Each summer ΕΜΣT transforms its rooftop into one of the most impressive outdoor cinemas in Athens, CineFIX, recalling the name of the former brewery in which it is housed. With panoramic views of the entire city, including the Acropolis, Museum’s rooftop terrace provides ideal conditions for the screening of works in moving image. The programme starts on 25 May on a weekly basis.
SEPTEMBER
Thursday 4 September| 21:00
As part of its longstanding interest in the rich and complex histories of the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, EMΣΤ is delighted to host a special evening dedicated to the films of the acclaimed Albanian artist and filmmaker Driant Zeneli, who is currently featured in the exhibition Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-human Rights. The evening will feature the world premiere of his latest film, titled When Winds in Monsoon Play, the White Peacock Will Sweep Away in addition to earlier and more recent short films.
A Q&A with the director will follow the screenings.
SCREENING PROGRAMME
When Winds in Monsoon Play, the White Peacock Will Sweep Away, 2025
21’21’’
A new opera-film by artist Driant Zeneli. Set within the Parliament of Dhaka and the Srihatta Art Centre in Sylhet (Bangladesh), the work unfolds as an allegorical fable featuring a white peacock who falls in love with his own tear. The story, paced by the six seasons of the Bengali calendar, guides us through multiple layers of interpretation, addressing political and ecological themes, taking reference from the movement of the “July Revolution, 2024”, in which more than a thousand people died during a series of protests and significant governmental changes in Bangladesh, culminating in the downfall of the long-standing Sheikh Hasina. The Baroque soundtrack is rearranged by Maestro Francesco Aliberti and performed by countertenor Pasquale Auricchio. The music, arranged and composed in a contemporary style, merges Baroque influences with traditional Bengali musical instruments and elements, creating an original and hybrid score.
These Sweet Murky Waters, 2023
13’ 16”
A poetic journey through art, memory, and ecology, this film reimagines Albania’s first woman scientist, Sabiha Kasimati, as a contemporary Prometheus. Blending history, mythology, and robotics, it honors her passion for biodiversity and defiance of oppression, transforming her tragic fate into a luminous act of resistance and rebirth.
The Trilogy: The Animals. Once Upon a Time … in a Present Time, 2019 – 2022
Chapter 1: No Wise Fish Would Escape Without Flying, 2019
7’ 10”
In a playful allegory, children help a trapped fish escape from a shark and net. The setting is Kosovo’s National Library, a landmark futuristic building from the times of former Yugoslavia. Blending imagination, history, and technology, the film transforms the iconic brutalist architecture into fluid possibility, entrusting wisdom to youth and reimagining knowledge as a living, liberating force.
Chapter 2: How Deep Can a Dragonfly Swim Under the Ocean?, 2021
11’ 23”
A dragonfly trapped within Tirana’s Pyramid, a monument to dictator Enver Hoxha, evokes resilience and confinement. The film is inspired by a man who spent 21 years in prison in Albania in long periods of isolation. In order to pass the time he improvised small robotic flying insects, which Zeneli brings to life in the film. Feeding on an octopus fossil yet unable to fly, the dragonfly becomes a metaphor for humanity’s struggle to transcend imposed limits, blending memory, architecture, and transformation into a meditation on freedom and adaptation.
Chapter 3: The Firefly Keeps Falling and the Snake Keeps Growing, 2022
11’ 46”
Inspired by an ancient fable, this film unfolds within Skopje’s fire-scarred Central Post Office, another Brutalist icon from Yugoslav times, now among UNESCO’s most endangered buildings. Developed collaboratively with engineering students, it transforms a monument of fragility into a site of imagination, resilience, and collective creation.
Those Who Tried to Put the Rainbow Back in the Sky, 2012
7’50”
Set in the Albanian village of Velmisht, this fable-like film follows three people and a duck who discover a fallen rainbow on a concrete ship. Blurring myth, memory, and lived time, their attempt to return it skyward becomes a meditation on dreams, origins, and suspended destinies.
