21.10.2026 at 21:00. Experimental Competition In Silico 3: The Sea Ate the Chair, The Future Is Virtual, Can GPT Dream of a Pink Elephant?, RAW, De Natura Tenebrarum / About the Nature of Darkness, Two Pids, I Don’t Repeat It Twice, Rodina, Big Hall

Description

RAW. A visual-sonic ritual.
A manifesto of vulnerability.
Raw material whose hidden interior is looking for a way to be spoken.The film is an inquiry into bodily memory and the impossibility of resonance.

Breathe in — as if lifting layers of earth.
If your throat is clenched — let the body talk.
Breathe out — let a feeling take on flesh.
You are here. You sound. You breathe.

About the director:

Irina Drozdova-Schastlivtseva

Interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Born in Kostanay, Kazakhstan, in 1978. A graduate in design from the Department of Architecture and Arts at Novgorod State University, she has lived and worked in St. Petersburg since 1998. Co-founder of the Psydoc Film collective. On her projects she is credited as director, production designer, and costume designer.

Anton Drozdov-Schastlivtsev

Cinematographer and director. Born in Leningrad in 1981. A St. Petersburg State University of Film and Television graduate in cinematography, he has shot 15 feature films. Co-founder and director of the Psydoc Film collective. On his projects he is credited as director and cinematographer.

Description

Russian premiere

Luca, a perpetually unemployed man-boy, is depressed and enraged with the world. He despises his flesh body and believes he is part of a revolution that will bring all of humanity into a pure virtual existence. When Luca is forced to see Michael, a caseworker from an unemployment centre, he slowly opens up. Over the course of their conversations, we come to understand that behind his nihilism and hopelessness is a desire for human connection. Embracing an Internet ugly core aesthetic, The Future is Virtual uses AI filmmaking tools to not simply represent Luca’s subjective view, but also to critique the technology itself and those who control it.

About the director:

Michael Mackenzie

Australian filmmaker, multi-disciplinary artist, and scholar based in China. His work explores how the internet shapes identity, belonging, and our perceptions of reality, spanning film, painting, and video art. He has exhibited across Australia, Europe, and Asia. He currently teaches at the Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University’s Academy of Film and Creative Technology.

Description

Russian premiere

After the world premiere of his film ‘Being John Smith’ at the Toronto International Film Festival, an unexpected encounter in a hotel elevator leads the filmmaker to question the nature of reality.

About the director:

John Smith

Director and artist. Born in 1952 in Walthamstow, London. He studied at the North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. Since 1972, Smith has made more than 60 films, videos, and installations, shown in independent cinemas, art galleries, museums, and on television around the world. In 2012, John Smith attended Message to Man as a jury member for the In Silico experimental film competition, and presented a retrospective of his work. Since then, Smith has participated in the Festival on several occasions. This year, two of his films have been included in the Prompted Reality special programme.

Description

Russian premiere

The film stages quasi-clinical encounters between aphantasic individuals and an AI system, then re-films digital footage on 8mm to return synthetic vision to material fragility.

Approximately 4% of the population has aphantasia, an inability to form visual images in the mind’s eye. They understand what an elephant is, what pink is, yet see nothing when they close their eyes. The film places this absence of inner images in dialogue with an AI system that produces images excessively, asking whether synthetic vision and human non-vision might reveal each other.

About the director:

Liu Guangli

Artist and filmmaker. His work examines image politics, memory, technology, and the fragile line between documentary, simulated, and speculative cinema. His films and installations often use low-resolution media, game engines, 3D reconstruction, machine vision, and archival structures to question how images are produced, believed, and politically activated. His work has been shown internationally in film festivals, museums, and art institutions, including Ars Electronica, Le Fresnoy — National Studio for Contemporary Arts, M+ in Hong Kong, Guangdong Museum of Art, and elsewhere. He lives and works in France.

Description

What year is it now? And what time is it? Why do I understand time?

On a walk by the sea I find myself asking questions that cannot be answered and cannot be left unasked.

About the director:

Dasha Iskrenko 

Director of non-fiction film. She is a graduate of the St. Petersburg State University of Film and Television. Her work explores time, loss, feeling, the inner and outer worlds of the human being, and the ties between them. Dasha Iskrenko’s films are born of a gaze held on everyday life, and of the urge to find hidden meanings in what is familiar.

Description

Russian premiere

The moral self-assurance of fairy tales is lost in the depths of the dark forest haunted by Manuel Knapp with his projection and recording equipment. He casts filigree white light, the strange calligraphic signals of a digital abstraction, into the existential darkness of a wintry forest landscape under a new moon; and by flashing a kind of writing on branches and tree trunks, he creates a cryptic choreography, a game of concealing and revealing.

– Stefan Grissemann

About the director

Manuel Knapp

Artist, musician, and filmmaker. Born in 1978. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2002) and computer music and electroacoustic media at the Institute for Composition and Electroacoustics of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (2005). In 2007, he won the Diagonale prize for Best Experimental Film; in 2008 he made the festival’s trailer. He has won accolades at, and taken part in, numerous film festivals, including Ann Arbor, Lausanne, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Osnabrück, Leeds, the Viennale, Mexico City, and Gothenburg. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held in leading art spaces in Austria and Czechia. In Russia, Manuel Knapp’s work has been shown in a group exhibition in Murmansk.

Description

Russian premiere

Each new attempt to remember becomes a re-recording: images pile up, distorting and erasing the original recollection. The film is built on a metaphor of memory as analogue tape, worn down irreversibly with every playing. It explores the blurred line between an event and the interpretations that follow, turning personal memories into a space of uncertainty.

About the director:

Ksusha Kernosenko

Filmmaker. A graduate of Artur Aristakisyan’s workshop at the St. Petersburg School of New Cinema, she lives in St. Petersburg. Her work addresses memory and the past, seeking a balance between the sensory and the conceptual.