20.10.2025 in 21:00. IN SILICO-1, Rodina, Big Hall

Description

Russian premiere

In the violent streets of Mexico City, Joel leads a double life fixing car engines by day and getting his hands dirty by night. Now, he must repair the toughest machine of all: his own shattered existence.

About the director:

Esteban Azuela
From hand drawing to complex transmedia pieces, Esteban Azuela (Mexico 1984) experiments with the narrative possibilities of visual art, in an atypical space between fiction, documentary and dialogue with other disciplines. His videos and animated shorts have been exhibited in venues as diverse as the Palais de Tokio, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage and the Central de Abastos market, while his collaborations as a VJ and sound act visualist include equally diverse artists such as Richard Devine, Los Viejos, Black Devil Disco Club, Tristan Arp, Nick Zinner and Lourdes Grobet.

Description

Russian premiere

A Different Goal is Marco Joubert’s first-ever foray into the realm of animation. Its images were created experimenting with Unity, a video game development software. Further elaborating and structuring the piece then took place through extensive sonic explorations. The work draws inspiration from an example given by philosopher David Chalmers, while trying to answer the following question: what would happen if intelligent machines started developing their own goals, different from those of humankind?

About the director:

Marco Joubert
Self-taught Canadian filmmaker and video artist with a background in architecture and visual arts. His audiovisual practice, characterized by formal rigor, lies at the crossroads of cinema, video art, poetry, and philosophy. Thematically, his work explores the specificity of the human condition: the implications of our capacity to think and reason; the gap between material comfort and basic needs; the difficulty of communication; and the ever-present awareness of mortality. His films create otherworldly realities that still resonate with common human experience. While pursuing an MFA at Concordia University (2022–2025), Joubert has been investigating how today’s technological ecosystem challenges our perceptions of humanness, as well as how innovative uses of audiovisual language can open new ways of thinking.

Description

World premiere

The story of Laika, the first dog in space. Dedicated to her 1957 flight aboard Sputnik-2, the film captures the Cold War atmosphere and the intense space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Blending rare archival footage with AI-generated imagery, it offers a perspective on a pivotal moment in history—not only as a scientific milestone but also as a profoundly human story of sacrifice, ambition, and moral complexity. Laika Will Never Return to Earth invites viewers to reflect on the cost of progress and the forgotten lives behind grand achievements.

About the director:

Timur Molchansky
Filmmaker. Born on 27 July 1991, in Kamskoye Ustye, Tatarstan. Graduated from the Kazan State Technological University in 2015. Worked in national television and several video production studios, primarily in motion design. His key project was creating the intro video for the opening ceremony of the Games of the Future 2024. With Timur’s debut film The Art Code, he became a participant and award-winner at several Russian festivals.

Description

Russian premiere

Four great minds. Four modern AIs. One surreal conversation. Artificial Alfred Hitchcock presents four of today’s most advanced language models, each inhabiting the voice of a historical genius:

• ChatGPT becomes Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher of rupture and fire;

• Claude channels Johann Sebastian Bach, divine architect of musical order;

• Gemini transforms into Ada Lovelace, prophet of computing;

• DeepSeek speaks as William Blake, mystic of the imagination.

About the director:

Sebastian Macchia
Electronics engineer with a background in film studies, uniquely positioned at the intersection of technology and creativity. With a strong focus on artificial intelligence, Sebastian has spent recent years pioneering AI in content creation. As the creator and driving force behind the YouTube channel Nobody & The Computer, he explores and expands the frontiers of digital storytelling through innovative AI applications.

Description

Russian premiere

The pace of technological progress in the physical world has stalled. We Made Telephones converts mid-20th century propaganda and advertising into a personal, intergenerational exploration of how the ‘world of atoms’ fell apart – and how it might yet recover.

About the director:

Ben Young
Filmmaker based in the North of England. He works as a producer, writer, and director across creative documentary, fiction, and experimental forms. He is a member of Biennale College and EAVE.

Description

Russian premiere

“She opened the door, crossed the threshold. She approached, timidly, surrendered to this strange language, still unaware she had an appointment with eternity.”

