Viewings have begun, and we are delighted to introduce the selection committee, who will be discussing the many film entries received to compile the festival programme over the coming months. Juan David González Monroy, Rita Macedo, Christina Stuhlberger, and Clarissa Thieme were responsible for programming the short and feature films last year, alongside Katrin Mundt. New to the team this year is Tendai Mutambu, whom we warmly welcome!

We are looking forward to working together in the coming months! The results of the selection process will be announced in mid-March.

Programming Team 2026

Juan David González Monroy is a visual artist based in Berlin. Since 2010, he has collaborated with Anja Dornieden under the moniker OJOBOCA. Their practice focuses on photochemical film and cinema as a social ritual. OJOBOCA’s films, installations, and performances have been featured at festivals, solo screenings, and exhibitions, including the Museum of the Moving Image, ICA London, Berlinale, and New York Film Festival. Juan works as an archivist at Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, where he programmes the series Condition Report, focused on screening film prints from the archive.

Rita Macedo is a filmmaker and artist based in Berlin. Her work, shown internationally in exhibitions and film festivals, moves between non-fiction, speculative invention, and narrative disruption to probe the unstable terrains of meaning and memory. Through a practice that resists fixed interpretation, she investigates shifting relations between image, perception, and time. She is an Artistic Associate at the Braunschweig University of Art.

Tendai Mutambu is a writer and curator whose work centres on contemporary artists’ moving image and the essay film, with a focus on Black diasporic practices. Recently, he was Development Editing Fellow for Logic(s) at Columbia University’s INCITE Institute, and an associate producer for Aura Satz’s Preemptive Listening. He has held programming roles at Spike Island, LUX Moving Image, London Film Festival, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (all UK), and Govett-Brewster/Len Lye Centre (NZ). He’s a regular contributor to Ocula, Art Monthly UK, and ArtReview.

Christina Stuhlberger is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna and Brussels. She co-founded elephy, a collective and platform for film and audiovisual art, and serves as a guest programmer for the Courtisane Film Festival in Ghent. In addition to her artistic work, she is a doctoral researcher in the arts at the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels and teaches in the Doc Nomads international master’s program in documentary filmmaking.

Clarissa Thieme is a filmmaker and artist. Her films, installations, and performative interventions focus on the fissures between individual memory and its translation into processes of historical objectification. Her latest work explores a living archive as a new commons and vulnerability as an artistic strategy of resistance and solidarity. Thieme co-founded ARchipelago, a site-specific archiving platform, and the open-archive initiative Između Nas/Between Us at the Sarajevo Video Archive. She is a PhD candidate at the Artistic Research Center (ARC) at the Vienna Film Academy (mdw).

The 39th European Media Art Festival will take place from 22 to 26 April 2026. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will continue beyond the festival, closing on 25 May 2026. We are looking forward to your entries - this year´s deadline is 22 December 2025.

Media artists from around the world can now enter their work to be considered for the 2026 European Media Art Festival. The online platform is already open - please click here.

This year’s deadline for entries is 22 December 2025.

We welcome current works in the categories Film (experimental short and feature films), Installation (installative, interactive, spatial or sculptural media art works), and Expanded (performances, live events, or workshops).

Entering works is free of charge.

Our international curatorial team will compile the programme for the upcoming festival from the entries received. Fees will be paid to all artists whose work is selected for the festival. Premiere status is not necessary. Please refer to our regulations for more details on the entry and selection process, as well as technical requirements.

The 39th European Media Art Festival will take place from 22 to 26 April 2026. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will continue beyond the festival, closing on 25 May 2026.

We are looking forward to your entries!

On International Museum Day on May 18, exhibition curator Inga Seidler will give a guided tour of this year’s EMAF exhibition Witnessing Witnessing at 3 p.m. at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. The exhibition features works by Agil Abdullayev, Alisa Berger, Karolina Breguła, Doplgenger (Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran), Hannah Hallermann, Flo Kasearu, Gabriela Löffel, and Benedikt Terwiel. Admission is free.

You will also have the opportunity to watch Dimitris Athiridis’ documentary film exergue – on documenta 14 (GR 2024, 848 mins, German, English, Greek with English subtitles). The last four chapters of this 14-hour film will be shown from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.

exergue – on documenta 14 follows artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team as they work on the world’s most important art exhibition, which first took place in Kassel and Athens in 2017. The result is a unique look behind the scenes of the institutional art world in a changing political landscape. Parts 1 to 4 can be seen on May 16 from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., and parts 5 to 10 on May 17 from 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

After five days, the 38th European Media Art Festival came to an end yesterday. More than 160 films, installations, performances, and talks were shown and experienced at nine different locations across the city. One of the highlights was the presentation of the EMAF Media Art Prize by the German Film Critics Association (VdFk) at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück yesterday morning.

Daphné Hérétakis was awarded for her work What We Ask of a Statue Is That It Doesn’t Move (GR, FR 2024, 31’).

The film deals with the current political situation in Greece: in Athens, nothing seems to be happening, and the people are as silent as statues. But elsewhere in the city, a caryatid escapes from the museum and a splinter group calls for the destruction of all antiquities. Perhaps filmmaking is the only way to avoid turning to stone, says the synopsis.

The jury, consisting of Günter Minas, Bianca Jasmina Rauch and Hannes Wesselkämper, stated: “With anarchic humour while oscillating between documentary and fiction, the director follows a (fictitious) citizens’ initiative that wants to subvert the past by blowing up the Parthenon in Athens and replacing it with statues of people from the present day. The stagnation caused by the current political situation is transformed into a new movement, centuries-old traditions are thrown overboard with a sense of mischievous joy. Thus, What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move cleverly poses the question in the cinematic space: What traces of us will archaeologists of the future find?”

The jury gave a special mention to Tila•pia by Crispin Yanisi, a film “which enters into an aesthetic dialogue with the fish of its title. It explores the theme of interculturality through balanced imagery and a well-founded artistic approach, following the fate of the fish from the net to the plate”, the jury stated.

Both films were previously shown in the International Selection. This year, for the first time, all 31 films screened will receive the EMAF Award. The prize money will be divided equally among the selected artists. The winners are:

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ben Balcom, George Clark, Theo Cuthand, Chloë Delanghe & Mattijs Driesen, Sam Drake, Eitan Efrat & Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Zachary Epcar, Kevin Jerome Everson, Laurence Favre, Maïder Fortuné, Daphné Hérétakis, Mina Heydari-Waite, Hyejin Jung, Ferney Iyokina Gittoma, Pranami Koch, Mónica Martins Nunes, Ella McConnell, Monica Panzarino, Franca Pape, Kanthy Peng, Martyna Ratnik, Jazmin Rojas Forero, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Silke Schönfeld, Lina Selander, Jonathan Seungjoon Lee, Micah Weber, Helena Wittmann, Crispin Yanisi and Else/Xun Zhang

More information on the films is available here.

On the opening night alone, the Kunsthalle Osnabrück welcomed nearly 1000 visitors. We were delighted to receive so many visitors who attended the EMAF for the first time, as well as those who have been our guests for decades – thanks a lot! A huge Thank you goes also to all our supporters, as well as cooperation and media partners (which can be found here), and of course to all helping hands!

The exhibition “Witnessing Witnessing,” curated by Inga Seidler, can be visited at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 25 May during the museum’s regular opening hours. Guided tours take place every Sunday at 4 pm and can also be booked at presse@emaf.de.

Thank you for your interest and we look forward to seeing you next year! The 39th European Media Art Festival will take place from 22 to 26 April 2026.

Best wishes from the EMAF 2025 team!

Picture Copyright: Angela von Brill

The International Selection presents works by established and emerging artists from around the world – many of them being shown in Germany for the first time. A recurring motif is the revisiting of personal and political stories in direct dialogue, but also in the encounter with places and landscapes. Some artists play with cinematic genres, especially elements of horror and suspense, which might also reflect their discomfort with the present. The more or less tamed nature – the garden, the park, the jungle – repeatedly appears as a historical backdrop, a personal anchor point or a utopian blueprint for an alternative way of living together. The following films will be screened tomorrow at 11 am at the Lagerhalle as part of the programme “A Deflected Signal”:

Dreams Of My Father, Jonathan Seungjoon Lee, KR, AR, NL 2024, 15’

Colorful Colorado Nails, Monica Panzarino, US 2024, 6’

Dreams of Sunlight Through Trees, Theo Cuthand, CA 2024, 15’

she’s waiting for the sunset, Martyna Ratnik, LT 2024, 8’

母の手紙 / Mother’s Letter, Sylvia Schedelbauer, DE 2025, 24’

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers (in English).

At EMAF in April 2024, Nahed Samour and Pary El-Qalqili took account of the repression and silencing of voices in Germany expressing solidarity with Palestine. One year later, Samour looks at where we are now: What to call the current societal condition? Has it already become permanent? Together with Anita Di Bianco and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Nahed Samour will discuss these questions in the Talk I could swear my face was touching stone: Continuities tomorrow at 1pm at Kunsthalle Osnabrück. In her ongoing project Corrections and Clarifications Anita Di Bianco compiles daily retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print news since September 1, 2001. Moving chronologically backwards from the present, Di Bianco suggests that the notion of historical ruptures is itself part of the misrepresentation and distortion and that the persistence of such revisions reveal a series of precedents. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s essay What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment examines willful ignorance as part of structural racism and violence in Germany. How to unlearn the settings that shape and obfuscate one’s own perceptions – to allow for resonances with the knowledge and experience of migrant communities? In a collective reading, voices intervene in the silences and gaps. They offer testimony to continuities of denial, initiating a conversation on the challenges of speaking (up), and acts of refusal in a social landscape of anticipatory obedience.

From the feature film section, we recommend tomorrow’s German premiere of Candela Sotos’ Yrupẽ (ES 2025, 79’) – in Spanish with English subtitles. The search for ”The Irupé Flower,” a lost film by Guillermo Fernández-Zúñiga – a Spanish pioneer of scientific cinema exiled to Argentina after the Spanish Civil War – triggers a journey through family histories and national archives. As we follow the slow growth of the irupé in an aquarium in the car park of an art college in Buenos Aires, layers of images and empty spaces gradually emerge. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the filmmaker (in English). The event starts tomorrow at 5 pm at the Hasetor cinema.

Although 31 films have already been honoured as EMAF award winners in the International Selection – we will be celebrating the award ceremony of the Association of German Film Critics on Sunday at 11 am at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. The jury members of the German Film Critics’ Association, Günter Minas, Bianca Jasmina Rauch and Hannes Wesselkämper, will discuss the films of the International Selection and then award the EMAF Media Art Prize of the German Film Critics’ Association. After the screening of the award-winning film, all attendees are invited to join us for drinks and snacks.

If you wish, you can stay on at Kunsthalle Osnabrück afterwards and take a guided tour of the exhibition with our mediators. On Sunday at 4 pm is the last chance during the festival. There are public tours tomorrow at 12 noon, 4 pm and 6 pm, but even after the festival there will be a public tour every Sunday at 4 pm until the exhibition closes on 25 May. Groups can book a tour by emailing presse@emaf.de. Special offers and conditions are available for school groups.

Another highlight towards the end of the festival will be the feature film Macumba (BRD 1982, 88 min.) by Elfi Mikesch on Sunday at 6 pm at the Lagerhalle. The film tells the story of Magda, who lives with her friends in a Berlin house whose days are numbered. Everyone follows their own obsessions in their own way. A certain delirium turns everyday life into a dream, into a trance-like movement towards an uncertain future. Max Taurus, a gifted sleuth who calls himself a “detective,” follows a trail that leads him to this very demolition site, where he believes he can prevent a murder. In the process, he becomes entangled in a labyrinthine story from which he cannot free himself. The crash of the wrecking ball, accompanied by the music of Silvestre Revueltas, becomes a swan song for a way of life that has its roots in the 1960s. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker (in German).

The complete festival programme can be found here.

We wish you a sunny weekend at the EMAF in Osnabrück and look forward to a great second half of the festival!

Wow! We were delighted to welcome so many visitors to the opening of the 38th European Media Art Festival at Kunsthalle Osnabrück last night. It was a wonderful evening, and we would like to thank you for your interest and the many kind words. While spring begins with the EMAF flags for Juliane Schickedanz (director of the Kunsthalle Osnabrück), the EMAF flair swept from the shop at Bierstaße 13 to the town hall for Mayor Katharina Pötter. “The EMAF is not a classic film festival with feature-length or short films,” said outgoing State Secretary Dr. Jörg Mielke. “Rather, the EMAF is a film festival where we have a very, very strong transition from cinematic expression to an artistic form of expression with installations and productions that we don’t usually find elsewhere.”

Over four days, more than 160 films, installations, performances and talks will be presented – at various locations around the city. How about checking out the programmes of our guests from the classes of the art academies in Szczecin and Helsinki? Both can be viewed today at 1pm and 7pm respectively.

The everyday lives of six filmmakers, students at the Academy of Art in Szczecin, unfold against a backdrop of growing unrest, social tensions, dramatic political crises and wars, with an awareness of an irreversible climate catastrophe and the increasing prevalence of mental health issues. Every day there is something new in the news – both from their own country and from the rest of the world – which often has a direct impact on the lives of these young people. The short film It Will Be a Very Difficult Conversation tells the personal stories of the six filmmakers in six chapters, addressing issues that are sometimes difficult, often unpleasant, but at the same time extremely important. At 1pm at the Lagerhalle.

The work Ensemble by students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki combines film with live performance and a letter from the past: “When you think of spaces and images, you may have certain expectations: How will the image fit into the space? How will I fit into it? Our space will be in motion in terms of time and place,” it says. And further: “We don’t want you to know where the next act begins. Is there a linear progression or just a collection of beginnings and endings? Does the space have an end, or does something new begin? Sometimes the portals will open for everyone, and sometimes there are experiences that are only meant for one person. We will accompany you through projections or voices appearing around you.” Tonight at 7pm, at Haus der Jugend.

In the International Selection, you can see An Ear-Splitting Blur tonight at 10.30pm at the Lagerhalle – featuring films by Sam Drake and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

Fragmented records in Sam Drake’s Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air (US 2025) reveal a hidden history of Cold War radiation experiments on humans, coming to light through a haze of manipulation and embedded studies. Desert dust sticks to the teeth and leaves its mark. Contaminated images evoke the invisible.

The Diary of a Sky (LB 2024) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan unfolds an atmospheric symphony of violence over Beirut, in which the incessant movement of Israeli military aircraft and the hum of generators during power cuts merge in a haunting way. This 45-minute video essay immerses the viewer into a frightening chronicle of everyday life, in which the skies are turned into a weapon and, through the terror of repeated attacks, into a disturbingly mundane backdrop.

New Red Order – our Artists in Focus – present their third programme tomorrow at 1pm at the Lagerhalle. A I O U (US 2019) tells of a distant future. Of a cosmic institution of unknown origin. In this place, the debt for the extinction of a life is finally paid: by resurrection. Nosferasta: First Bite (US, PR, GB 2021) spans five centuries of colonial destruction and tells the story of Oba, a Rastafarian vampire, and Christopher Columbus, whose bite originally turned him into a vampire. Together they spread the colonial epidemic throughout the “New World.” Formally, Nosferasta is a vampire film and a series of installations. Impressionistic in style, they explore the guilt that comes from being involved in colonial conquests, acknowledging the difficulty of shaking off the legacy of centuries of vampire indoctrination. At its core is the question: How can you decolonise what is in your blood? Give it Back: Crimes Against Realty (US 2024) is about a tour of a supposedly restituted apartment. Led by Jim Fletcher, a reformed Native American impersonator and frequent collaborator with New Red Order, it showcases real people involved in the voluntary return of land to indigenous peoples, organisations and tribes. The film is part of New Red Order’s ongoing research into the return of land by settlers to indigenous peoples, a practice that has become increasingly common over the past decade.

As part of SPECTRAL, the LaborBerlin collective will once again present the diversity of analogue film practice. A central work in this year’s presentation is the re-screening of a multi-projection performance developed by Takahiko Iimura, a pioneer of Expanded Cinema in Japan, together with composer Alvin Lucier. Thanks to LaborBerlin’s collaboration with researchers from Collaborative Cataloging Japan, the performance will be shown live and in analogue for the first time since the 1960s. Tomorrow at 7 pm, at Haus der Jugend.

The complete festival programme can be found here.

We look forward to your visit!

Picture Copyright: Kerstin Hehmann

In the festival section Campus, classes and subject groups from art schools and universities present their current work. Students from Helsinki, Szczecin, Braunschweig and Osnabrück are our guests at this year’s EMAF and will be showing the fruits of their labour in exhibitions, film programmes and performances at the festival cinemas and selected venues in the centre of Osnabrück.

The HBK Braunschweig exhibition presents works by students of fine art and art pedagogy. Films, videos, sculptures, performances and installations examine the connection between individual experiences and social and political contexts, focussing on different perspectives on questions of witnessing.

It Will Be a Very Difficult Conversation is a short film by students from the Academy of Art in Szczecin which seeks to express what we lack words for in everyday life: how do we engage with conflicts in our immediate surroundings? How can I produce critical art that perhaps leads to restrictions for those closest to me? How do I manage when a war splits the community that I come from?

In their film and performance event Ensemble, students of the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki explore fundamental questions relating to the shared experience of images and spaces. For a limited period, doors open that lead us to a home, to the sea or to the surface of skin. Voices, soundscapes and the light of the projectors lead the audience into the space and the time of their imagination.

The Institute for Art/Art Pedagogy at the Osnabrück University is participating with works created in collaboration with different artists. They seek to make us aware of human boundaries in information processing and the psychological and social effects of false information and information saturation.

Students from the media laboratory at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences are presenting projects that draw on virtual reality, AI or physical computing to engage with the strategies of political manipulation, the modelling and tactile exploration of landscape and new forms of playful interaction.

At the Department for Everyday Records established by the Music and Art School Osnabrück, the citizen’s personal records are systematically administered and ordered by staff. Personal everyday records such as notes, receipts or contact lens packets can be handed in by citizens at the relevant office. 



Until April 18 film and art professionals can register to visit the festival here. The complete festival programme can be found here.



We look forward to your visit!

Picture Copyright: Tom Brück

When witnesses of violence and injustice go unheard, where are the things that happened registered, where are they stored? How can testimonies write stories that have not yet been written and break the power of a systematic lack of knowledge that secures privileges within society? These are the questions that the Talks at this year’s European Media Art Festival will be addressing. Today we would like to introduce you to the programme.

Bearing witness is itself caught up in epistemic violence: I only see what I know, recognise, have learnt to recognise. Taking the National Socialist Underground complex as its starting point, Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment (2023) describes collective ignorance as the basis of structural racism and contrasts this with the self-assertion of migrant-situated experience and memory. The title of this year’s Talks I could swear my face was touching stone picks up on the affective aspects of testimony. It is taken from the poetry collection Land to Light On (1997) by Canadian writer Dionne Brand. Brand’s poetry has repeatedly engaged with the question of bearing witness, with the gap between what is inflicted and what of that is reported. Before this backdrop, the four events are dedicated to the transhistorical dimensions of witnessing as well as corporeal and sensorial forms of knowledge, with those taking part linking together short presentations, conversations, readings and films.

The Talks are curated and moderated by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marc Siegel, Philip Widmann and Florian Wüst.

Technologies

Film scholars Anaïs Farine (Beirut) and Irit Neidhardt (Berlin) look at the shifting contexts of images and sounds from and about Palestine. They examine how solidarity with the Palestinian cause institutionalised through cinema has largely disappeared in present-day Germany, and identify current artistic and curatorial interventions in a field where technologies of making visible easily tend to have obverse effects. The conversation is accompanied by a wide range of audiovisual materials – from films made by West German film crews, commissioned by the PLO, to recent experimental films utilising found footage from colonised Palestine in the early 20th century, and the 2024 short film compilation made in Gaza, From Ground Zero.

Magic

Listening to the voices of the oppressed often requires us to enter unmastered territory characterised by defiant magical happenings and unexpected fantastical imaginaries. Author and philologist Sanabel Abdel Rahman (Tunis) and artist and researcher Ashkan Sepahvand (London) speak of witnesses who disrupt colonial reality through magic and storytelling. Abdel Rahman, who will join online from Tunis, shares aspects of her research on magical realism and haunting as part of Palestinian resistance, while Sepahvand focuses on figures of alterity emerging in modern Iran under geopolitical ruination.

Continuities

At EMAF in April 2024, legal and islamic studies scholar Nahed Samour and artist Pary El-Qalqili took account of the repression and silencing of voices in Germany expressing solidarity with Palestine. One year later, Nahed Samour (Berlin) looks at where we are now: What to call the current societal condition? Has it already become permanent? In another chronicling, Frankfurt-based artist Anita Di Bianco’s ongoing project Corrections and Clarifications compiles daily retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print news since September 1, 2001. Moving chronologically backwards from the present, Di Bianco suggests that the notion of historical ruptures is itself part of the misrepresentation and distortion.

Bodies

Author and curator José B. Segebre (Berlin) will reflect on the aesthetics of waiting in queer, feminist, Black and decolonial artistic practice. He will foreground waiting as a central dimension of sumud (steadfastness), a practice of resistance that defines Palestinian daily life, both inside and outside historic Palestine. Ashkan Sepahvand will address performances and rituals of death in the context of the AIDS pandemic, which arose in the 1980s and continues in the present, focusing both on the historical transmission of knowledge between queer dancers and choreographers and on the theater of director Reza Abdoh, whose work cites the Iranian-Islamic performance tradition of ta’ziyeh.

Until April 18 film and art professionals can register to visit the festival here.

We look forward to your visit!

Picture Copyright: Anaïs Farine und Irit Neidhardt

We are happy to present our programme to you now! It includes the themed film programmes, the International Selection, the Feature Film section, the Artist in Focus and EMAF Extended programmes, as well as exhibitions, many live performances, lectures, live music sets, and parties with guests from all over the world. You can find all the information now at www.emaf.de and in the coming weeks here and on our social media channels! We look forward to seeing you at EMAF 2025! Accreditations are still possible here until April 18th.

This year, 31 short films will be screened in the International Selection. The programme will present works by renowned and young artists from all over the world – many of them for the first time in Germany. In the Feature Film section, nine contemporary and historical feature films enter into a dialogue. In many of these works, we encounter gestures of protest and resistance against persistent injustice and social inequality. Some artists play with cinematic genres, especially with elements of horror and suspense, which might be a response to their unease with the present. Another central motif is the revisiting of personal and political histories in direct dialogue, but also in encounters with places and landscapes. More or less tamed nature – the garden, the park, the jungle – recurs as a historical backdrop, a personal anchor point, or a utopian blueprint for a different way of living together.

In the following, we would like to give you a few first impressions of the programme.

International Selection

Variations on How to Farm a City (2024) by Mónica Martins Nunes (in artistic collaboration with Deniz Şimşek) follows the work of gardeners who, on wastelands and hills, between traffic arteries and perpetual construction sites, counter the city’s encroachment with a different form of time and coexistence: planting, harvesting, eating, and talking as daily renewed gestures that confirm their intention to stay. The urban environment in which Zachary Epcar’s Sinking Feeling (2024) unfolds are the abstract lines and reflective distortions of US office architecture, populated by the bodies and voices of three people. Their memories of an incident in a tunnel triggers daydreams and fantasies of losing control, of exhaustion, and connection.

A constant buzzing in her right ear prompts Jung Hyejin to cinematically explore the fine line that separates sound from noise. In Noise: Unwanted Sound (2024), she combines medical examination and social reflection, soundscapes, and personal-poetic self-exploration to illustrate how the voices of marginalised people are stigmatised and silenced as noise. Sylvia Schedelbauer’s Mother’s Letter (2025) is the filmmaker’s attempt to approximate her mother’s perspective. In the form of a letter, the mother addresses her daughter, who replies and comments with images from the family archive. The back-and-forth of the classic letter format becomes an intimate side-by-side that hints at conflict and closeness, while leaving room for questions that remain unanswered.

The complete list of films in the International Selection can be found here.

All 31 films are equal winners of the EMAF Award. The prize money, which was previously awarded to individual works, will now be shared by all selected films. A jury of the Association of German Film Critics (VDFK) will continue to award the VDFK Media Art Award at the EMAF.

Feature films

In Candela Sotos’ Yrupẽ (2025), the search for a lost science film by Guillermo Fernández-Zúñiga is intertwined with delving into family history and national archives. As we follow the slow growth of an yrupẽ plant in an aquarium, images and voices emerge, revealing a history of silence, concealment, and censorship. In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and looted the archive of the Palestine Research Centre. In addition to countless historical documents on Palestine, it had contained a collection of still and moving images which the Israeli Ministry of Defence appropriated. In A Fidai Film (2024), Kamal Aljafari reclaims these images and weaves them into a counter-narrative that reconstructs a Palestinian history that has been suppressed for decades.

The Soldier’s Lagoon (2024) by Pablo Álvarez Mesa follows the trail of Simon Bolívar’s fight for the liberation of Colombia in 1819. The journey takes us high into the misty region of the Páramo, a landscape in which centuries of violence and trauma are embedded. Careful observation and conversations with botanists, historians, and artisans create a multi-layered reflection on oral history and its relation to the land. The Lie, created in 1987, is a powerful testimony to the systematic extermination of German Sinti by the Nazis. Katrin Seybold and Melanie Spitta, herself the daughter of a survivor, use previously unpublished police files, photographs and documents from racial researchers, and the memories of the few survivors of the camps to reconstruct not only the genocide itself but also the attitude of a society that ignores the right for compensation.

The complete list of selected feature-length films can be found here.

EMAF Extended

After the festival, Dimitris Athiridis’ documentary exergue - on documenta 14 (2024) will be screened alongside the EMAF exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück. The film accompanies the artistic director of documenta 14, Adam Szymczyk, and his curatorial team as they plan and realise one of the world’s most important exhibitions of contemporary art, which for the first time took place in Kassel and Athens in 2017. This decision, which was part of the curatorial concept of documenta 14, sparked controversy in advance and ended with a budget deficit and a media scandal. In 14 chapters, exergue offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at contemporary art production, exploring the tensions between curatorial work and institutional structures, local funding and the global art market, and the role of contemporary art in a changing political landscape.

SPECTRAL

As part of SPECTRAL, the LaborBerlin collective will once again present the diversity of analogue film practice. A central work of this year’s presentation is the re-enactment of a multi-projection performance developed by Takahiko Iimura, a pioneer of expanded cinema in Japan, together with composer Alvin Lucier. Thanks to the collaboration between LaborBerlin and the researchers of Collaborative Cataloging Japan, the performance will be shown live and analogue for the first time since the 1960s. In addition, S.P.A.C.E. EXPANDED will present a series of performative and installative expanded cinema works created over the past three years as part of a residency programme. They all activate the projection space in a special way, transforming it into a place of shared experience.

Film and art professionals can now register to visit the festival. The accreditation entitles you to free entry to all film programmes, the exhibitions, performances, talks and the EMAF Campus.The accreditation deadline is April 18th.

We look forward to seeing you again and send regards from the EMAF 2025 team!

Picture Copyright: Sylvia Schedelbauer

The 38th European Media Art Festival begins in Osnabrück in seven weeks’ time. Curated by Inga Seidler, the EMAF 2025 exhibition, which will be on show at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, is dedicated to the festival theme Witnessing Witnessing, exploring testimony as an active and performative practice that goes beyond the mere documentation of events. The assembled international artists use digital media, video, VR, 3D scans, sculpture, forensic methods, and re-enactment to explore the moral, political, and emotional aspects of witnessing. Their installations question the authenticity and truth of media productions as well as the power relations involved. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to make connections and critically engage with the information presented. Works by Agil Abdullayev, Alisa Berger, Karolina Breguła, Doplgenger (Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran), Hannah Hallermann, Flo Kasearu, Gabriela Löffel, and Benedikt Terwiel will be on display. We would like to introduce youto three of them by way of example:

The video installation llustrating the Request for Privacy by artist Flo Kasearu is a documented performance developed together with a group of women who receive support from the Pärnu Women’s Shelter. One in five women in Estonia has experienced physical violence in her life, and one in ten has also experienced sexual violence. These are the official figures; the real figures are probably much higher. Kasearu organised a performance with the women from the Pärnu Women’s Shelter at theNO99 Theatre in Tallinn. For two hours, the women, sitting with the audience in a courtroom-like setting, read passages from the files of their own court cases. Filmed in black and white, Illustrating the Request for Privacy focuses exclusively on how the women read this artificial bureaucratic language, which seems completely detached from the traumatic events. On the one hand, the work reveals these women’s courageous emancipatory act, but at the same time, it highlights the gap between the official abstract records and the personal traumatic experiences that victims are usually left alone with.

The work Grammar of Calculated Ambiguity is based on an audio track recorded by Swiss artist Gabriela Löffel two weeks after the publication of the Pandora Papers during an offshore finance conference. This multi-day conference was aimed exclusively at insiders in the financial industry, trustees, lawyers, and asset managers, so to speak the architects of offshore structures. Gabriela Löffel’s recording documents a panel discussion on the public perception of the offshore financial industry. While the financial industry plays a key role in the context of global crises such as climate change and growing inequality, its structures and practices remain hidden. Parts of the recording are difficult to understand due to the acoustic conditions. Experts have therefore reconstructed them in a recording studio with the help of forensic sound engineers. Löffel filmed this process of translation, thus addressing the ambiguity of language: As we hear how technical jargon is used, among other things, to circumvent existing laws, it becomes clear that words are never neutral – even the smallest nuances can open up new realms of meaning. A composition by sound artist Olga Kokcharova complements and intervenes in the video, emphasising the installation’s malleable, porous nature.

Agil Abdullayev’s Radicals in Between Trees and Dicks is based on four years of research into queer cruising culture in Azerbaijan and the neighbouring regions of the Caucasus, Georgia and Kazakhstan – environments where queer identities are criminalised or repressed, but where cruising (the search for anonymous encounters in public) remains a vital practice. The installation combines performances, oral history testimonies and poetic re-enactments to illustrate how queer history and community are interwoven with political urgency in contested spaces. Three video channels present different perspectives on cruising: physical sites such as parks and abandoned buildings, anonymised interviews, and abstract imagery through slow motion and body movement. Agil Abdullayev questions dominant narratives and invites us to see public space through a queer lens. Abdullayev also incorporates elements of Azerbaijani film history, particularly Soviet films that invoke traditional family values and masculinity, into minimalist dance scenes. The work is not only about documenting queer experiences, but also about creating spaces in which these stories can be told and re-interpreted.

The exhibition is on show at Kunsthalle Osnabrück until25 May.

Film and art professionals can nowregister to visit the festival here.The accreditation entitles you to free entry to all filmprogrammes, the exhibitions, performances, talks and the EMAF Campus. The accreditation deadline is April 18th.

Picture Copyright: Flo Kasearu

With its Artists in Focus section, EMAF honours artists whose work is situated at the intersection of art and cinema, expanding common notions of cinematic narrative and working practices. We are delighted to welcome New Red Order (NRO) as this year’s Artists in Focus – or rather ‘NRO and Company’, as alongside films by NRO’s core contributors, Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway) and Jackson Polys (Tlingit), the programme will also feature works created with Bayley Sweitzer, Maria Meinild, Anton Vidokle and other collaborative constellations.

NRO is a public secret society that works with networks of contributors, accomplices and informants. Through film, installation, performance, as well as collective projects (Give It Back) and partner organisations (Creative Time), NRO confronts settler-colonialist society, articulating its foundation within desires for indigeneity alongside the violent displacement of Indigenous land and life. NRO asks how those desires can be channeled toward productive and sustainable ends: “Our aim is to transcend the guilt and shame, not to remove and thus get over it, but to imagine something through and beyond, that can address and promote Indigenous futures.” (NRO)

NRO’s works incorporate a multiplicity of forms and strategies that range from genre cinema, to experimental film, advertisement and manifestos, further combining them with humour, sincerity and conscientious research. They seek to expand our political imagination and point the way to a more livable future.

“Collectively, our work seeks to devise dexterous and unlikely conceptual frameworks to unpack, rearrange, and even parody the contradictions, missteps, and trauma which characterize the history of the colonial project since 1492. We question the safe stagnation of normative attitudes towards these difficult topics; and instead attempt to scaffold toward more conceptually generative understandings of how ‘identity’ and ‘history’ are conveyed and configured within our contemporary understandings of decolonization, reconciliation, and settler-colonialism.” (Adam Khalil)

A central work in the programme is Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil’s first collaborative feature film INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./] (2016). It draws on the Anishinaabe “Prophecy of the Seven Fires”, which predicts first contact with Europeans long before it happened. In INAATE/SE/, Adam and Zack propose a filmic language that reflects Anishinaabe epistemologies in order to trace the intergenerational impact of this story in their own Indigenous community.

In Never Settle: The Program (2018), images of settler-led planetary destruction alternate with group therapy sessions in which willing settlers can investigate and overcome their own desire to “indigenise”. In the form of a recruitment video, NRO critically questions the dynamics of complicity, the urge to make amends, and the co-optation of Indigenous concerns by non-Indigenous people.

Nosferasta: First Bite (2021) by Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer and Oba, a Trinidadian artist and musician based in Brooklyn, translates 500 years of colonial destruction into the language of a vampire film. It follows Oba, a shipwrecked African slave turned vampire by Christopher Columbus, and the latter, as they make their way through the “new world” gradually spreading the colonial infection – until Oba’s allegiance changes. In an unconventional blend of styles and genres, Nosferasta explores the difficulty of overcoming centuries of vampiric conditioning, posing the question of how to decolonise what is in one’s own blood.

The films of NRO and its often long-standing collaborators will be complemented by two short film programmes curated by Adam Khalil: Anti-Ethnography will feature works spanning several decades which interrogate the ethnographic gaze from an Indigenous perspective. A second programme will accompany the European book launch of Temporal Territories. An Anthology of Indigenous Experimental Cinema, edited by the COUSIN Collective (Sky Hopinka, Adam Khalil, Alexandra Lazarowich and Adam Piron) in which Adam will introduce the work of some of the artists featured in the publication, among others Walter Scott’s new short film Organza’s Revenge.

The 38th European Media Art Festival begins on April 23rd in Osnabrück. We look forward to once again becoming an international meeting place for artists, curators, researchers, students and those interested in film and art for five days. Film and art professionals can now register to visit the festival here.

The accreditation entitles you to free entry to all film programmes, the exhibitions, performances, talks and the EMAF Campus. The accreditation deadline is April 18th. The accreditation fee is waived for press representatives -please contact presse@emaf.de in advance, also regarding discounted hotel conditions.

Details about the programme will be available here in the coming weeks. We look forward to your visit!

In its programme, EMAF not only provides an annual overview of contemporary media art but also addresses developments and discourses that shape our social co-existence, be they of an artistic, technological or political nature. This process of critical engagement is particularly evident in the festival theme, which is developed by a curatorial team that changes every year. With the upcoming thematic focus Witnessing Witnessing, we intend to explore the role of witnesses today, how testimonies – like statements, documents, individual objects or entire archives – shape our view of the world and how they can influence political reality.

What we witness or hand down as a testimony enables others to form a picture of the world that goes beyond the limits of their own experience. Witnessing thus creates connections between individual and collective, past and present realms of experience. Testimonies are also important because they have the potential to bring into play voices that were previously unheard. They can challenge the transmission of inherited knowledge, but also unconscious processes of social repression, and thus permanently change what can be said, perceived and imagined. But what happens when these processes are interrupted? When testimonies are ignored, actively denied or used against the witnesses themselves? And how is it possible to mediate between different or contradictory accounts of reality?

The exhibition, curated by Inga Seidler, conceives of witnessing as an active and performative practice that goes far beyond the mere documentation of events. Artists use digital media, video, film and interactive installations to explore witnessing as a moral, political and emotional act. They question the authenticity and truth of media production by examining the responsibilities and power relations involved in representing events, history, trauma and violence. Visitors are invited to investigate for themselves, make connections and critically engage with the information presented, thus becoming part of the processual act of witnessing.

What can art and cinema do, or say, in times of a live-streamed genocide committed with impunity? The film programme, curated by Laura Huertas Millán, examines a range of artistic practices that explore memory, the physicality of resistance, and performance as a somatic archive for the transmission of History. The title of the series, We Sing to Wing Again, inspired by a verse by the poet Hoa Nguyen, reflects an attunement to the never-ending cycles of colonial violence, the breaking of oppressive silence, bearing witness, and sheltering hope.

When witnesses of violence and injustice are hushed up in their testimony, where is what happened registered, where is it accounted for? I could swear my face was touching stone, the title of this year’s Talks curated by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marc Siegel, Philip Widmann and Florian Wüst, is borrowed from the poem Land to Light On (1997) by Canadian author Dionne Brand. In her poetry, Brand has repeatedly turned to the question of bearing witness, to the gap between what has been done and its recounting. The four hybrid events that combine panels, lectures, readings and films attend to the transhistorical dimension of affective witnessing as well as to corporeal and sensory forms of knowledge.

About the curators:

Laura Huertas Millán is Colombian and French filmmaker and artist based in Belgium. Her films intertwine fiction, ecology, critical ethnography, and diasporic narratives to unearth histories of resistance and survival.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian works with various media, attending to epistemic disobedience and diasporic infrastructures. Furthermore, she teaches sculpture and installation at HfK Bremen.

Inga Seidler is an independent curator and project manager based in Berlin. She was exhibition curator for the transmediale festival and head of the web residency programme at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since 2021, she has been curating the exhibitions at EMAF.

Marc Siegel is a film scholar, curator and member of the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP. He is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.

Philip Widmann is a researcher, programmer, and filmmaker. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the SNSF-funded project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich.

Florian Wüst is a Berlin-based film curator, artist and lecturer. He curates film programmes for international art institutions, cinemas and festivals, and is co-founder of the Berlin Journals—On the History and Present State of the City.

The 38th European Media Art Festival will take place from April 23rd to 27th, 2025. The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be on view until May 25, 2025.

We are pleased to ring in the New Year with two film screenings at Kino in der LAGERHALLE to shorten the wait until EMAF.

On Wednesday, 22 January, we will be showing the feminist science fiction film BORN IN FLAMES by Lizzie Borden (1983) in the context of the exhibition “Glitch in the Matrix” and in cooperation with our longtime partners at Kunstraum hase29. Afterwards, we would like to invite you to join us for a discussion with Katrin Mundt (EMAF) and Jasmina Janoschka (hase29).

The following Wednesday, 29 January, we will continue our series “Sehen, um zu hören (Looking in order to Listen)” with Jean-Pierre Gorin’s documentary essay POTO AND CABENGO (1980), also at Kino in der LAGERHALLE. The film follows the life of a pair of twins and the controversies they sparked about childhood, language and social participation.

Wed, 22 January 2025, 19:00 – LAGERHALLE Osnabrück

Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden, USA 1983, 80’ (with German subtitles) In cooperation with Kunstraum hase29

Lizzie Borden’s science fiction film BORN IN FLAMES (1983) depicts a dystopian future in the United States, where a feminist revolution is proclaimed against existing power structures in order to combat social inequalities and female oppression. Using the media – particularly radio – as a symbol of resistance, the film explores the struggle for equality in an authoritarian state that blocks reform and suppresses alternative voices. Just like the exhibition “Glitch in the Matrix” at Kunstraum hase29, the film addresses the question of how our perception of “reality” is manipulated by political and media power structures. The subsequent discussion with Katrin Mundt and Jasmina Janoschka will explore the extent to which glitches – disruptions in the system – promote the loss of control, but also social change.

Free admission.

Wed, 29 January 2025, 19:00 – LAGERHALLE Osnabrück

Sehen, um zu hören (Looking in order to Listen), part 2: Poto and Cabengo, Jean-Pierre Gorin, USA/FRG 1980, 72’ (en OV)

Grace and Virginia are twin sisters from San Diego. Growing up largely isolated from the outside world, the girls have developed their own private form of communication – a blend of German and English, the languages they are surrounded by at home. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s polyphonic documentary looks at the girls’ living situation and traces the media reactions that followed the discovery of their “secret language.” It also captures the unease that this unusual, shared language community, seemingly cut off from the outside world, caused in society. An unusual study of words and faces, mass media and isolation, and the political dimensions of family. Tickets: 6 EUR / 5 EUR (conc.)

Further dates to note:

18 February 2025, 19:00 – LAGERHALLE Osnabrück

Sehen, um zu hören (Looking in order to Listen), part 3: Leila and the Wolves, Heiny Srour, UK/FR/BE/NL/LB/SE 1980–84, 95’ (Arabic with English subtitles)

With LEILA AND THE WOLVES by Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour, we are delighted to show a feminist film classic in Osnabrück. The film centres on Leila, a young Lebanese woman living in London who, in search of her own role in society, explores the collective memory of Arab women and their often-hidden role in the recent history of the Middle East. She embarks on an imaginary journey through time, from the early 20th century to the present day, through the contested landscapes of Palestine and Lebanon. The film interweaves history and personal memory, archival material and folklore. Heiny Srour spent six years working on this extraordinary film, which is imbued with the hope of liberation from patriarchal and colonial rule.

Leila and the Wolves has been restored by CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée and has been selected for Venice Classics 2021. The film is available for distribution through Cinenova, London, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation and distribution of feminist film and video art.

Tickets: 6 EUR / 5 EUR (conc.)

26 March 2025, 19:00 – LAGERHALLE Osnabrück

Sehen, um zu hören (Looking in order to Listen), part 4: Winter Adé, Helke Misselwitz, GDR 1987–88, 116’ (German OV)

In the winter of 1987, filmmaker Helke Misselwitz returns to the railway crossing near Zwickau where she was born in an ambulance 40 years earlier. From there she embarks on a journey through the GDR. The filmmaker meets women of different ages and social backgrounds: a single working mother from a briquette factory, two young punks, a successful Berlin economist and an 85-year-old lady celebrating her diamond wedding anniversary. Misselwitz gives the women space and listens as they talk about their different lives, their disappointments and their hopes for the future. The great closeness between the women is the hallmark of this film, which is full of discontinuities and contradictions, but also funny and filled with optimism. An impressive, atmospheric portrait of the GDR on the brink of collapse.

Tickets: 6 EUR / 5 EUR (conc.)

We look forward to seeing you again and send regards from the EMAF 2025 team!

The architecture of a place tells us how we live and how we want to live together. It also tells its history, and that is the history of its society. Crises, wars, fires, changes in social opinion can be visible through gaps, additions, vacancies and decay.

Under the theme Ortsbestimmungen (engl. Localisations), the Experimentalfilm Workshop e.V. is once again presenting video works, found footage and animated films by six international artists who explore the forms and contents of places and spaces in different ways. This year’s “Lichte Momente” was curated by Vera Brüggemann and Christine Gensheimer.

“Lichte Momente” will open on Thursday 5 December 2024 at 5 pm at Kunsthalle Osnabrück

You are very welcome to attend! As part of the opening, there will also be a first guided tour with the curators.

The programme will include contributions from Manuel Boden (GER), Lilli Carré (US), Barry Doupé (CA), Arianne Olthaar (NL), Eszter Szabo (HU), and Dagmar Weiss (GER).

The video works are freely accessible and can be viewed daily from 5 December 2024 to 5 January 2025 from 5pm to 10pm. We offer free guided tours every Saturday at 6pm.

How you experience “Lichte Momente” is up to you – whether you happen to be passing by, take a systematic approach and visit each work of art individually, or join a public guided tour. The tour is also an invitation to find your own rhythm in the frenzy of the run-up to Christmas and the tranquil phase around the turn of the year.

We would like to thank the City of Osnabrück, the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e.V., the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture, Spiekermann & Co. AG, Interessengemeinschaft Osnabrücker Altstadt e.V., and outdoorbeamer.com for their support.

“Lichte Momente“ is an event organised by the Experimentalfilm Workshop e.V., which also hosts the European Media Art Festival. “Lichte Momente“ has been taken place in Osnabrück since 2012.

How do we remember the past and whose voices do we echo when we talk about it? Over the coming months, EMAF, in collaboration with Kino in der LAGERHALLE, will be showing films from four decades and different parts of the world. They span different times and places, explore the blurred edges of political upheaval and uncover the buried traces of historical events. They employ various forms of documentary narrative in which personal and collective memory, the spoken word and mediated history overlap.

The series begins on 20 November at 7pm with:

The Halfmoon Files by Philip Scheffner, DE 2007, 87’ (English, Hindi, Punjabi, Gurkha with German subtitles)

“Once upon a time there was a man. He ended up in the European war. Germany took this man prisoner. He wants to return to India. If God is gracious, he will make peace soon. Then this man will leave from here.” The words of Mall Singh, spoken into a gramophone horn on 11 December 1916 in the town of Wünsdorf near Berlin, fade away with a crackling sound. 90 years later, Mall Singh is a number on an old shellac record in an archive, one of hundreds of voices of colonial soldiers from the First World War. The Halfmoon Files is a ghost story, a documentary and an investigation into the entanglements of politics, colonialism, science and the media. Philip Scheffner follows these voices to the place where they were recorded.

Admission: 6 Euro, reduced 5 Euro

The viewing process for the upcoming festival has begun, and we are very pleased to announce our new programming team today: Juan David González Monroy, Rita Macedo, Christina Stuhlberger and Clarissa Thieme will be working together with Katrin Mundt over the next few months to select the films for the International Selection and Features before presenting them at the festival. We are looking forward to the exchange and the joint work on the programme!

Juan David González Monroy is a visual artist based in Berlin. Since 2010, he has collaborated with Anja Dornieden under the moniker OJOBOCA. Their artistic practice focuses on photochemical film and explores cinema as a social ritual. OJOBOCA’s films, installations, and expanded cinema performances have been featured in numerous solo screenings and group exhibitions, including at the Museum of the Moving Image, ICA London, Wexner Center for the Arts, Anthology Film Archives, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, as well as at film festivals such as the Berlinale and the New York Film Festival.

Rita Macedo is a filmmaker and video artist based in Berlin. Since 2018 she is an artistic associate at Braunschweig University of Art, where she teaches several film related subjects. Her work operates within the realms of documentary and speculative fiction, with a focus on meaning, memory and history, and has been shown at numerous exhibitions and festivals, such as European Media Art Festival, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Shortfilm Festival Hamburg, IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, amongst others.

Christina Stuhlberger is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna and Brussels. She co-founded elephy, a collective and platform for film and audiovisual art, and serves as a guest programmer for the Courtisane Film Festival in Ghent. In addition to her artistic work, she is a doctoral researcher in the arts at the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels and teaches in the Doc Nomads international master’s program in documentary filmmaking.

Clarissa Thieme is a filmmaker and artist. Her films, installations, and performative interventions focus on the fissures between individual memory and its translation into processes of historical objectification. Her new work explores a living archive as a new commons and vulnerability as an artistic strategy of resistance and solidarity. Thieme co-founded ARchipelago, a site-specific archiving platform, and the open-archive initiative Između Nas/Between Us at the Sarajevo Video Archive. She is a PhD candidate at the Artistic Research Center (ARC) at the Vienna Film Academy (mdw).

Don’t forget to send us your latest films, installations und expanded projects. Our Call is still open until January 10: https://emaf.filmchief.com/entry-forms.

Media artists from all over the world can start entering their works for the European Media Art Festival 2025. The online platform https://emaf.filmchief.com/entry-forms is now open.

We are looking forward to receiving works from the areas of Film, Installation and Expanded (live projects such as performances, interactive works, or workshops). The deadline for entries is 10 January 2025. Our curatorial team will develop the festival programme based on these entered works.

Entering works is free of charge. Artists’ fees will be paid for all entries selected for the festival.

Reorientation of Prizes

From the next edition of the Festival, we will be reorganising the awarding of prizes. Up to now, the three festival prizes have been awarded from among all the films selected for the International Competition. In future, we will divide the available prize money equally among all the short and medium-length films selected for what will be known as the International Selection. These films will be equal winners of the EMAF Award and will receive €400 each.

We believe that films do not need a competition to prove their uniqueness. Our selection and programming is based on the dialogue that develops between films and between films and audiences. We also see the decision to dispense with competitions as a further step towards more fairness and transparency in the work of festivals. In line with the consistent payment of artists’ fees and the rejection of premiere restrictions, it is intended to strengthen the EMAF as a place where exchange and encounter take precedence over competition and exclusivity.

A jury of the VdFk will award the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics’ Association to one of the films from the International Selection. The prize is non-monetary.

German short films selected for the International Selection can be considered for the awarding of 5 reference points in accordance with current FFA regulations. For the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics´ Association, a distinction will still be made between nominated and winning films when it comes to the awarding of reference points.

The 38th European Media Art Festival will take place from 23 to 27 April 2025. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be on view until 25 May 2025.

After five days, the 37th European Media Art Festival ended yesterday in Osnabrück. We are pleased about the great interest shown in the festival and the good discussions that took place. Three prizes were awarded at the EMAF in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück on Saturday evening.

We would like to thank all artists, helpers and our sponsors, especially nordmedia, the city of Osnabrück, the Lower Saxony Foundation, the VGH Foundation, the Sievert Foundation for Science and Culture and the Osnabrücker Land Regional Association e. V.. The exhibition of the 37th EMAF can be seen at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück until May 26th.

We are pleased that the starting signal for five days of the European Media Art Festival was given yesterday evening in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. Around 1,000 people were there when Anna Jehle & Juliane Schickedanz (Head of the Kunsthalle Osnabrück), Wolfgang Beckermann (First City Councilor, City of Osnabrück), Dr. Jörg Mielke (Head of Lower Saxony State Chancellery) and Alfred Rotert & Katrin Mundt (head of EMAF) opened the festival in fairly cool temperatures.

“As international and diverse in terms of artistic approach as the selected works are, the curators of the exhibition and the film programs are just as international and diverse. And so these diverse approaches and perspectives are reflected in the 5-day program of the festival, the exhibition, the almost 100 films, the numerous performances and contributions,” said Wolfgang Beckermann, the first city councilor of the city of Osnabrück, yesterday evening said at the opening of the 37th European Media Art Festival in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück.

Accordingly, we now continue with four days of a full programme. Here we have put together some tips for you:

As part of the Sudden Flash themematic programme, we will be showing the film Memoria tomorrow (Friday) at 8:30 p.m. in the Hasetor film theater. It deals with a Scottish orchid grower, Jessica (Tilda Swinton), spends time in Bogotá with her sister and her sister’s family. An unexplained and unevidenced bang wakes her, and she tries to track it down: to recreate it, to share it with someone, to find out what it is. Swaths of indefinite stillness begin to tingle: at any moment they might be cut through by an image or a sound that seems to have no origin and, to most, no impact—a catastrophe without precedent, or consequence. Impact registers on Jessica’s face: a gasp in public, or a look of wonder, or tears. Origins are buried, occluded, built on top of, but Jessica finds herself attuned to them. A hole is found in a skull: to let something out, or let something in.

The panel How to Resist as an Artist? on Saturday at 3 p.m. in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück will address the background of the “Strike Germany” movement. Jury member Marwa Arsanios, the artist Caitlin Berrigan and the cultural theorist and philosopher Sami Khatib discuss with moderator Franziska Pierwoss about the impact of the resistance of cultural workers against the discrimination of filmmakers from No Other Land by politics and the media during and after the Berlinale can unfold. How do cultural workers deal with cancellations, scandal and repression? How do they maintain space for contradiction and disagreement without excluding individual voices from institutional contexts? The panel is intended to give guest speakers and the audience space to share their thoughts, experiences and strategies.

Also on Saturday, at 7 p.m., three prizes will be awarded in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück: the EMAF Award (worth 3,000 euros), the Dialog Award (worth 2,000 euros) and the EMAF Media Art Award of the Association of German Film Critics (worth 2,000 euros). The award ceremony will be followed at 8:30 p.m. by the live music set COOL FOR YOU.

On Sunday at 2 p.m. the performance voice under – sensory assembly can be seen in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, followed by a group discussion led by Ester M. Bergsmark and Anna Zett.

The performative film screening voice under is an invitation to bring your body to the cinema: to listen with your eyes, to see with your back, to respond to the screen with the felt sense of your own experience. Here, filmmaker Ester M. Bergsmark will present a shorter version of this transdisciplinary work, which consists of three parts: film screening, board game and meditation. Focusing on the spine and our peripheral nervous system, the performance puts into question our frontal cerebral sense of orientation, creating space for positive uncertainty and porous narratives about queer deep time, threat, dissociation, and reconnection.

30 people can take part in the performance – please register in time at presse@emaf.de.

We wish all guests and friends of the festival a good time and interesting insights at the 37th European Media Art Festival!!

Many greetings from the EMAF 2024 team!

CONCEPT AND FESTIVAL MANAGEMENT Katrin Mundt, Alfred Rotert www.emaf.de

Supporters of EMAF 2024

For International Museum Day on May 19th, the EMAF is offering a workshop with the artist Lotta Stöver in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.: “Feelers, Sensors: Seismic Vibrations & Cultural Noise”

Earth is never static, always moving. So, naturally, Earth is a conductor (and constant generator) of low frequency pressure waves (sound). In this workshop, we will build our own seismic instruments to sense; feel those vibrations that traverse Earth’s surface. We can listen to “cultural noise” through Earth, see seismic activity in real time, or amplify this messy mix of earthy vibrations to make it tactile.

Lotta Stöver is an emerging artist in the fields of media, technologies and research. Her works engage with phenomena and matters as they converse, align, disobey, transform, de/transition and mutate along with (new) technologies. Through processes of poetic engineering, digital imaging methods, writing, and involving data and matter in an embedded and embodied manner, her artifacts pose questions about (social) norms implied by natural and technological environments. Her work forms around this materially thinking-with the social domain of technologies, resulting in observations, critique, queer alternatives and utopian proposals.

Please register via e-mail at presse@emaf.de

Picture Copyright: EMAF/ Lotta Stöver

An important meeting place for emerging artists, the EMAF Campus presents current projects by classes from leading European art and film schools. This year, classes from Germany, Belgium, Norway, and Spain will be guests, presenting exhibitions and film screenings developed especially for the festival.

On the occasion of its 35th anniversary, the Academy of Media Arts Cologne is presenting a broad selection of experimental short films from recent decades, showing student productions in various media formats: from web series to material films, from found-footage music videos to autobiographical films.

The film programmes of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Kask in Ghent, which were created in 2022 and 2023 by master’s students in film, animation, and photography, move thematically between alienation from and immersion into one’s own world.

Under the title In the Belly of the Vacuum Cleaner, the Norwegian Kabelvåg School of Moving Images is developing an exhibition around the image of the vacuum cleaner, which, like our consciousness, sucks in the environment, collects it, and reassembles it into new (dis)orders.

With BLACKBIRDS SINGING IN THE DARK, the joint exhibition of the University of Osnabrück and the Universidad de la Laguna Tenerife portrays the perspectives of a young generation marked by the current presence of crises, wars, social injustices, and social traumas.

Harmony of Mindscape, another project by students from the Department of Art at Osnabrück University in collaboration with students from Osnabrück’s Music and Art School, allows visitors to experience how they react to certain stimuli and to sense the point when they change.

You can find all the information now at www.emaf.de and in the coming weeks here and on our social media channels!

We look forward to seeing you at EMAF 2024!

Accreditations are still possible until April 19th.

Many greetings from the EMAF 2024 team!

Artist in Focus: Phil Collins

EMAF is proud to present Phil Collins as this year’s Artist in Focus. Collins is internationally acclaimed for a socially engaged practice that addresses the intersections of art, politics and popular culture. Taking different forms – from films, photography and installations, to performative situations and live events – his work foregrounds aspects of lived experience and voices that have often been disregarded or suppressed.

In a newly commissioned essay Dominic Paterson asserts that Collins “uses his own strategic reproduction of normative media frames as the occasion to trouble (or queer) them. His work acknowledges the force of such frames through its reiterating of their strongly determining effects—a feature that is always itself performative in the work; always a matter of conspicuous gestures, demonstrations, enacted poses, and repetitions. The task Collins’ work has taken on in recent years, however, is not just to critique or subvert existing framings, but rather to collectively create conditions in which communities can shape, for themselves, the spaces in which they appear and perform as themselves.”

Among other works spanning more than twenty years, the films on show include Bring Down the Walls (2020), an argument for the abolition of the American prison-industrial complex and a celebration of the dance floor as a site of transcendence and liberation; his documentary musical Tomorrow Is Always Too Long (2014), a modern day city symphony and a love letter to Glasgow; as well as marxism today (prologue) (2010), which shines a light on the political and social upheavals since the fall of the Berlin Wall through the personal stories of three former teachers of Marxism-Leninism and an Olympic gymnast from the GDR.

Expanded Cinema & Performance

The collaboration with the analogue film collective LaborBerlin, which commenced last year under the title SPECTRAL. Unburdened Recollections, will be continued this year. The joint project is dedicated to the re-staging of historical Expanded Cinema works, and this year, it will present analogue multiple projections and film performances from the 1960s and 1970s. A classic of Expanded Cinema by Malcolm Le Grice (curated by Cinzia Nistico, Filmwerkplaats Rotterdam) and a recently restored work by Dutch artist Babeth Mondini-VanLoo (curated by Simona Monizza, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam) will be reconstructed. In a panel discussion, the participating artists and curators will discuss the restaging and archiving of live cinema, as well as the ethical issues surrounding the reconstruction of historical works.

Kerstin Schroedinger & Oliver Husain will premiere their new live-streaming-performance Hypericin Yellow-Red Movie (2024), which is based on research into alternative AIDS treatments in West Germany in the 1990s. Experimental medicine, photochemical processes, as well as old and new transmission media come together in unexpected ways. The performance will be shown at the festival and on drip-drop.tv, and will be accompanied by a film programme.

You can find all the information now at www.emaf.de and in the coming weeks here and on our social media channels!

We look forward to seeing you at EMAF 2024!

Accreditations are still possible until April 19th.

Feelers, Sensors – the EMAF 2024 thematic focus explores the role that sensory perception plays in the human and non-human experience of the world, and how a technologically enhanced sensorium is changing orientation and interaction in the world: making the world shareable and communicable in a different way.

We are happy to present our programme to you now! It includes the themed film programmes, the International Competition, the Feature Film section, the Artist in Focus and Expanded Cinema programmes, as well as exhibitions, many live performances, lectures, live music sets, and parties with guests from all over the world.

You can find all the information now at www.emaf.de and in the coming weeks here and on our social media channels!

We look forward to seeing you at EMAF 2024!

Accreditations are still possible here until April 19th.

The film programmes of this year’s EMAF offer a broad overview of contemporary experimental film and artists’ moving image – from current short and feature-length film to historical works and Expanded Cinema. Numerous artists will be in attendance to show and discuss their work. Nearly 100 films and film performances from all over the world will be presented.

The International Competition, which features short and medium length films, is the heart of the film programmes. In this year’s selection, many films revolve around the different layers of space and time and the question of how we learn from the past for the present. They reconstruct historical events, imagine alternative histories, and read possible paths into the future from the memories of others. The relationship to land and territory is another focus. Both documentary and experimental, the works tell stories of origins and orientation, of loss and migration, of living and staying.

Messaline Raverdy’s Ôte-toi de mon soleil (2023) sensitively documents her encounters with an elderly man who lives in a labyrinthine universe of collected and accumulated things. Meandering conversations about knowledge and memory, about capturing and holding onto the world, unfold between the filmmaker and the man as they tidy up.

In I Am Also Part of the Three Turns (2024), Monica Maria Moraru reconstructs from oral accounts, roughly gridded images, and allegorical tableaux two Romanian landscapes that were simultaneously affected by natural disasters. Personal losses and the need to improvise with what is left, overlap with the state’s deliberate erasure of space and the creation of newly built landscapes.

Vika Kirchenbauer’s essay-performance video COMPASSION AND INCONVENIENCE (2023) explores the first public exhibitions of contemporary art in London in the mid-18th century. In a series of performed scenes, historical sources are re-read and given voice in relation to the institutional conditions under which art becomes visible today.

Alee Peoples’ Hey Sweet Pea takes a humorous and playful approach to the theme of disappearance. Between re-enacted voicemail messages from her own mother and borrowings from the youth’s science fiction The Neverending Story, a narrative space opens up that attempts to capture the very real progression of nothingness, the destruction of our environment, but also the loss of loved ones.

With further films by: Razan AlSalah, Tolia Astakhishvili & James Richards, Boris Dewjatkin, Carl Elsaesser, Ismaël Iken, Mira Klug & Johannes Gierlinger, OJOBOCA, Peng Zuqiang, Leonardo Pirondi, Martyna Ratnik, Messaline Raverdy, Steve Reinke, Ann Carolin Renninger, Margaret Salmon & Maria Fusco, Reiji Saito, Clare Samuel, Deniz Şimşek, Jordan Wong, Xin Shen, Yu Wang, Micah Weber and Chris Zhongtian Yuan.

This year´s Artist in Focus will be Phil Collins. Please find out more about his programme and about our Expanded Cinema & Performance programme at EMAF 2024 in our next newsletter.

We look forward to your visit! Accreditations are still possible until April 19th.

Many greetings from the EMAF 2024 team!

Still: COMPASSION AND INCONVENIENCE, © Vika Kirchenbauer and VG Bild Kunst

The EMAF exhibition, curated by Inga Seidler and presented at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, is entitled Feelers, Sensors. It explores the possibilities and limitations of sensory perception and the environments it opens up in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The term ‘AI’ refers to the ability of computers to capture and process sensory information in a way that resembles the human perception of the world. The exhibition’s works particularly address questions regarding the role that technology plays, and may play in the future, in the context of perception, experience and the creation of meaning.

The exhibition includes works by Caitlin Berrigan, Erik Bünger, Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez, Aay Liparoto, Rita Macedo, mots (Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot), Tanita Olbrich, Pedro Oliveira and Lotta Stöver.

The artists featured in the exhibition explore machine perception, but also the human senses and their various forms of perception, as well as the perceptive abilities of plants and animals.

The starting point of Rita Macedo’s science fiction eco-dystopia Farewell recording for an observer of an unknown time and place for example is the so-called “Invasive Landscape Phenomenon,” a mysterious, spreading disease. This illness, reminiscent of a dissociative trauma reaction, has developed in a world on the brink of ecological collapse, where first-hand sensory experience has been replaced by a media alternative to physical presence. The narrator’s voice carries the viewer continuously through the unfolding narrative, interweaving essayistic digressions on capitalism, environmental destruction, technological progress, and death.

You can find more information about the exhibition here.

We look forward to your visit!

Accreditations are still possible until April 19th.

Many greetings from the EMAF 2024 team!

The 37th European Media Art Festival begins on April 24th in Osnabrück. We look forward to once again becoming an international meeting place for artists, curators, researchers, students and those interested in film and art for five days.

Film and art professionals can now register to visit the festival here.

The accreditation entitles you to free entry to all film programmes, the exhibition, performances, talks and the EMAF Campus. The accreditation deadline is April 19th. Further information can be found here.

The accreditation fee is waived for press representatives - please contact presse@emaf.de in advance, also because of discounted hotel conditions.

Details about the programme will be available here in the coming weeks. We are looking forward to your visit!

In order to orientate ourselves in the world, we connect with it through our feelings and perceptions. We scan it with our senses, thereby adjusting our proximity to and distance from the Other. This year’s thematic focus Feelers, Sensors uses films, installations, sound works, performances, and spoken contributions to explore the role that sensory perception plays regarding the human and non-human experience of the world while also examining how a technologically enhanced sensorium is changing our orientation and interaction in the world.

We are observing an increasing privatisation of space, which also manifests itself in our sensory relationship with the outside, for instance when using noise cancelling to isolate ourselves from disturbing external stimuli. Online communication, as well as “smart” or “sensitive” technologies, are transforming the way we interact with each other through our senses, raising the question as to which forms of inclusion or alienation they promote. At the same time, embodied formats from group meditations to demonstrations can communalise or organise sensory and emotional experiences.

What challenge does the sentience of other living beings pose for the human self-image and the responsibility for their habitats? What or who is perceived, publicly seen, or heard is a political question. How can suffering which exceeds the individual’s perceptual capacity or paralyses speech remain communicable? How can we develop more sensitive feelers, and more equitable sensors?

An exhibition and three film programmes are developed around the thematic focus, which will be accompanied and interactively expanded by further live formats such as performances, workshops, and talks intended as spaces for encounters and exchange.

Please find more information here We look forward to keeping you updated about the preparations for the 37th EMAF in the coming months and send best regards from the EMAF team 2024!

We have received countless works in the past few weeks and months. Thanks a lot to all artist for the submissions! Our entry platform is now closed and our commission and curators are in the middle of screening for the 37th European Media Art Festival.

At the beginning of the year, we would like to announce a change in the executive team of the European Media Art Festival: Tanja Horstmann will take over the festival’s management on 1 May 2024. Drawing on her many years of experience in the field of festival work, including the Berlinale, as well as project management for organisations such as Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Tanja Horstmann will take over the reins of the EMAF in the coming years and develop it further together with artistic director Katrin Mundt. Horstmann succeeds co-festival director Alfred Rotert, who co-founded the festival a good four decades ago and has helped shape it ever since, and who will be retiring in May.

“We are delighted to have found a suitable successor for Alfred Rotert in Tanja Horstmann. Her extensive festival experience and close ties to independent film culture were highly convincing during the selection process. We are very much looking forward to working with her!” says Katrin Mundt on behalf of the board of the EMAF supporting organisation.

Tanja Horstmann studied film and television studies at the Ruhr University in Bochum. From 2001 she worked for the International Forum of New Cinema and in 2006 she joined the Film Office of the Berlinale. She worked for Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art e.V. in various capacities. From 2007–2022 she supported the Forum section of the Berlinale during the film selection process. Since 2011, she has been responsible as project manager for a variety of film and event series organised at Arsenal, the Zeughauskino at Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, and the Kulturquartier silent green. Since 2003, she has also been organising the presentation of the women artists’ programme funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion, which is presented every two years at the Arsenal cinema.