CineSalon Experimental Film Festival 2025

Online Programme

All Online Programmes are linked below and will be available until December 21st

CineSalon Online Artist in Focus: Darja Kazimira Zimina

CineSalon’s 2025 Online Artist in Focus is Darja Kazimira Zimina, one of the most refreshingly unique and bracingly visceral talents to have emerged in recent experimental cinema.  A director, artist and musician, they were born in Latvia and are currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia. They hold a Master of Spatial Arts and work across film, performance, sound and bodily practices. Their artistic practice delves into ritual, katabasis (symbolic descent) and the making of sacred space—both physically and psychically.

Using improvisation, multi-instrumental performance, and experimental body work, Zimina explores transformation and embodied thresholds between the visible and invisible. Zimina’s video and performance work often incorporates motifs of death, burial, taboo and metamorphosis—grounded in a personal mythology and expressed through abstract, non-linear languages of gesture and sound.

Their practice positions the body itself as site of ritual and the work as an act of erecting a sacred field or container for collective and individual transformation.

Read an interview with Darja Kazimira Zimina conducted by CineSalon to accompany this screening

Where the Forest Dreams (2025)

The Field of Death (2018)

Medea Forgives Jason (2021)

Ukrainian Folk Tale About the Murdered Sister (2021)

The Sun Omophagous and His Children (2023)

Fuck My Black Holes, They Are Bottomless (2024)

Uzdrawianie (Healing, 2024)

Another Man With a Sword, Don't Try to be Stronger Than My Death (2025)

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Re-Membering (Sophia Felumaz Santabarbara)

Coleoptera (Christie Lynn Blizard)

They Carry Terror Far And Wide (Kevin Casciani Nolan)

We All Disappear Slowly (Jesed Moreno)

Persephone (Jung-Ching Zhou)

Shapeless Variations (Francisco Rojas)

Re-Membering traces an inner journey rendered stunningly vivid through a mythically powerful use of body, landscape and object. Coleoptera charts a similarly dreamlike space - a quirkily operatic recreation of a dream that the artist had of turning into a beetle. It is the third video in a trilogy that explores extra-terrestrials, angels, transformation, and life after death. They Carry Terror Far and Wide and We All Disappear Slowly are both intensely immersive pieces that writhe at the threshold of imagery and abstraction, with fragments of pictures melting into pulsing coloured textures. Both films hint at a consuming darkness that is accentuated by their compellingly propulsive soundtracks. Persephone makes a strikingly personal use of techniques associated with the essay film to create a self-reflective work that takes the myth of Persephone, the queen of the underworld, as its foundational narrative in seeking to reenact the core theme of “mother-daughter separation. Shapeless Variations is a resounding celebration of the purest visual properties of cinema. A condensation of a handful of sunsets with various visual moods. The horizon is invisible, there’s no dividing line. A chance to meditate on the “speed” of water and the sea and also a more fluid kind of editing. 

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When Wisdom Speaks; Another Withering Spinal Cord & The Necessity of Purgation (David Matthew Johnson)

Khroma (Fermín Moreno Quintana)  

Smoke (Erica Schreiner)

� (Xamil Citna)

LOVE (Francesca Fini)

Monument (Jeremy Drummond)

A figure pushes through the amniotic fluid of whispers of centuries of faith without ever surfacing in When Wisdom Speaks; Another Withering Spinal Cord & The Necessity of Purgation, starkly minimal piece from David Matthew Johnson, a 2024 CineSalon Artist in Focus. Khroma imagines a dark anthological tale structured around the primary colours - blue, yellow and red - that also taps into the primary powers of cinema. Filmed with Erica Schreiner's characteristic VHS aesthetic which is at once lush and DIY, Smoke is a visceral exploration of heartbreak and healing, following the emotional journey of the artist grappling with the sudden end of a relationship. For the second year running, the anonymous project Xamil Citna provides CineSalon with one of the most truly radical films in its programme: �. � reconstructs the landscape of Ukraine through audiovisual abstraction, testifying to the 'catastrophe' entirely subsumed within war discourse. � is a fiction. The repetition compulsion of counter-representation that reawakens war trauma. Or, the intolerable obscenity of spectacles that remain silent about reality. What alternative is there? Tragically, the 'catastrophe' is inevitable. Nevertheless, the image-scape of Ukraine circulates ineffectually and endlessly. LOVE is on the brink of becoming the first video performance that is wholly created through the alchemy of artificial intelligence. A voracious hybrid entity, metamorphic and insatiable, arises, eager to consume new perceptions and recompose them into uncharted mythologies. Monument begins in ghostly abstraction and accumulates texture by texture into a meditative trance that is also a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. 

