architect, artist, and activist Ronald Rael&#39;s creation of SKYLOS, the world&#39;s largest 3D-printed earthen structure.</p>

<p>Through dancing, The Motherfucker&#39;s Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons&rsquo; torture tools while they dance. Bush also dances with a smirk across the screen while announcing a war that would destabilize a whole region. Everything becomes a gesture of dance: the torture, the hesitant political humor, and the war. Everyone becomes a dancer, the dictator and the oppressed performing a distorted version of this human act. Saddam dances, Bush dances, so what&#39;s left for the Iraqi people, except to join in?</p>

<p>An 86 year old jazz singer from North Carolina longs for excitement in her sleepy Connecticut home. As she strives to hold on to memories of an illustrious past, she learns that it&#39;s never too late to search for love.</p>

<p>&ldquo;Let The Red Moon Burn&rdquo; is a meditation on the ancient ritual of fire dancing in Bulgaria. The film creates a blur between the past and the present to evoke the ghosts in the landscape. The spirits of ancestors unearthed by the pulsation of music. All the sounds and images were recorded during the Zheravna Costume Festival, where thousands of people gather every summer to perform the traditional dance under the full moon.</p>

<p>A Texas brown tarantula navigates its changing landscape through touch and vibration in the grasslands of southern Colorado.</p>

<p>In the high desert of Eastern Oregon, a string of unsolved cattle mutilations unravels into a deeper portrait of a rural community grappling with myth, modernization, and the unknown.</p>

<p>An experimental oral history about Mount Lebanon in upstate New York. This project spans specific histories of the mountain by weaving the stories of five different people.</p>