When Ι Grow Up Ι Want to Be an Artist, 2007
21’55”
The artist’s father, once a regime painter during the time of the dictatorship of Enver Xoxha in Albania, and later a forger of visas, reflects on art as political and social survival. As he paints his son in the style once reserved for dictators, narration weaves personal failure with Albania’s turbulent history, blurring truth and lies into a haunting portrait.
Too Late, 2008
1’00”
The shapes of letters forming the words “too late” are installed on a house rooftop. The video documents the words’ shadows moving across the screen as the position of the sun changes during the day, so that when the clouds obscure the sunlight, the words disappear. “Too late” is the emblem of time that never stops. A notion of time that is irrational, changeable and elusive, and that human beings strive to control and measure.
Total duration: 95’
Thursday 11 September| 20:30
Chris Jordan
Albatross, 2017
97′
CineFIX presents Chris Jordan’s documentary Albatross (2017), resulting from eight years of filming on the remote Midway Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean. This island, one of the most isolated places on Earth, hosts the world’s largest colony of Laysan albatrosses. Jordan’s film captures the tragic impact of plastic pollution, revealing that over 97% of dead albatross chicks found on the island had ingested plastic floating on the ocean’s surface, mistakenly assuming it was food.
The film offers an intimate portrayal of the albatrosses’ lives, focusing on their deep familial bonds and the cycles of life and death. These visual narratives serve as a powerful metaphor for humanity’s relationship with nature and the consequences of overconsumption. Albatross transcends traditional environmental documentaries by blending beauty with sorrow, urging viewers to confront the environmental crises we face. Jordan’s work is not just a depiction of a tragedy but a call to action, emphasizing the need for collective responsibility and change.
Thursday 18 September | 20:00
Gints Zilbalodis
Flow, 2024
85′
CineFIX presents the unique, poignant animated film Flow (2024), directed by Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis.
With a stunning, almost dreamlike aesthetic, it tells the story of a cat surviving a devastating flood. The world it once knew is gone, and it must join forces with other animals — a wolf, a capybara, a lemur, and a secretary bird — aboard an improvised raft, navigating a deserted, flooded planet without humans.
The film does not contain a single word of dialogue, yet manages to conjure complex emotions and raise profound philosophical questions through movement, rhythm, sound, and music alone. The relationships between the animals develop slowly and naturally — every glance, every gesture, and every conflict is imbued with meaning. Flow speaks of survival, cooperation, and the power of empathy, without ever “saying” anything — only showing.
Flow won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 2025 Oscars and it has been hailed as an ecological fable, an allegory for the modern world and its impasses, prompting the audience to ponder profound questions: What remains when we’re gone? Who inherits our world? And how can we survive—or even thrive—without words, through actions alone?
Thursday 25 September | 18:00 & 20:00
Screening Room
Laetitia Dosch
Dog on Trial, 2024
83′
Ιn French with Greek subtitles
CineFIX#special presents the film Dog on Trial by Laetitia Dosch on . A courtroom comedy with an unpredictable ending, about a dog put on trial for being what he is. The film won the Palm Dog Award at the Cannes Festival 2024.
In this highly original crossbreed gem where Louis Buñuel meets early animation, slapstick comedy, and philosophical comedy, emerges the delirious reality of unconventional femininity – finally, off the leash: April, an independently-minded lawyer known for taking on lost causes, resolves to secure a victory in her next case. However, when Dariuch, another seemingly hopeless client, asks her to defend his faithful canine companion, Cosmos, April is unable to resist. She dives into the absurdity of defending a canine client, confronting not only the legal system but also advocating for both women’s and animal rights. A lively and at times comical court case unfolds – where a dog’s life hangs in the balance.
AUGUST
Thursday 21 August | 21:00
Α selection of short films by acclaimed Greek director Menelaos Karamaghiolis.
The screening features three films by Karamaghiolis that shed light on aspects of coexistence, dependency, and care between humans and animals — viewed through a social, political, and existential lens.
Based on true stories, these works delve into themes of abandonment, solidarity, and companionship in a world where marginalised lives — both human and non-human — claim space and are given a voice.