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Write Your Sunlight on My Skin (Billy Palumbo)

Half Halt (Sofia Theodore-Pierce)

Solstice Exercises (Tania Hernández González)

Does Spring Hide Its Joy (Célia Hay)

nearer to thee in a triptych (Matt Whitman)

Flowers for an Old Shrine (Long Pham)

Walking Dog (Xianyi Zhang)

Billy Palumbo's films engage in a constantly shifting and precarious sense of place, time, and feeling, alternately seeking dizzying uncertainty and uneasy serenity. In his Write Your Sunlight on My Skin, the elements collide to make serenity out of turmoil, and anxiety gives way to a new normal. Half Halt is the third in a series of shorts in which Sofia Theodore-Pierce explores the lived experience of epilepsy through experimental form. In horsemanship a half halt is a pulse on the rein to say, hey I’m still here, holding. It indicates something about to happen. A meditation on intimacy in times of offscreen emergency, both personal and political. Solstice Exercises takes Margaret Tait's poem Northerner as its starting point to reflect on the seasonal and emotional transition from winter to spring. While the poem searches for words to understand this fragile yet violent passage, the film uses images to communicate what cannot yet be seen. Does Spring Hide Its Joy is a trembling portrait of the ruins of the hydraulic tower in Birkenhead Docks, Liverpool, documenting the building’s state of transience. The experimental portrait accompanying Kali Malone's sound piece captures the movement of natural forces: wind, fire, water, featuring animals as they pass through and overcome a man-made skeleton of industry. nearer to thee in a triptych is a mysterious and elliptical work built of fragmented details suggestive of transformation and return. Or, in Matt Whitman's own words:

eyes set down

lots love for a locked door

the silhouettes are the same

but the faces have changed

you know I can’t go home this way

came here to say the same

Flowers for an Old Shrine tracks instants from the lives of an old man and old woman as they dissolve and disintegrate into light cracks and chemical abrasions on what Long Pahm aptly calls a "celluloid wandering". Walking Dog is a film about a woman who embarks on a quest to find her off-leash dog in a dystopian wasteland, only to discover that both she and the dog are transforming from domesticated beings into defiant strays. What begins with begins with a routine act - a walk through an industrial wasteland - spirals into a profound exploration of independence and constraint.

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Palimpsest 1: Now U see Us (Michael Alexander Morris)

Manifesto of Feeble and Bitter Love (Abinadi Meza)

A Poem (Vasilios Papaioannu)

All the Birds Crawl Out of Their Nests (Tommy Aashildrød)

Anomalies in a Landscape (Félix Caraballo)

Self Portrait (decomposed) (Cat Haines)

In My Head (Irina Tempea)

Vanishing Point (Hannu Nieminen)

Aerial (Aida Berisha)

Palimpsest 1: Now U see Us is a series of one reel diary films made up of improvised superimpositions. The mundane and the absurd aspects of contemporary life that overwrite one another: family trips and sleeping cats compete for attention with cryptid conferences and a live-streamed genocide. Captured in camera without editing on 8mm and blown up to 16mm. Manifesto of Feeble and Bitter Love is a more abstract perspective on reality - a cameraless experimental short inflected with sorrow in the face of contemporary crises. A lamentation field. Color and sound dissolve into unstable tones that drift and sink, haunted and unnamed. Film as elegy - a howl against devastation. A Poem explores the fleeting dreamscapes of reality. In an underground garage, a voice message becomes the testament of a love left in limbo, while fleeting images allude to the moment that led to it. In All the Birds Crawl Out of Their Nests musician, photographer, creator and magician Tommy Aashildrød casts a dark spell, unleashing an unsettling vision of nature in Autumn darkness. 

