Automat 2025

Elvert Bañares – Agas sa Amon Kalayo (Fuel to Our Fire)

Drawing from unused footages, B-rolls, and extensive behind-the-scenes documentation, Filipino filmmaker and multimedia artist Elvert Bañares crafts Agas sa Amon Kalayo'(Fuel to Our Fire) as a companion documentary to Ang Kalayo sa Gintung-an (A Flame in Our Midst). The film offers an introspective look into the creative process, exploring concepts, methods and motivations behind the making of Ang Kalayo sa Gintung-an. Beyond documenting production, it reflects on the role of filmmakers and artists in times of political repression, examining how fiction can reveal real atrocities and how art becomes a vital force urging people toward awareness, resistance and collective action.  

Elvert Bañares is a very independent filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist acting as his own cinematographer, production designer and editor. He started making underground experimental films and video art in 1993 and has moved on to narrative shorts and documentaries starting in 2008. He is an Urian Award Winner (2023), one of the most coveted film awards in the Philippines given by the Manunuri—the Philippines’ longest-running Film Critics’ Group; three time Cultural Center of the Philippines Award Winner for Independent Film; and winner of 13 international awards during the past three years including Kota Kinabalu International Film Festival; Encuentro Cinéfagos – Festival De Cinearte En La Frontera; Wasteland Film Festival; La Paz International Film Festival, Copenhagen Web Fest, Ojo Móvil Fest and Brunei Film Blitz.

Ang Kalayo sa Gintung-an screens on Sunday, October 19

Matthew Berka – Three Figures in Aftersong

Matthew Berka is an artist filmmaker and composer whose work has been shown in both gallery and cinema presentations. Previously he has screened and exhibited his films at Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Millennium Film Workshop, Close-Up Cinema, London, Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna, Italy, Antimatter [media art], Mackintosh Lane, London and ZÉRUÌ, London. He has been part of the cooperative the Artist Film Workshop (AFW), contributing to touring screening programs and workshops. He currently works as a Time-based media conservator at the Tate Gallery. He also helps program the artist-run gallery Mackintosh Lane based in East London.

Aftersong screens on Thursday, October 16

Daniel Brody – Kobot Talk

Daniel Brody is a multimedia artist who is interested in creating works that open up new psychological and spiritual spaces. Brody was born in New York City and is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art. He currently resides in upstate New York. His films have been installed in museums, won numerous awards and been screened at festivals around the world. Highlights include: screening on PBS, first place Ann Arbor Super 8 Festival, top Jurors Award at the Artist of the Mohawk Hudson Region and screenings at Athens Digital Arts Festivals 2024 “Techno(s)cene” and 2025 "Simulacra."

The Machine screens on Thursday, October 16

Gloria Chung – among trees, among stones and the city however

Gloria Chung lives and works in New York. Her films have been screened at festivals and galleries in the USA and internationally. 

Dark Light screens on Wednesday, October 22

Enzo Cillo

Enzo Cillo is an Italian new media artist interested in the mechanisms of perception and the idea of the image as a set of shapes and distances. His research explores the meaning of space within the image. His works attempt to deconstruct the visible field, emptying it from its meaning. Over time, he has had the opportunity to rethink not only the video itself but also the moment of projection as a spatial extension of the image. His works have been exhibited in various museums, and he has participated in international festivals such as Transient Visions, ECRA, nodoCCS and Experiments in Cinema. He currently lives and works in Rome.

Rectangle Boundary screens on Friday, October 17

Lauren Marie Dake – Making Films

Lauren Marie Dake is an experimental filmmaker and educator from Seattle. Her practice centres on notions of escape, chaos, the uncanny and the ethereal. She is fascinated with the world-building potential of handmade and cameraless cinema and experiments with direct animation onto 16mm films, where she engages in an ongoing attempt to create new realities within the dimension of the frame. Lauren’s films have recently screened at the Grrl Haus Cinema Best of 2024 Festival in Cambridge MA, MicroActs Artist Film Screenings in London, International Avant-Garde Film Festival in New York and Boston Short Film Festival.

Split Horizon screens on Friday, October 24

Francisca Friedrich & Lena Deisenberger

Francisca Friedrich is an Austrian cinematographer and artist studying at the University of Arts Linz. She is scholarship winner of the Talent Academy Linz-Cannes 2024 and scholarship winner of extraordinary students at the University of Arts Linz 2024. As a director, her films have been shown at the Cannes Short Film Corner, Prix Ars Electronica and have been shown in competition at the Vienna Shorts Film Festival 2025. 

Lena Deisenberger is an Austrian director studying at the University of Arts Linz. Working on various film sets as a kids’ acting coach she had the chance to gain experience in the industry. In 2018 Lena created the video design for the opera SIMON at Musiktheater Linz. She has been part of Innsbruck Film 2023, was scholarship winner of the shortfilmlab LISFF and participant in the Talent Days VIS. Currently she is working on two fiction short films in post production.

HEAST screens on Thursday, October 16

Isabelle Hayeur – Snow Falls

Isabelle Hayeur is known for her photographs and her experimental videos. She has also realized public art commissions, several site-specific installations and photography books. Her work is situated within a critical approach to the environment, urban development and to social conditions. She has exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Tampa Museum of Art, Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art contemporain, Les Rencontres internationales de la photographie à Arles and in several festivals.