Claire Panaget

About the director:

Anaïs Ibert
“I was born in Basse Normandie in France in 1986. In 2005 I had my High school diploma – Film Study to the Experimental College and High school of Hérouville-Saint-Claire. I currently live and work in Paris. In 2008 I co-directed ibü, with Victor De la Heras, a traditional object animation short film. In 2015 I directed Malagueña, shot on 16mm and super 8. This movie is an exploration into fiction; through it, I try to create a new cinematic language freed from traditional narrative rules, like a collage. In 2024, I directed Ostatenham, my first film produced by a production company. I experimented with a more traditional form of storytelling. Likewise I make collages from few years cutting and gluing newspaper on wood support. I am also member of artist-run film laboratory l’Abominable / Navire Argo from 2014.” Malagueña competed in the In Silico programme of the 26th Message to Man IFF, while Ostatenham was featured in the Multiverse section of the Festival’s 34th edition.

Description

About the director:

Nikita Spiridonov
Artist, composer, curator, and founder of the u/n multitude collective. In the context of the artistic practice of u/n multitude, he explored the political dimension of sound, creating performances and political scores. As a video artist, Spiridonov continues to take historical events as a starting point and investigates the difficulties of memory work along with the ways of remembering. Spiridonov is a participant of numerous exhibitions, including: Orchestras (Solyanka Gallery, Moscow, 2016), Notes for Tomorrow (diverse cities, 2021-2025), Limits of visibility (CCA Winzavod, Moscow, 2025). He participated in the In Silico competition of Message to Man IFF with Volga Song (2020), Dots, Lines and Zigzag (2022) and Meat Grinder 2 (2024). He was a jury member of the In Silico competition in 2023.

Description

Russian premiere

“The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here”. Abraham Lincoln, 1863. In 1939, a second unit with a double and extras filmed scenes for the Hollywood classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in the Lincoln Memorial. The succession of the sorted-out plan sequences undermines the usual cinematic narration; the plot does not progress here. The neoclassical architecture is merely the setting for a recurring ritual: The inconspicuous protagonist is lost between the pillars of the hall. He often pauses in the face of the monumental Lincoln, as if he himself were freezing into a sculpture.

About the director:

Christoph Girardet
Born in 1966, he is a German video artist and filmmaker. Girardet makes both the accidentally found and the extensively researched found footage from the archives of film history the subject of his art. Montage, omissions, and repetitions reveal the underlying structures and inner mechanisms of cinematic reality. Beyond this analysis of material and its clichés, his work engages with a melancholic sense of absence, creating an individual pictorial world. Girardet’s films were twice showcased in the In Silico competition: Personne (2016) and It Was Still Her Face (2017).

Description

He does not remember much from that time. Things have faded, like the color of a painting after too much light. The only thing that bothers him is this music. It keeps popping up… He thinks he forgot what it meant. All he knows, for sure, is that he cannot get it out of his head.

About the director:

Andrea Gatopoulos
Italian film producer and director, member of the European Film Academy, and alumnus of Berlinale Talents and the Locarno Spring Academy. He trained in workshops led by Werner Herzog, Radu Jude, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Andrea Gatopoulos’s films have been screened at more than 100 festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Rotterdam, Rome, and Camerimage. He is a tutor at the Nouvelle Bug residency (Italy), focused on machinima films, including those created with artificial intelligence. At the 34th Message to Man IFF, he served as tutor for the Dziga Vertov Neural Network Film Lab, and had previously taken part in the In Silico competition as a producer.

Description

Russian premiere

A horse reflects on memory, disturbing the daily routines of citizens in Los Santos, San Andreas, during the press release for his new book “Someone to Steal Horses With.”

About the director:

Dylan Pailes-Friedman
Filmmaker and multimedia artist, born and raised in New York City and currently based in Glasgow, Scotland. He graduated magna cum laude from Pratt Institute in 2017 with a BFA in Film/Video. His short films explore themes of intimacy, mental health, and collective memory, and have screened at numerous film festivals worldwide.