EXPERIMENTAL 2026

Àwọ̀ ojú ọ̀run (The Colour of the Sky)

Experimental | Duration 01:11:00 | Director | Judah Iyunade (Nigeria)

The search for truth behind a grandmother’s mysterious disappearance, the stories told to shield the innocence of childhood begin to unravel. A retracing of her final moments, exploring where myth and fate begin to converge. An ascent to a heaven, imaging the space between where spirits linger. As her family gathers, the sacred burial rites, a final act of guidance, a chance to move beyond the dream realm and into the spiritual realm.

Director Biography

Iyunade Judah is a Nigerian-born, Winnipeg-based artist & filmmaker whose practice traverses photography, film, and performance. Rooted in his Yoruba heritage, his work intricately weaves personal and collective memory, ancestral histories, and the evolving complexities of diasporic identity. Through a richly symbolic and often ritualistic visual language, Iyunade explores the tensions between presence and absence, tradition and transformation, crafting intimate meditations on the African diasporic experience.

Director Statement

Awo Oju Orun is a meditation on disappearance and return. It begins with a loss drawn from my family’s history. My grandmother vanished without explanation, leaving only silence behind. In the film, I invert this story. It is her niece who disappears, though her body is later found. She is the grandmother reborn, returning to relive the moment of her own vanishing while carrying fragments of her past life.
The film moves through the spaces between life and spirit, shaped by Yoruba understandings of continuity. In this worldview, death does not end presence. Burial rites become acts of transition, guiding the spirit from one realm into another. I was drawn to these rites not as cultural markers but as living gestures, where mourning becomes a passage, and memory folds into myth.
I wanted the film to feel suspended between worlds. Silence, stillness, and time open space for absence to be felt. Each image lingers as if caught between the visible and the unseen. The work does not seek resolution or closure. It asks the viewer to remain inside disappearance, to witness how the dead return through the living, how the past survives inside the present.
To follow the niece is to meet the grandmother again. To witness her burial is to stand at the threshold between worlds, where spirit circles back into being.

Crève-Coco : Bestiary of an Elsewhere

Experimental | Duration 51:27 | Directors | Alice Bachmann, Christophe Dos Santos (France)

Christophe dreams of an exotic adventure on the other side of the world, where he can finally reunite with Pingky, the orangutan he adopted online.

From the humid labyrinths of his mental jungle to postcard-perfect landscapes, everything seems staged for the tourist he embodies. In this fictitious, exotic elsewhere, the cages grow ever narrower.

The animal is an unwilling actor in this bitter masquerade: living beings become objects of consumption, exploited and photographed in theme parks.

The film becomes a bestiary, from the animal escaping the frame to the one growling off-screen. From the fantasized, inaccessible totem—the orangutan—to inflatable imitations, the animal is omnipresent, reflecting our futile attempts to break free from our own mental cages.

Christophe gradually fades away, as if enacting an exhaustion of anthropocentrism. He drifts through soundscapes, wandering spaces that do not belong to him, while the cinema audience watches the spectators at the zoo.

Documentary? Fiction? Rather a play on and mise en abyme of filmic material, this uncertain form investigates a protean reality as a system of resistance to the preconstructed mental patterns imposed by our consumer cultures.

Food consumption (of animals?!), consumption of entertainment and spectacle, consumption of reality, of the memories it generates, and of the display of those memories.

Director Biography

Alice Bachmann and Christophe Dos Santos (born in 1992, Lyon) are visual artists who work at the intersection of documentary, performance, and moving images. Both trained in fine arts in France, their careers have unfolded between Italy and Portugal.

Based in Paris, Alice Bachmann holds an MA in Film and Video from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, as well as a second MA in Sound Arts. In addition to her artistic work, she works as a camera operator in the audiovisual sector and, in her free time, cares for wildlife for the Sea Shepherd organization.

Christophe Dos Santos, based in Lisbon, participated in the Maumaus independent art program after spending several years with artistic collectives in Argentina, notably in Buenos Aires. His practice spans video, performance, and curatorial projects in independent art spaces.

Their most recent project, Tropical Resort, was presented in a solo exhibition at Galeria FOCO in Lisbon from November 25, 2023, to January 12, 2024. The film Crève Coco emerged from this exhibition—which itself grew out of the initial filming for Tropical Resort—and represents a hybrid of visual arts and cinema.

Memories and Miseries

Experimental | Duration 11:22 | Director | Mohammad Fakhrul Alam (Iran)

A displaced man revisits fragments of his memories, searching for the meaning of his existence across three reflections of himself: soul trapped in limbo, war-haunted priest, and lonely writer.

Director Biography

Mohammad Fakhrul Alam is a poet, media researcher, screenwriter and filmmaker from Bangladesh whose cinema whose work explores memory, displacement, and the fragile boundaries between reality and imagination. Rooted in poetry, shaped by music, and refined through years of traveling across the country, his work seeks not to explain but to evoke-images that linger like echoes long after the story ends.

After his completion of Film and TV Essentials at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Alam developed Memories and Miseries as a concept short from parts of his bachelor’s thesis screenplay. Through abstraction, fragmented narratives, image, and rhythm, he has attempted to build a cinematic language that moves beyond words, remaining both deeply personal and universally resonant.

At this stage of his career along with studying in MSS in Media and Communication at Independent University of Bangladesh- his film Jaal is going through post- production phase in UK-India. Two of his live action feature, "Memories and Miseries" and "Dreams and Desire" and first animated feature, "The Wild Seashore" are under development phase now.

Alongside filmmaking, Alam has also co-founded and served as the CEO of Scenate, a non-profit organization supporting and promoting independent filmmakers in Bangladesh.

Director Statement

In creating Memories and Miseries, I sought to explore the unspoken layers of human existence- where memory, loss, and emotion shape our sense of identity and belonging. Through the fragmented memories of a displaced man, the film journeys across three reflections of the self: a soul trapped in limbo, a war-haunted priest, and a lonely writer.

More than a non-linear narrative, Memories and Miseries is a meditation on displacement, loneliness, and the blurred boundaries between past, future, and imagined memory. After spending nearly a decade traveling throughout the country like a dervish, I felt compelled to tell stories of people uprooted by forces beyond their control. Watching wars unfold across the world from Gaza to Ukraine and witnessing the lives of displaced Rohingya people in my own country, I became increasingly drawn to those who lose not only their homes and loved ones, but also their sense of identity, belonging, and meaning of life.

Through shifting narrators, letters, monologues, and visual storytelling- I wanted to follow silence rather than noise, not to escape the world, but to understand whether we can ever find liberation from the memories that shape and haunt us.