Anomalies in a Landsacpe is a film in four tableaux – four audivisual landscapes that unfold in all their strangeness. Spices, leaves and local seaweed reveal and imbue with their hues this film shot and developed on the very banks of the Magtogoek / St. Lawrence river in Canada. Self Portrait (Decomposed) is an exploration of the transsexual body through the practice of process cinema. This self-portrait was developed with a mint and hibiscus tea on the new moon, and left to rot in compost until the full moon. The process explores what it means to have a body that is both deeply abject and disposable, and one that is beautifully cared for and sublime. In My Head is an experimental first-person short film. It deals with the multiple sclerosis that has affected the filmmaker for over eight years: "Through my magnetic resonance images, my cervical slices and jerky sounds, everyday life unfolds. Life goes on. I'm fine, I'm not so fine." This film-diary is part mourning, part sweetness.

Vanishing Point is 1) a point at which receding parallel lines seem to meet when represented in linear perspective and 2) a point at which something disappears or ceases to exist. This film is a meditation on the vanishing of things, species, individuals and, maybe, the whole human race. It was created by chemically destroying and mutilating black and white super-8 film material. Springing from a childhood lullaby written by singer Lei Lowe’s parents, Aerial grapples with the most intimate kind of archeology – exploring the relationship between photographer and performer, observer and self. While navigating the volcanic terrain, she becomes characters that reflect and externalise her journey in an almost extraterrestrial world. Texture, contrast, and shadows create an abstract dialogue between the viewer and the film’s ethereal nature. An amorphous love-letter to cinema, which weaves in elements of horror, sci-fi and documentary.

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I’m Here Live, I’m Not a Human (Flâneuse du Mal)

All Windows Look Inward (i. fredericks)

WILLIAMBABE (Tianjiao Wang)

Before the Freeze, Final Cut (Tenley Eakin Raj)

The Blob (Mahda Purmehdi & Cesar Herrejon)

Winesploitation (Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz)  

REFUSE (Merch). does not seperate itself. (Stuart Geelon)

I’m Here Live, I’m Not a Human is a video exploring the modes of nonhuman embodiment and its emancipatory potentialities in the context of western anthropocentric humanist discourse. It's also hilariously relatable for anyone who has ever attended an online meeting. All Windows Look Inward foregrounds the intimacy of the process of projecting celluloid in a charged domestic setting, invoking memory, loss, grief, and PTSD using re-filmed abandoned 16mm home movies. WILLIAMBABE is is a tribute by Tianjiao Wang to the influential artist and mentor, William Pope.L, following his passing. It begins with a timelapse of a spathiphyllum plant, named WILLIAMBABE, purchased on the day of his death, symbolizing the quiet persistence of life and memory. It then transitions into a space shaped by two of Pope.L’s works evoking a haunting yet reflective atmosphere. Before the Freeze, Final Cut is a uniquely nightmarish take on a domestic incident. Escapism, in the form of exotic Maria Lus, leaves disaster in its path after visiting the home of the recently-divorced Jo Hess, poet and mom to young Rylie. In The Blob, birds look 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. In Winesploitation, a woman contemplates drunken memories as well as her friendships, agency, and Dionysian aspirations in this cross-genre short. Borderline trash meets docufiction as the protagonist recites her truth… or some version of it. REFUSE (Merch). does not seperate itself. is an exercise in textural exploration. Art and artist are inseparable and equally disposable. Solo performance for artist, refuse sack, chains and lubricant.

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Pictures of a Negative Chair (Magdalena Bermudez)

Ici loin / Here Afar (Ghada Sayegh)

Enxofre / Sulfur (Karen Akerman & Miguel Seabra Lopes)

Augmented (Raymond (Ray) Rea)

Ode to RG Springsteen (John Winn)

Forty-Five Seconds (Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty)

Snowfall (Dick Blau)

Pictures of a Negative Chair is 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’s things. And a question about the need for human beings, and the things they require. Following the route taken by Ghada Sayegh on her regular drive during Covid lockdown, Here Afar is an audiovisual essay that returns to images of a city, a sky, a route, shortly before or shortly after the end of the world. Sulfur begins with the concrete reality of the world and an inhospitable mineral landscape but transcends and challenges it, in a poetic and polyphonic evocation that is embodied through the footsteps, the voices and an almost playful game of encounters and disagreements between two children. Augmented analyzes the commonalities between medical augmentation and transgender alignment. In Raymond Rea's words: "At a time when we are under attack, we realize that we're frightening because we're the future." Ode to RG Springsteen is well described by critic Olaf Möller: "R.G. Springsteen was a fine director of low budget genre films, in particular Westerns. Excerpts from some of these films drift through mundane scenes of everyday life, filled with household chores and moments of leisure. A tribute to a little-appreciated master as well as an homage to cinema as the philosophical soundtrack of our life." Forty-Five Seconds takes a drive around Askeaton, County Limerick, and remarks on unusual activity in the skies. It is part of a body of work titled 'A Collection of Disarticulated Bones' which draws together places, stories and objects that all contain overlapping themes of colonialism, national identity, tourism and power struggles. Snowfall is a single shot film, part documentary and part performance - an ecstatic, funky, and amusing hommage to all the great snow scenes in mainstream movies.

