International Competition

7 feature films and 9 short films, including 13 Italian premieres. The International Competition selection of Archivio Aperto Festival delves into the private archives of families, filmmakers and activists, while exploring public archives and stories that have long remained untold, offering a contemporary perspective on society and the complexities of the world we are living through. Materials and memories from the past are revisited through the eyes of today’s artists and filmmakers, who challenge established narratives and bring the shadows of the last century back from oblivion.

Discover the official jury

Feature-length

BENITA

Alan Berliner

Following the suicide of his friend and filmmaker Benita Raphan, Alan Berliner reconstructs her life and work through her personal archive, exploring the relationship between mental health and creativity.

Cara a Cara

Federico Veiroj

A fiction filmmaker searches inside his own archival footage to understand who he is, where he comes from and his life purpose.

Az Zeeb

Rafael Guendelman

After discovering his grandmother’s forgotten Super 8 reels, a filmmaker retraces his family history across Chile, Palestine, and Israel.

Auber 89

Giuseppe Schillaci

One hundred hours of found footage from the archives of Aubervilliers Town Council. The footage, shot in the 1980s during an ambitious urban regeneration project, depicts a neighbourhood striving to improve its living conditions and envisage a better future.

The Clearing

Sabine Groenewegen

At the beginning of the 20th century, Dutch colonial forces transformed Sumatra’s rainforest into vast rubber plantations. The racial contradictions underpinning this world of slavery fueled a rebellious silence that would endure for generations.

Où vivre insiste

Aude Fourel

Aude Fourel films Monica Maurer and Cahide Ozel, two women and filmmakers from different backgrounds and generations, bound together by images. Weaving together their archives, the film portrays a community of women who seek a safe space in which to build a fragile memory that resists oblivion.

Pós-Processo Crime

Susana de Sousa Dias

In 2000, Susana de Sousa Dias made Criminal Case 141/53, telling the story of two nurses imprisoned during Portugal’s 48-year dictatorship. Twenty-five years later, the filmmaker returns to the film itself, questioning the way she worked with archival materials.

Short and medium-length

Forgotten Spaceman

Elham Ehsas

In 1988, Afghanistan sent its only astronaut into space, a journey that proved home can be farther than the stars.

Winter Blumen Garten

Sara Piñeros Cortés

Two women exchange cinematic letters that span the past and the present. Heidrun, a Viennese woman portrayed through archive footage, and Sara, a Colombian migrant who works at the Austrian Film Museum.

Intersecting Memory

Shayma’ Awawdeh

Childhood memory returns to days of the Second Intifada in Hebron, Palestine, where fear, siege, and death shaped every moment under occupation.

Last May in Theaters

Arief Budiman

The film tells the story of the struggles for democracy in Gwangju in 1980 and Jakarta in 1998, seen through the perspectives of two cinema ticketing staff.

Equal Dust

Jani Peltonen

NATO's nuclear exercise, a tracking shot through nocturnal Helsinki and the Finnish Eurovision Song Contest entries show what the end of the world looked like in the 1980s.

Greetings from the Secretariat

Ivan Ramljak

On a paradise island, not everything is as perfect as it seems. A crime film, created from photographs discovered in an abandoned police station, reveals what lies behind the warm sun and colorful attractions of one of Croatia’s most popular tourist destinations.

L’uomo più bello del mondo

Paolo Baiguera

A family taboo, a missing story. Using 25 photos and the cold readings of artificial intelligence against his mother’s warm memories, a nephew reconstructs the life of Michele, an uncle lost to AIDS and heroin in 1980s–90s Italy, exploring memory, the value of images, and what remains unspoken.

Also Resisters

Christina Danielle Bartson

Adapted from David E. McReynolds’ 1968 essay, Also Resisters uses Vietnam War archives to explore militarism and resistance across generations and borders.

Mix

Klaudia Szott

During the Cold War, students from the Global South came to study at Lodz Film School. Years later, Sylwia - born to a Polish mother and a Nigerian father - discovers traces of her own story in the films they made.