A Q&A with Menelaos Karamaghiolis will follow the screenings.
GREEK ANIMAL RESCUE, 2017
Documentary
Digital video, single channel, colour, stereo sound
64’
A gravely ill, abused three-legged stray dog, abandoned in the industrial wasteland of Aspropyrgos, an industrial part of Athens; a London-based charity whose mission is to help the neglected animals of Greece; a group of young volunteers who patrol Aspropyrgos and attend to the strays – these are the characters in a film that takes place in a dystopian space for abandoned animals. Does the sick three-legged hound stand any chance of getting adopted, becoming healthy again and running across the fields of Essex? Why are the Greekies – the strays from Greece – so popular when it comes to being adopted abroad? With an unexpected ending, the film tries to discover whether there is any hope for the doomed dogs and and a disenfranchised part of Athens. A cinematic allegory of the circumstances in Greece during the crisis and its unsung victims – based on true stories taking place in ‘invisible’ districts of Athens that tourists and Athenians themselves often ignore. The stories of stray animals depict – with a cinematic precision – everything that happens in Greece in times of crisis and how a a London based charity, becomes motivated to start a European campaign aimed at awakening all those who live protected but also trapped in big cities.
SHOULD DISABLED ANIMALS PUT TO SLEEP?, 2023
Digital video, single channel, colour, stereo sound
17’ 20’’
A plumber cannot tolerate seeing disabled animals being euthanized before their time just because animal wheelchairs are expensive and hard to purchase from abroad. The film follows his journey over 8 years, along with the stories of the stray dog Aris — who lost his back legs just after finding a family — and the also stray Maria, who was hit by a car outside the National Rehabilitation Center in Ilion, Athens. The 3 heroes of this film redefine the concepts of disability and solidarity and raise serious questions about euthanasia.
A BIRD IN SEARCH OF A CAGE, 2012-2019
Digital video, single channel, colour, stereo sound
11’ 26”
Inside his cell, a juvenile prisoner raises a bird that flies freely outside its cage, becoming his closest friend and a symbol of freedom within the prison walls. Little by little, in a film shot over 5 years, the prisoner becomes a kind of “prison guard” when he realizes that the sexual awakening of the bird may upset their relationship— prompting it to fly away from the cell they share.
Thursday 28 August | 21:00
Johan Grimonprez
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, 2024
150′
EMΣT presents the acclaimed, award-winning documentary film Soundtrack to a Coup d’État by Johan Grimonprez. A documentary that blends politics, music, and archival footage shedding light on the 1960 coup in Congo and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Through the sounds of jazz and the voices of Black resistance, the film unfolds an audiovisual portrait of colonialism, power, and liberation.
A Q&A with the director will follow the screening.
SYNOPSIS
Jazz and decolonization are entwined in this historical rollercoaster that rewrites the Cold War episode that led musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach to crash the UN Security Council in protest against the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. It is 1960, six months after the admission of sixteen newly independent African countries to the UN, a political earthquake that shifts the majority vote from the colonial powers to the Global South. As Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe in indignation at the UN’s complicity in the overthrow of Lumumba, the US State Department swings into action by sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. Featuring excerpts from My Country, Africa by Andrée Blouin (narrated by Marie Daulne aka Zap Mama), Congo Inc. by In Koli Jean Bofane, To Katanga and Back by Conor Cruise O’Brien (narrated by Patrick Cruise O’Brien), and audio memoirs by Nikita Khrushchev.
