Open Frame Competition

Open Frame is the competitive section dedicated to short found-footage works created within universities, workshops, and international residency programmes. A selection of 11 short films, remarkable for their visual vocabulary, the richness of their narratives, and the many intriguingly singular ways in which these works inhabit the audiovisual form.

Making a film from archival materials is never simply a matter of artistic intention. It is a lengthy process, often carried out with limited resources, within an economy that leaves little room for experimentation. Yet working with archives also means giving something back to society: stories and fragments that institutional structures have often withheld from the public. As historian Marc Ferro argued, it is the task of those who write history to “give back to society the History that institutional apparatuses have taken away from it.” Perhaps, then, working with archives is not only about preserving memory, but about keeping it alive; allowing it to exist beyond the frameworks through which official history has sought to shape it.

The filmmakers brought together in Open Frame are not historians, but they share this impulse to revisit and rework the past. They take materials preserved in archives and, through their own gaze, make them resonate differently. Coming from a wide range of contexts – SATIS Marseille, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia Sicilia, Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, Cambridge Long Road College, ENSAD Limoges, IUAV Venezia, Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, Academy of Media Arts Cologne, EMJMD FilmMemory, and UnArchive Suoni e Visioni – they reassemble these images into new constellations, bringing to light possibilities that may have always been there, but were still waiting to be seen.

To celebrate found footage also means acknowledging the invisible networks of people, institutions, and professionals who preserve, catalogue, digitise, and make archives accessible. With its entry into the competitive programme, Open Frame takes on a new responsibility: to celebrate not only the artistic possibilities of found footage, but also the images, the people, and the labour that allow these films – and the stories they carry – to exist.

Curated by Enxhi Noni and Milana Tsakaieva.

Selection Committee: Enxhi Noni, Milana Tsakaieva, Vanessa Mangiavacca, Giulia Simi

Short and medium-length

Bingo

Sarah Ford

Overscans are debris ; images in the margins of our already obsolete Super 8 films. What do we do with the images that fall outside the frame? What do we do with our film waste?

Cacciatori d’uranio

Davide Palella

Planet Earth, year 2960 AD. A group of uranium hunters returns to the blue planet in search of the precious metal.

dogma.no3

Gabriele Armenise & Vito Polito

Government Expedition 2002 reaches an unexplored frozen continent. When the contingent falls apart, one explorer, driven by blind and obsessive faith, continues alone on the mission: to conquer water, the resource on which to found a new world.

I learn, get hurt, accept, strive, fight, love, cry and laugh

Chanmin Kim

One day, you asked me, “Are you living your life to the fullest?” Hearing this from someone I love gives me a strange, unexplainable feeling.

In the hands of time

Greta Bonnaud

As Alzheimer's slowly erases his memories, an elderly man revisits a Super 8 film from his childhood, where fleeting images of family holidays awaken long-buried sensations of warmth, wonder, and belonging.

Men 3eoni

Ruba Alsharki

A six-minute, eye-to-eye confrontation with the looted archives of militant Palestinian cinema.

MissingNo

Simona De Carlo

A little girl's childhood memories increasingly degrade until they become a shapeless mass of glitches and technological errors.

Notes pour un déjeuner sur l’herbe

Agnese Cappellazzo & Anna Candiani

An anthropology lecture describes a universal ritual that has connected people with nature for centuries: the picnic.

Ils disent que l’on rêve

Camille Detry

Some call me “the mule”, for the burden I carry. To the lab, I'm just BEXT-497-0X. Once, I was Oli. My full name, I no longer remember.

E anche questa mattina

Claudia Basteri

Through personal accounts and archive material, Still this morning explores the invisible traces of the slow violence perpetrated by the chemical industry in the Apuan region.

Altrimenti inventa

Meriam Jarboua

Otherwise Invent addresses the absence in the collective visual imaginary of North African people who came in Italy before the 1990. Through playful research and experimentation within/with Italian archives, the film proposes a process of “reinventing” the missing archive, starting from my own family history and then expanding into a more collective dimension.