Holiday Out screens on Tuesday, October 21

Panu Johansson

Panu Johansson is a media artist and an experimental filmmaker from Finland. He works with moving image, photography and sound. His works have been exhibited in various festivals, exhibitions and microcinemas since 2000. Reoccurring themes in Johansson’s work are memories, landscape, the history of experimental film and cultural history. When working with moving image he prefers analogue film, though he is open to all materials. Johansson collects images and sounds eagerly and also likes to use “found footage” materials whenever possible. His works could be described with terms such as landscape film, diary film or personal film.

Wherever Street Piece screens on Saturday, October 18

Jeffrey Langille

Jeffrey Langille began filmmaking in the 1990s using Super 8, editing film by hand on his kitchen table. His practice has retained this connection to materiality, including work with tape loops, analog synthesizers and 16mm film. His interests include experimental electronic music, field recording and photography. He attended film school in the 1990s, and completed an MFA at Simon Fraser University in 2015. His work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally. After 25 years in Vancouver, he now lives on the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, in Dawson City, Yukon.

Lament screens on Tuesday, October 21

Christine Lucy Latimer

Christine Lucy Latimer is a lens-and-time-based media artist from Toronto/Tkaronto, on Treaty 13. Latimer’s work excavates the influence of capitalism and planned obsolescence on 20th-century moving image technologies. Repairing and resuscitating discarded film and tape elements in hybrid gestures, she orchestrates freak anachronistic dialogues between the photochemical, photoelectric and digital. Her work has been featured in hundreds of film festivals and gallery exhibitions across five continents.

Assets screens on Thursday, October 16

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an artist, filmmaker and writer whose work is grounded in experimental literature, the conceptual avant-garde and philosophy. Liu’s works are concerned with materiality in different contexts and eras, as well as its transformation, symbolism, decay and emotional resonance. For Liu, materiality includes both living and inanimate matter. Through film, poetry, painting, sculpture and other media, she reflects the light and darkness of the world she lives in. Her films have been shown at international festivals and museums, including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Image Forum, Japan, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Museum of Kyoto, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, among others. 

Excuse Me, Miss! screens on Saturday, October 18

Tian Liu

Tian Liu is a multimedia artist and filmmaker working between Los Angeles and Shanghai. Her practice spans video, installation, performance and photography, exploring memory, gender, intergenerational trauma and cultural displacement. Rooted in personal and familial histories, her works investigate silence, fragility and identity through unconventional narrative forms.

fú píng screens on Sunday, October 19

Penny McCann – A filmmaker and a toy bus

Canadian media artist Penny McCann’s body of work spans 30 years and encompasses both narrative and experimental films and video. Since 2000, she has been engaged in creating a body of experimental films that journeys through an abstract and poetic terrain, forming a sustained meditation on landscape, place and time. According to Cecilia Araneda in her essay “Penny McCann: Within the Unsaid, A Response to Land Lines (of time and place) in no particular order:” “McCann intervenes with our sense of the familiar with her use of hand-crafted analogue filmmaking approaches…purposefully setting it back into a kind of suspension that we immediately associate with the dream state of processing memories.” Her work has been exhibited extensively at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Ann Arbor Film Michigan), Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg (Germany), Ottawa Art Gallery, Cinémathèque Québecoise (Montreal) and Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa).

Buses don’t stop here anymore screens on Saturday, October 18

Billy Palumbo

Billy Palumbo is a filmmaker, educator and programmer in Oklahoma City. He is Visiting Professor of Film at Oklahoma City University, and the director of the Wide Open Experimental Film Festival.

Write Your Sunlight on My Skin screens on Saturday, October 18

Richard Reeves

Richard is a kinetic film scratcher, visual music maker, animated traveller of time and space, light sensitive, spinner of zoetropes, looper of loops and collector of projection bulbs for total enlightenment. He is best known for creating animations by drawing both sound and picture directly onto film and has produced award-winning films that have screened around the world.

Fusion screens on Sunday, October 19

Paul Tarragó – Super 8 (Processing) Adventures

Paul Tarragó is a filmmaker, using both video and celluloid, living in London. His work is a mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand. His films have shown widely on festival and gallery circuits (International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYUFF, EMAF, National Review of Live Art, Triangle France, Kino der Kunst) and include several award-winning experimental narratives, video installation, a collaborative feature, cinematic sketchbooks, moving image and live soundtrack performance work. 

Magic with small apparatus screens on Thursday, October 16

Lim Yen

Lim Yen is a Singapore-based storyteller with more than 10 years of experience in editing long and short-form fiction, non-fiction, reality, commercial, branded content, music videos and more. An alumnus of Cinemovement Lab VII Tokyo 2024 and the Apichatpong Creators Lab 2023 in Mexico, she believes in always finding alternative ways of telling stories and not conforming to the norm. Her short exits / entrances is her regaining autonomy in moving images. An unorthodox cathartic observation on life and language,

exits / entrances screens on Saturday, October 18