BIOGRAPHY
Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of theory and practice, between art and cinema, going beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, other and self, mind and brain to weave new pathways in how we perceive our realities. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work depicts intimate stories that brush up against the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our collective imagination, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities. Grimonprez’s feature films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo, selected by the Guardian as one of the “30 great works in the history of video art”), Double Take (2009, in collaboration with writer Tom McCarthy) and Shadow World (2016, in combination with investigative journalist Andrew Feinstein) won the Best Documentary Feature Award at the 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Traveling the festival circuit from the Berlinale, Sundance to Tribeca, Grimonprez’s films have garnered several Best Director awards, the 2005 ZKM International Media Award, an Independent Spirit Award, and the 2009 Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État received the Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature and won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, along with awards for Best Editing and Best Writing from the International Documentary Association (IDA). The film also won the ABC News VideoSource award for its use of news footage and the Audience Award at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
JULY
Thursday 3 July| 21:00
We animals are disappearing…
Mike Dibb, Chris Rawlence, John Berger
Parting Shots from Animals, 1980
60’
Ang Siew Ching
High-Rise Pigs, 2025
18’ 6”
Tiziana Pers
The Age of Remedy, 2024
4’ 47’’
Total Running time: 84’
This compelling screening programme brings together three distinct works that interrogate the human-animal relationship through political, ethical, and emotional prisms. Parting Shots from Animals (1980) by Mike Dibb, Chris Rawlence, and John Berger is a seminal documentary inspired by Berger’s essay Why Look at Animals?. Narrated by Berger, it adopts the point of view of animals, critiquing our exploitative treatment of them while recalling past interspecies kinship. Ang Siew Ching’s High-Rise Pigs (2025) turns its gaze toward China’s vertical mega-farms, focusing on the Zhongxin Kaiwei Pig Building. Through digital imagery, models, and documentary footage, it dissects the mechanisation and invisibility of industrial slaughter, exposing capitalism’s systemic devaluation of animal life. In contrast, The Age of Remedy (2024) by Tiziana Pers offers a hopeful, participatory gesture. This short film documents the artist’s performative contract with her son to stop eating animals when using a specially acquired plate, transforming an everyday object into a tool of ethical commitment. Together, the films challenge us to reconsider our complicity in animal abuse and imagine new relational paradigms with them.
Mike Dibb, Chris Rawlence, John Berger
Parting Shots from Animals, 1980
60’
Parting Shots from Animals, directed by acclaimed British documentary film maker Mike Dibb, was inspired by John Berger’s essay Why Look at Animals? which lends its title to the exhibition and has been a significant point of reference. The documentary consists of a diverse series of arresting “films within a film”, each presented as if made about humans from the perspective of the animals whose lives we may appear to celebrate, but continue to exploit and to destroy. The film decries the commodification and exploitation of animals as opposed to earlier forms of human-animal relationships that were more mutually beneficial, while highlighting our obsession with defining the world in our own image without consideration for other non-human life with which we share the planet. While John Berger doesn’t appear in the film and wasn’t directly involved in its making, he narrates to great effect the text he co-wrote. Its provocative opening sequence sets the tone: “We animals are disappearing. We have made a film, not so much about us, the animals, but about you, the people…”. The film was made for the seminal BBC documentary series Omnibus, broadcast mainly on BBC One. It ran from 1967 until 2003, and won 12 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards during its 35-year history.
BIOGRAPHIES
John Berger was born in 1926 in London, UK; he died in Antony, France, in 2017. John Berger was a highly influential writer and thinker whose 1972 book Ways of Seeing revolutionised art history. His work examined how ideology is conveyed through visual media and inspired generations of scholars. Berger also wrote extensively on human-animal relationships, most notably the essay, “Why Look at Animals?” in his 1980 volume, About Looking. A novelist, critic, and activist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972 and used his platform to advocate for workers, migrants, and the oppressed.
Mike Dibb was born in West Yorkshire in 1940. Mike Dibb is an award-winning filmmaker who has directed and produced documentaries on art, literature, music, science, and sport. Best known for his collaborations with John Berger, including Ways of Seeing and Parting Shots from Animals, his films have had a lasting impact on visual culture. His work, which spans a range of productions for BBC and Channel 4, has received accolades, including a BAFTA and an Emmy, cementing his reputation as a leading figure in documentary filmmaking.
Chris Rawlence was born in 1945. Chris Rawlence is a director, producer, and writer specialising in science and documentaries focused on the arts. His work, featured on BBC, Channel 4, and US networks, often explores neurology and made-for-TV opera, and his projects push the boundaries of documentary storytelling, merging science with artistic expression. He produced Parting Shots from Animals, a film inspired by John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?”.
