25 FPS 2026: From Resistance to Different Realities

The 25 FPS Festival announces its 22nd edition, taking place September 22 – 26 at Kinoteka Cinema in Zagreb, and kicking off with a iconic opening performance by Guy Sherwin at Histrionski dom. Special events await us at Studio-galerija Klet and the Academy of Fine Arts during the festival, with Dispersions, a two-day seminar, to be held at Surogatkino (KIC), on September 21 & 22.

Opening with Guy Sherwin’s iconic expanded cinema performance

The festival opens on Tuesday, 22 September, with the pioneer of the British film avant-garde Guy Sherwin and a performance of his cult piece Man With Mirror, fifty years after its premiere. The artist uses a mirror and a projected film recording of his own character to create a poetic dialogue between the materiality of film and a live performance, analysing and examining the relationship between the past and the present, memory and perception.

Challenges and preoccupations of the international competition

The selection of the 22nd edition is immersed in the theme of resistance – individual and collective – traceable not only in historical artefacts and archives, but also in the attempts of penning different realities as a response to the generally accepted bad state of the world. As the selection team – Marina Kožul, Nika Petković and Tena Trstenjak – announce, the selected filmmakers from different geographic and historical backgrounds convey that a different world is still possible.

Many films in the programme explore the issues of post-colonial injustice, as well as their heritage in institutionalised racism, dominating the contemporary society. Be it hybrid essays, structural or homemade films, their authors oppose the official narratives, creating new forms of counter-memory and trying to envisage a future beyond the dark shadows of colonialism.

A Person of the Forest, the latest film by the British filmmaker and festival laureate Miranda Pennell materialises the consequences of the colonial past in the spirit of an orangutan. The selection includes another laureate, the American filmmaker Ben Russell, whose film Another Earth dizzily takes us “from mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin” to portray the chaos of today.

Lost, forgotten and once banned languages and the attempts of bringing them back to life in a cinematic form are the topic of Hidden Materials by Colombian filmmaker Luis Esguerra Cifuentes, as well as Lebanese filmmaker Robert Minassian and his film When Flowers Dream of Us, speaking about the sacrifices and dreams of his ancestors. Thai artist Tulapop Saenjaoren in his magical Local Sensations portrays a form of resistance to idolatry and alienation, and Austrian artist Johann Lurf is treading the same path of disclosing the alienation of locality and topography in his Forever… Forever, captured by a custom made 65mm camera.

The filmmakers often abandon themselves to intimate, oneiric and psychedelic visions, out of need for escape, like the existential essay Câine pierdut by a young Parisian artist Jules Bourbon, or out of sincere love for the analogue medium, like in the case of the Italian intermedia artist Martin Moolhuijsen and his Katabasis, based on hand-painted 35mm slides.

The international competition features 25 films in total, and the Croatian section Reflexes includes eight works by Croatian authors.

Grand Jury & Critics Jury

This year’s Grand Jury consists of the British experimental filmmaker and artist Alia Syed, Spanish film scholar Gloria Vilches and Argentinian-American film historian and curator Federico Windhausen. The award in the Croatian competition section will be judged by the Critics’ Jury, including curator Tena Bakšaj, film critic and co-programmer with Slovenian Cinematheque Anja Banko, essayist and critic An. Fazekaš. In addition to the audience award, the festival also presents the Green DCP Award at the discretion of the 25 FPS Audiovisual Research Association to a Croatian film from the programme.

All the information about the film programmes and events, as well as a comprehensive schedule, are published on the official website. Admission to all the screenings and events is free of charge.