10 feature films and 11 short films on past, present, and future liberations. As every year, the Competition reflects the variety of demands and experiences from the past and how they resonate in the present, involving perspectives from vastly different countries and archives of multiple kinds.
Among the films in competition, Videoheaven is the title of the film by filmmaker and artist Alex Ross Perry, having its Italian premiere at Archivio Aperto in collaboration with Fondazione Prada and the Museo del Cinema in Turin. Narrated by Maya Hawke and edited from hundreds of sources—ranging from TV commercials to blockbusters—it tells the story of video rental stores, a glorious, contradictory, innovative, and at times ambiguous industry that had an undeniably disruptive impact on American film culture.
Partition by Diana Allan, also in its Italian premiere, combines archival footage from the time of the British occupation of Palestine with audio recordings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, reinterpreting the past and the colonial gaze that still influences the present.
Holofiction by Michal Kosakowski (2025, 102’, Poland/Germany) is an experimental film exploring the visual representation of the Shoah through a montage of thousands of excerpts from fictional films and TV series produced from 1938 to the present. Drawing from a vast archive of over 3,000 narrative works, the film critically analyzes how the imagery of the Shoah has been codified and reproduced in cinema over the decades.
Also premiering in Italy is The Big Chief (Wielki Szef) by Tomasz Wolski (2025, 85’, Poland), which tells the story of a little-known but fascinating historical figure—The Big Chief—against the backdrop of the dramatic events of 20th-century Europe. Another Italian premiere is John Lilly And The Earth Coincidence Control Office by Michael Almereyda & Courtney Stephens (2025, 85’, USA), a film exploring the mysteries of consciousness and communication through the figure of neurophysiologist and psychonaut John C. Lilly, a bold experimenter with dolphins and psychedelics whose research helped bring dolphins and whales into the 20th-century collective imagination.