25.10.2025 at 17:30. International Competition Winners 2 (2025), Dom Kino

Description

Russian premiere

The electronic monitoring has transformed Tehran into a digital panopticon. But what happens when the roles are reversed and the focus is turned on the surveillants?

About the director:

Hesam Eslami
Tehran-based filmmaker, directing and producing documentaries for international television and cinema since 2013. He earned his BFA and MA in Cinema from the Tehran University of Art. His recent work focuses on the margins of Iranian society, including 20th Circuit Suspects (Hot Docs, 2017), The Marriage Project (Visions du Réel, 2020), and A Band of Dreamers and a Judge (IDFA, 2023).

Description

Russian premiere

It’s Christmas. Train stations are decorated in a glitzy glow, the times are festive…

A Docu Essay about tradition and resignation. How long does one have until considering oneself not only deviant, but sick? How long can each individual endure this state? How long can we all as community still endure?

A Capitalist Realism Questioning. A Hold On Christmas Diary.

About the director:

Nicolaas Schmidt
Filmmaker, video and concept artist based in Hamburg. He studied Fine Arts, Time-Based Media, and Visual Communication/Film at Hamburg University of Fine Arts. His works have been presented at international film festivals and art institutions. Schmidt’s Sence+Innocence received the Jury Diploma of the In Silico competition in 2011.

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

Russian premiere

Graziano is the sole resident of a deserted mountain village. With his blind dog as his loyal companion, Graziano roams the empty streets, serenades in the abandoned church, and embarks on a quest to reunite with his long-lost love, whose name has faded from his memory. A melancholic portrait of a hermit dwelling in the echoing well of his daydream.

About the director:

Jozefien Van der Aelst
Film director and writer based in Berlin and Antwerp. In her hybrid worlds, often on the brink of collapse, she explores the relationship between humans and nature, touching on themes such as emergence, spatial narrativity, cartography, traditions, landscape, grassroots religion, catastrophe, and ecology. She holds an MA in Philosophy and a BA in Theatre, Film & Literature Studies, and later studied directing at the German Film and Television Academy (dffb) in Berlin.