Painted films, corografías and tracing collectivity in Jury's Choice programs

For the upcoming 25 FPS Festival, the members of our Grand Jury - filmmakers Alia Syed, film programmer and scholar Gloria Vilches and film historian Federico Windhausen - have curated special programs for challenging traditional structures and conventions, featuring ‘painted films’, ‘corografías’, films in the interplay between voice, text and image.

Spanish film scholar Gloria Vilches has coordinated Xcèntric, the CCCB's experimental film program, and other audiovisual projects at the center. For 25 FPS, she has prepared a selection of films at the intersection of painting and cinema, titled Painted Films and Film Paintings. Opting for less known and less canonical artists, filmmakers who paint and painters who make films, her aim is to “point to the factor of time as the key to the development of these types of intermedial works that expand the possibilities of painting,” and, of course, cinema as such. Vilches will present her program on Wednesday, September 23, at 4 pm.

Federico Windhausen is Buenos Aires-based film historian and curator, and the editor of A Companion to Experimental Cinema, to be published in Croatian translation during the Festival. Windhausen’s selection brings recent work from Latin America, offering a series of speculative corografías, films that map alternative geography in visualizations of urban and rural landscapes. In his own words, these films “delve into parallels and points of intersection between human and non-human, organic and synthetic, animate and inanimate matter. Some evoke cosmovisions, others suggest conjectural chronicles, and each attempt to bring a new spatial imaginary into the realm of the moving image.” A Chorographic Cinema will be screened on Thursday, September 24, at 4 pm.

Alia Syed is an experimental filmmaker and artist of Welsh-Indian descent, known for films that disrupt traditional narrative structures to create complex explorations of migration and colonialism, identity and place, memory and the fragmentation of diasporic identity. Her selection, titled Under the Dome of the Bruised Sky, includes a number of films that explore different forms of spectatorship, activated through the interplay between voice, text and image, somewhere between desire and loss. As Syed herself says, these all find “contrasting ways of veiling gendered and racialised bodies, oscillating between hypersexualisation and desexualisation, rejecting the quantifiable gaze of neoliberalism”. Syed will screen her program on Friday, September 25, at 4 pm.

Stills: [1] Robert Breer - Blazes (1961), [2] Renate Kordon - Buntes blut (1985), [3] Pablo Mazzolo - Fotooxidación (2013), [4] Wallace Douglas - Breu febril (2024), [5] Alia Syed - Swan (1987), [6] Niki Kohandel - Albalo (2021).