21.10.2026 at 19:00. Experimental Competition In Silico 1 (repeat): Evening Light, Body, Remember…, Somnambula, Hei Dong Dong / Dark Channel, Succession, Polyphem, Textus Connectivus, L’uomo più bello del mondo / The Most Beautiful Man in the World, Rodina, Big Hall

Description

World premiere

From a dream a dancer is born — the living embodiment of thunder. His journey unfolds in the space between dream and reality, where movement releases a force of nature and the body becomes nature’s voice.

Somnambula is a short film created as part of a collaboration between the Context. Diana Vishneva contemporary choreography festival and the NOIR Films team. During the festival’s 14th season, directors Maxim Yeruzhenets and Marina Kirakosyan look behind the scenes, capturing moments that usually remain hidden from the audience.

About the directors:

Maxim Eruzhenets, Marina Kirakosyan

NOIR Films is the directing duo of Maxim Eruzhenets and Marina Kirakosyan. They bring more than 15 years’ experience in contemporary dance, theatre, sculpture and music. Over the past 12 years they have made more than 30 documentary and short films, and have screened and won prizes at festivals in Russia, Paris, and Argentina. They work closely with contemporary composers and with Dom Radio. They have taken part in the Message to Man IFF twice: in 2020, Waltz was featured in the In Silico experimental film competition, and in 2025, Reversed Footsteps competed in the international live-action shorts section. Their favoured subjects are childhood, dreams, enchantment, the study of bodily movement and the transformation of a character.

Description

Russian premiere

The household plastic tarpaulin so widely used in cities becomes a source of distortions in space and time, as if the laws of quantum mechanics had been transferred to the macroscopic world. Places far apart are gathered into a single field that lives by its own paradoxical rules. We find ourselves inside a cinematic arabesque, in which shots join into a continuous, intricate ornament unfolding in time.

About the director:

Mikhail Basov

Video artist and filmmaker. Born in 1977 in Taganrog. Participant and award-winner at numerous international exhibitions and festivals of film and video art, including the WRO Media Art Biennale, Kasseler Dokfest, Japan Media Arts Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, São Paulo International Short Film Festival, Doker, and the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, among others. A long-standing friend of Message to Man, he served as a jury member in 2020 and as a participant in the In Silico Experimental Film Сompetition in 2018 and 2022. In 2025, he presented a retrospective of his work and gave a masterclass.

Description

Russian premiere

LED lights – neon lights – high rise buildings – avenues – digital billboards – office blocks – illuminated street signs – plazas – streets – street art – slap stickers – graffiti – alleyways – mirrors and reflections – Seoul

About the director:

David Anthony Sant

Description

Russian premiere

POLYPHEM is the second chapter in a series of short experimental landscape films that reinterpret the stages of the journey of Homer‘s Odyssey and set them in the context of the anthropocene. Filmed in the only active bauxite tailings pond in Germany, POLYPHEM reimagines the myth of Polyphemus from Homer’s Odyssey within a contemporary landscape scarred by red mud, industrial aluminium waste.

About the director:

Ilaria Di Carlo

Italian visual artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art in London and at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome. She subsequently studied filmmaking at the SAE Institute of Berlin. Her visually driven films explore the role of myth and poetry as a reflection on contemporary life, while focusing on the themes of journey and identity in relation to spaces, landscapes, and architecture. Her films have been screened at numerous international film festivals including Torino Film Festival, Festival of New Cinema Montreal, and Cork Film Festival, receiving multiple awards such as Best Short Film at Torino Film Festival and the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her work has been presented in various museums, exhibitions, and institutions such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon, Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and Fundación Proa Buenos Aires among others.

Description

One member of the family is not remembered – only 25 photos of the uncle who died of AIDSremain. His nephew asks both his mother, who looks back via the pictures, and AI tool Google Vision API, which reads the photo data statistically. Memory cultures.

About the director:

Paolo Baiguera

Filmmaker. Born in 1998. He has worked on a range of projects for Sky, Rai, Kon-Tiki Film, Indigo Film, ANG Film, and Ring Film. He collaborated with Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis on Heads or Tails? (2025), selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. His debut short film, The Lost Child, premiered at the 2025 Venice International Film Critics’ Week where it received a special mention.

Description

World premiere

6 October 2025

in the evening, the impossible happened

A white horse walked into a prison

looked into the cells,

came out into the light

About the director:

Roman Mikhailov

Born in Riga in 1978. Mathematician, writer, theatre and film director. Author of ten films, eight books and more than a dozen stage productions. Laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize.

Description

Russian premiere

The lens of the camera is a key to the senses and the sensual. The close-up renders tactility inviting touch, the obscured image tests the boundaries of the frame beckoning one to enter. But as all the senses are awakened, the lens of the projector relays a distance that cannot be collapsed.

– Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss

About the director:

Matthew Berka

Artist, filmmaker, and composer. Born in Australia. His work crosses the boundaries of the film-essay and poetic cinema. Often constructed through the connective tissue of disparate sounds and images, his films find patterns of meaning through association and feeling. Defying a materialist view of the world, they offer a speculative vision of matter. Berka’s previous work has screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Melbourne IFF, Onion City Experimental Film Festival in Chicago, and Antimatter [Media Art] in Victoria, Canada, and has been shown at the London galleries Mackintosh Lane and ZÉRUÌ. Matthew Berka also works as a time-based media conservator at Tate and contributing programmer at Mackintosh Lane.

Description

Russian premiere

On a rainy day, ripples tremble in a culvert.

About the director:

Yu Zhe

Filmmaker. Born in 1988, he lives in Shijiazhuang, China. His short films Hot Hunt Heat (2010) and Wind Blows the Greenhouse (2017) have screened at international festivals. In 2026 he released his first feature film titled Go South.