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Proxy (Mahda Purmehdi)

Balancing Act (Federica Foglia)

"2nd Day & the End of the World" (Sara Koppel)

The Minchin Recovery Suite (Sandra Minchin)

Synovial (Natañia Colina)

We’re All Going to Make It (Paul O’Neill)

You’re Not Perfect (Mary O'Leary)

Sente (Myriam Bessette)

Repertoire of Death (Guadalupe Arellanes)

Proxy raids the toy room of vintage DIY technology to summon up a nightmare in which a man travels through space and time to fulfill the gruesome desires of figures residing in an unworldly dimension. Balancing Act is a self-portrait at the mirror, except there is neither a portrait nor a mirror. The film navigates the boundaries between what can and can't be told, through the remediation of a 1930 home movie, altered via hand-tinting and digital intervention. "2nd Day & the End of the World” is a 12 minute handrawn on paper animation, a Hyper-Family-Drama about processes of secession, post-traumatic attacks, tempting body conditions & powerless loneliness in a climate-catastropic universe. The Minchin Recovery Suite situates the body as both clinical site and aesthetic instrument, drawing on the visual language of pathology to trouble the boundaries between diagnosis, ornament, and endurance. Synovial places viewers in a viscous liquid, losing them only to the tunnel of rebirth. We Are All Going to Make It combines aesthetic bodybuilding communities, military vloggers, crytpofads and the colonial legacies of communications infrastructure to offer a playful critique of the techno-delusionism underpinning contemporary algorithmic culture. You’re Not Perfect embraces vivid body horror imagery in demonstrating how societal expectations can influence one’s identity and gaining a deeper understanding of how certain aspects of societal norms shape our lives. Sente reveals a phonography and a drawing filled with artifacts, amplified noises, and live analog processing, peering into the fringes of these fleeting moments. Repertoire of Death presents a lucid dream leading to a dance with Death. Photographed on 16mm, it blends found sounds with rarely heard music from the personal archives of Yma Sumac "Queen of Exotica" in order to blur the boundaries between past/present, dead/alive, and dream/waking.

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My Brother Jeremy (Luke De Brún)

hushes (Conchobhar Ó)

I Was Dancing (Jennifer Redmond)

Death by Passive Aggressive Interpretive Dance (Dylan Delaney)

Stranger than Paradise (Topp & Dubio)

The Green Man (Philip Spillane)

After the Swamp (Alparslan Çelik & Alper Çelik)

This programme opens with two atmospheric Irish horror films that invest heavily in the creepy intimate charge of retro video technology. In My Brother Jeremy, a child tells us about his beloved, yet strange older brother, Jeremy, who only comes out at night and loves to play hide and seek. In hushes, a woman viscerally experiences her all fears and anxieties in a mesh of time and place, as she struggles to comprehend both herself and the person closest to her. The deceptively breezy and catchy poetry film I Was Dancing considers the state of our humanity and casts a jaundiced eye on the future that may not be welcome. It asks such questions as how do we love? Is it a transactional thing or a practice? What kind of life does transactional love yield? Death by Passive Aggressive Interpretive Dance takes place in a land where interpretive dance is a religion and dancers must not commit blasphemy against the Dance Deity. It can be described as a modern silent film. Stranger Than Paradise questions our attempts to preserve an illusion of control.Two uniformed guards stand watch over an dysfunctional brick wall inexplicably erected in the middle of a forest. The initial peace and tranquility of nature is being disturbed from various angles. And sometimes, the real threat comes from within. The Green Man, usually found in architecture near windows or doors, is a mysterious figure covered in leaves and foliage. Here, the narrator lives between his technician job and otherworldly wilderness. Can he keep this up? What does the Greenman think? After the Swamp brings viewers into a mysterious ritual, enacted under the sign of Alejandro Jodorowsky.