Ang Siew Ching
High-Rise Pigs, 2025
18′ 6″
High-Rise Pigs is a film by Ang Siew Ching that explores the industrial production of pigs, and how these living, sentient, intelligent beings are turned into commodified meat. Using the Zhongxin Kaiwei Pig Building in China’s Hubei province as a focal point, the work examines the inner workings of a factory farm situated next to a small rural village. At 26 storeys, it is the largest single-building pig farm in the world, with a capacity to slaughter 1.2 million pigs per year. These high-rise farms are China’s response to its demand for pork, the most popular animal protein in the country. The Pig Building here becomes a framework through which technologies of reproduction, mechanisation, and containment are interrogated. Blending architectural models, digital imagery, and documentary footage, the work exposes the rationalised systems that control and reconfigure the pig’s tragic life cycle, revealing broader structures that treat animal life as a source for profit. Once the pigs enter the slaughterhouse, they are transformed into commodities, and their deaths become nearly imperceptible through a process of industrialised killing. This system obscures animal suffering, masking violence beneath an aesthetic of efficiency.
By mirroring this formal opacity in her filmmaking, Ang Siew Ching lays bare the well-hidden, horrific conditions in which millions of animals are kept worldwide and highlights the estrangement of humans from animals under late capitalism. High-Rise Pigs invites viewers to confront the systemic conditions that underpin the annual slaughter of 1.5 billion pigs (China slaughters almost half of these), revealing the industrial infrastructures that render this violence invisible, efficient and routine.
BIOGRAPHY
Ang Siew Ching was born in Singapore; she lives and works in Helsinki, Finland, and Singapore. Ang Siew Ching works primarily in film, examining the tension between culture, nature, and infrastructure and exploring how lands have been shaped, bent, and destroyed by humans in their pursuit of development. Her films portray landscapes continually reshaped by human intervention, reflecting the so-called Anthropocene’s relentless modification of the natural world, presenting a restless landscape, never at peace with itself, reshaped again and again to the detriment of non-human lives.
Tiziana Pers
The Age of Remedy, 2024
4’ 47’’
Tiziana Pers presents a poetic meditation on ritual, responsibility, and coexistence. Through a video documenting her performance‑objects—hand‑painted plate sets featuring the slogan “The age of remedy is now! Revolution is on your plate”—participants must sign a numbered “contract” pledging not to eat meat, fish, or animal derivatives on them. The contract leaves it open for participants to decide whether to embrace the proposed idea beyond the scope of this symbolic agreement, emphasising the power of personal choice. Starting with her son’s private signing in 2021, documented in the film, the work explores how a simple daily gesture—placing a plate on the table—can become a symbolic act toward empathy and planetary survival.
BIOGRAPHY
Tiziana Pers was born in Trivignano Udinese, Italy; she lives and works in Trivignano Udinese, Italy. Pers is an artist and animal rights activist who, in 2011, with her sister Isabella Pers, co-founded RAVE, a ’metaproject’ exploring contemporary art’s role in understanding the otherness represented by animals. Her animal rescue operations and actions in the public domain, as well as their resulting documentation in paintings, video, and installation, urge us to reconsider our position in the light of a speciesist consciousness. RAVE, located in an ancient Friulian borgo, invites participants to share space with trees rescued from felling and animals saved from slaughter through Tiziana’s ongoing project Art History. This in-progress participatory experience fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and artistic research in collaboration with other artists.
Thursday 10 July | 21:00
Andrea Arnold
Cow, 2021
94’
As part of its ongoing CineFIX screening programme, on Thursday, July 10 at 21:00, EMΣT presents the documentary film Cow (2021), by Oscar-winning director Andrea Arnold, in collaboration with the Greek streaming platform Cinobo.
The only documentary by acclaimed British filmmaker Andrea Arnold (American Honey, Fish Tank, Big Little Lies) brings us up close to the daily life of a dairy cow and promises to shake the way we see animals and the invaluable things they provide us.
Synopsis
A cinematic portrait of the life of two dairy cows, that brings us closer to their beauty and the challenges they face in their everyday life, making us see in a realistic and not romantic way, everything that they offer us.
Andrea Arnold Biography
Andrea Arnold studied directing at the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles. After making several short films, she won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for Wasp in 2005. Her first feature film, Red Road (2006), won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Carl Foreman Award at the BAFTA Awards. In 2009, Fish Tank, starring Michael Fassbender and Katie Jarvis, won the Jury Prize at Cannes and the BAFTA Award for Best British Film. In 2011, she directed Wuthering Heights, an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, which premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival and won the Golden Osella for Best Cinematography. In 2016, American Honey, starring Sasha Lane and Shia LaBeouf, won the Jury Prize at Cannes. In 2018, she directed the second season of the HBO series Big Little Lies.
Credits
Director: Andrea Arnold
Producer: Kat Mansoor
Director of Photography: Magda Kowalczyk (sometimes listed as Magdalena Kowalczyk)
Editors: Rebecca Lloyd, Jacob Secher Schulsinger, Nicolas Chaudeurge
Sound: Nicolas Becker
Sound Design: Raphaël Sohier, Carolina Santana
Production Sound Mixer (Sound Recording): Nicky French
Thursday 17 July | 21:00
The Lives of Non-human Others
EMΣT presents, three experimental documentary videos from the exhibition Why look at animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives. Through different narrative models, artists with radically different approaches touch upon the issue of human intervention on our living other.
Cheng Xinhao
March of the Elephants, 2022
41′ 21″
Cheng Xinhao’s essay film March of the Elephants is the first work realised in his latest research series Tales about the South of Clouds initiated in 2021, in which the artist traces the oral literary traditions of China’s Yunnan province and its accompanying physical manifestation by immersing himself in specific fields and encounters. The work March of the Elephants discusses the historic movements and social symbols of elephants along the Lancang River in Yunnan, bordering Myanmar. Documenting the movements of elephants in and out of their natural habitats, the film reveals the construction of contemporary reality rooted in ancient legend and political discourse, and the multiple uses of the animal by humans, therein.
BIOGRAPHY
Cheng Xinhao was born in the Yunnan Province, China. He lives and works in Kunming, China. Cheng’s works are usually based on long-term field studies, centred around his hometown in Yunnan Province. With videos, installations, photographs and words, he personally investigates the polyphonic relationships between logic, discourses, knowledge, and the ways in which nature, society, and history play within them.
Ιgor Grubić
Ingresso Animali Vivi, 2023
14′ 40″
Do animals born in captivity dream of freedom? Are they aware they are bred to be a product? These are some of the questions raised by Igor Grubić in this latest experimental film. Shot at night inside a former slaughterhouse in Italy, Ingresso Animali Vivi (Live Animal Entrance) is a cross between documentary and fiction. The protagonist, a dog, is the only animal to enter and exit this spectral chamber of horrors alive. The non-human point of view chosen by the artist intends to highlight the feeling of compassion and empathy between the dog and the animals destined from birth to become products for our tables; their skeletal presence hovers in this “factory of death”. Grubić creates an alarming, chilling atmosphere that confronts the viewers with the evident
BIOGRAPHY
Igor Grubić was born in Zagreb, Croatia, where he currently lives and works. Igor Grubić has been active as a multimedia artist from the beginning of the 1990s. His critical, socio-politically committed practice – which includes site-specific interventions in public spaces, photography, and film – is characterised by long-term engagement and research. It focuses on political situations of the past and present, from an in-depth exploration of the fate of historical monuments and the demise of industry, to an examination of the predicament of minority communities and the plight of factory-farmed animals. Though grounded in documentary tradition, Grubić’s work in photography and film is characterised by an affective and empathic approach, which is deeply humane and often poetic.
Rainio & Roberts
To Teach a Bird to Fly, 2020
24′ 21″
The hybrid documentary-fiction film To Teach a Bird to Fly thematises extinction, climate change and our relationship with other species. It presents a fictionalised story told from a future perspective, reflecting on our present moment. The film imagines a post-climate-crisis world in which the environment has reached a relative equilibrium. The protagonist recounts events from the past – stories told by her grandmother, who took care of endangered Northern Βald Ibis birds. She is moved by her grandmother’s dedication to breeding and hand-raising the birds on the brink of extinction and by the profound interspecies connections that formed in the process.
BIOGRAPHIES
Minna Rainio was born in Kangasala, Finland and Mark Roberts was born in Canterbury, UK. They live and work in Helsinki, Finland. Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts are award-winning filmmakers and artists producing films and large-scale moving image installations that deal with topics such as migration and climate change and their impact on people’s individual experiences and histories. Most of their works use the form of documentary fiction to confront the audience and destabilise perceived boundaries and perceptions of time, space, and society.
JUNE
Sunday 1 June | 21:00
Rumba Rules, New Genealogies, 2020
Duration, 107 ‘
Feature documentary
CA/BE/DRC/FR
Lingala and French spoken (ST EN / ST GR)
Directors: David N. Bernatchez and Sammy Baloji with the collaboration of Kiripi Katembo Siku
Image: Kiripi Katembo Siku, Sammy Baloji, David N. Bernatchez, Nelson Makengo
Sound: David N. Bernatchez, Dolet Malalu, Serge Makobo
Editing: David N. Bernatchez
Colourgrading: Miléna Trivier
Sound design and mix: Simon Gervais
Producers: Rosa Spaliviero and David N. Bernatchez
Associate producers: Carlo Lechea, Kiripi Katembo Siku, Serge Makobo
Permeating the daily life of one of the great orchestras of the current generation, Rumba Rules proposes an incursion into the arcanes of a monumental African music. An essay on the meaning of self and rootedness, the film culminates in a kind of urban polyphony.
Ya Mayi, Lumumba, Xéna La Guerrière, Pitchou Travolta, Alfred Solo, Soleil Patron and many others: nearly thirty artists feed the creative life of the Brigade Sarbati Orchestra. By entering the group and the city of Kinshasa, the film gets into the rumba as if it were penetrating a rootstock. Through studio work, rehearsals and concerts, different portraits offer a foray into the dynamics and stories of this highly acclaimed Congolese music. From local roots to the patrons from the diaspora, the voices of the Rumba Rules polyphony are past and present.
Executive production: Paysdenvie and Twenty Nine Studio & Production
Associate production: Mutotu and Idea
In coproduction with: Mu.ZEE (Ostende) and Festival d’Automne à Paris
With the support of: CALQ-Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec; FRQSC-Fond de Recherche du Québec sur la Société et la Culture; PRIM-Productions Réalisations Indépendantes de Montréal; SPIRA-Coopérative de cinéastes indépendants
The screening will be followed by a discussion between Sammy Baloji, David N. Bernatchez, Katerina Gregos and ioLi Tzanetaki.
Biographies:
Sammy Baloji (b. 1978, Lubumbashi, DR Congo) lives and works between Lubumbashi and Brussels. Since September 2019 he has been working on his PhD artistic research project “Contemporary Kasala and Lukasa: towards a Reconfiguration of Identity and Geopolitics” at Sint Lucas Antwerpen. A Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, he has received numerous fellowships, awards and distinctions, notably at the African Photography Encounters of Bamako and the Dakar Biennale, and was a laureate of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In 2019-2020, he was a resident of the French Academy of Rome – Villa Medici. Since 2018, he has been teaching at the Sommerakademie in Salzburg. Sammy Baloji co-founded in 2008 the Rencontres Picha/Biennale de Lubumbashi. His solo exhibition entitled Echoes of History, Shadows of Progress, curated by iOLi Tzanetaki, is on view at EΜΣΤ until the 2nd November. Apart from his numerous solo exhibitions Baloji has also participated in several major group exhibitions including: the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023), the Architecture Biennale of Venice (2023), the 15th Sharjah Biennial (2023), Sydney Biennial (2020), documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens, 2017), the Lyon Biennial (2015), the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), the Photoquai Festival at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris, 2015). In 2023, he ranked 11th in the Power 100, the annual list of the “most influential people in art” by the British magazine Art Review. His first solo exhibition at Imane Farès, 802. That is where, as you heard, the elephant danced the malinga. The place where they now grow flowers (2016) is now part of the collection of TATE, London.
