A week of experimental film arrives with the 25 FPS Festival

The 25 FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival will turn Zagreb’s Kinoteka into a meeting place for experimental cinema from Sept. 22 to 26, with its opening ceremony at Histrionski Dom.

The festival will begin with the Disperzije seminar on Sept. 21 and 22 at KIC’s Surogatkin, where film researchers and curators will examine attention, its fragmentation and the effects on spectatorship in the 21st century.

British expanded-film pioneer Guy Sherwin will open the 22nd edition on Sept. 22 with “Man With Mirror,” a performance first staged 50 years ago. Using a mirror and projected footage of his own image, Sherwin creates a poetic exchange between film’s material form and live performance, as well as between past and present, memory and perception. His work explores film’s basic elements, light and time, often through serial forms and live components that expand the possibilities of analog film.

Resistance, both individual and collective, runs through this year’s selection. The program traces it in historical artifacts and archives, but also in efforts to imagine different realities in response to a world presented as being in poor condition. The films challenge official narratives and create forms of counter-memory while confronting the legacy of colonialism.

Among the featured works are Miranda Pennell’s “The Forest Man,” where colonial history takes shape through the spirit of an orangutan, and Ben Russell’s “The Other Earth,” which moves from “mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin” in an attempt to portray the disorder of the present. Other films address forgotten or once-banned languages and attempts to revive them through cinema, while Tulapop Saenjaoren’s “Local Sensations” explores resistance to idolatry.

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from mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin