25 FPS 2025: Endings We Made
21st 25 FPS Festival will take place from September 23 to 27, 2025 at Kinoteka cinema in Zagreb, with a grand opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art. After Zagreb, the festival continues at Art-kino cinema in Rijeka (September 30, October 1 and 3), and at Multimedia Cultural Centre Split (October 30).
Festival opening
The festival opens on Tuesday, September 23 with an exhibition by Italian visual artist Rosa Barba entitled Meaning Distances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, with a selection of her sculptural film installations. In her conceptual research, Barba uses the landscape and human-induced environmental changes to examine the instability of knowledge, myths, and scientific experiments in changing socio-political and cultural conditions. In addition to her work being featured in numerous international collections, Barba has had solo exhibitions at a number of prestigious institutions, such as New York’s MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, and Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie.
A talk with the artist will take place before the opening, and there will be a musical performance by artist Ivona Eterović (tonota) in the evening.
Fragility & humanity
A total of 25 films will be screened in the international competition program, and 5 films in Croatian competition program Reflexes.
As announced by the festival’s selectors, Marina Kožul, Nika Petković and Tena Trstenjak, this year’s films share the notion of the end of the world that we have brought upon ourselves. Many titles focus on humanity and its conceptual and literal fragility, turbulent existential crises and rampant wars, and cracks in time, space and ourselves; all of this creates an image of the world that we ourselves have fashioned. The influence of technology is crucial here, they add, but the focus is no longer on its relationship to reality only, but on the impossibility of distinguishing between the real and the virtual, the analog and the digital.
The international competition includes many new films by authors familiar to the festival audience, among others British avant-garde filmmaker John Smith with his charming film Being John Smith, Canadian experimental film-maker Mike Hoolboom, who brings us computer collage Wind, Paris-based Chinese filmmaker Yuyan Wang (winner of the audience award in 2021) with another visually attractive, synthetic film Green Gray Black Brown, American filmmaker Zachary Epcar, who at the 17th 25 FPS won the Grand Prix for his Canyon, and now he returns with the fantastic Sinking Feeling. Dorian Jespers, winner of the festival’s Grand Prix and audience award 2020 for Sun Dog, will draw us into the Kafkaesque drama Loynes.
Moroccan-French artist Randa Maroufi, a member of the grand jury at the 16th 25 FPS, has created a complex reconstruction of L’mina, which won the award for innovation (Leitz Cine Discovery Prize) at the Cannes Film Festival. American visual artist Gabriel Abrantes won the Grand Prix for his Palaces of Pity in 2012, and he enters this year’s program with his witty Arguments in Favour of Love. The program also includes a new film by French visual artist Nicolas Gourault, Their Eyes, which follows Global South micro-workers teaching artificial intelligence how to control autonomous vehicles. Also visually impressive is the work of biochemist-filmmaker Émilien Dubuc, ODAMADO, described as “an imperfect manual for storing memories in DNA.” With her Momentum, Palestinian-Egyptian filmmaker Nada El-Omari demonstrates the enduring power of images to bear witness.
Juries & Awards
The Grand Jury of the 21st 25 FPS Festival is composed of British critic and theorist Erika Balsom, Belgian curator of cinema Stoffel Debuysere, and American filmmaker and collage artist Michael Robinson. The award in the Croatian category (Reflexes) will be decided by a jury of critics consisting of Bartol Babić Vukmir, Dario Dunatov, and Vanja Gajić. The festival will also award the Audience Award and the Green DCP Award, which is awarded to a Croatian film in the selection by the Association for Audiovisual Research 25 FPS.
We also expect a rich accompanying program, curated programs by jury members, a panel on Film Festivals and Their New Realities, and two live audiovisual performances.
Admission to all festival screenings and programs is free, with mandatory collection of free tickets at the Kinoteka cinema box office.