David Nadeau Bernatchez is a Quebec artist and researcher who works in between boundaries. Sound, moving images and memories: the core of his work grew in music and cinema. It reached new dimensions between 2006 and 2013, when he worked on a PhD in anthropology and history about congolese urban musics (EHESS Paris and Laval University, 2013). Director of many short films (Red Devil [2025], Ludovica [2018], Joseph Samuel Jacques Julien [2015], Solo Kinshasa [2013], Des Temps Morts [2009]), Nadeau-Bernatchez co-directed and co-produced the feature-length documentary Rumba Rules, New Genealogies [2020]. His film work nowadays focuses on archive and memory, experimental narrative and performing cinema. He also curates and writes in various forms, collaborates with various artists and collectives such as Entours Studio (which he co-founded in 2025), Orchestre-d’hommes-orchestres, Vu Photo and Bureau de l’APA. His films, lectures and performances have been presented on various stages, contexts and countries. Rooting and uprooting are at the heart of his work.
Thursday 5 June | 20: 30
AKOE/AMFI: The Story of a Revolution (*Just to sleep on his chest…), 2023
Special screening at CineFIX in collaboration with Athens Pride.
ΕΜΣΤ in collaboration with Athens Pride is pleased to present the film by Iosif Vardakis AKOE/AMFI: The Story of a Revolution (*Just to sleep on his chest…), 2023, 71’, produced by Laika Productions. After the screening a discussion will follow with participants featured in the documentary, moderated by Fivos Sakalis.
Arrival time: 20:30 (total duration 150’)
In 1977 a group of friends created A.K.O.E. – the Greek Homosexual Liberation Movement. The movement’s magazine – “Amfi” – and its offices at the legendary basement on Zalongou street, will become a place of refuge for the Greek LGBT community until 1990. AKOE and “Amfi”, will be the first reference points for a community that is just beginning to gain conscience and organize. It will be a revolution for the right to exist, the right to happiness, the right to love. This is the first time its story is being told.
The film AKOE/AMFI – The Story of a Revolution *Just to Sleep on their Chest…, had its world premiere at the 25th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival on March 11, 2023. It was selected for the “Newcomers” International Competition section and won the Audience Award for a Greek film of over 50 minutes. It was also nominated for two “Iris” awards. The “Iris Awards” are the awards of the Greek Academy of Motion Pictures, the highest honor for a film in Greece. AKOE/AMFI was nominated in the category of Best Documentary and Iossif Vardakis was nominated in the category of Best Newcomer Director.
The need for a film that recounted the LGBTQ history in Greece was so great, that the film has gone on to be screened in all of Greece’s major universities and was screened again in the 26th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, with the catalogue calling it “emblematic”.
Cast & Crew:
Narrator: Iōko – Ioannis Kotidis
Guest: Giorgos Papapavlou
Original Music: K.Bhta
Sound Design/Mixing: Dimitris Miyakis
Sound Recordist: Kostas Koutelidakis
Illustrator: Steve Stivaktis
Animator-VFX: Afroditi Bitzouni
Editor: Kostis Kontogeorgos
Consulting Editor: Yorgos Zafeiris
Cinematographer: Dimitris Kasimatis – GSC
Production Manager: Tasos Koronakis
Executive Producer: Lefteris Charitos
Producers: Marina Danezi, Tasos Koronakis – Laika Productions
Written and Directed by Iossif Vardakis
With the support of the Greek Film Center and ERT
Short Director’s Bio
Iossif Vardakis studied Film/TV at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has been working as a theatrical director in Greece since 1997, having directed over 30 stage shows. This is his first film.
Thursday 19 June | 21:00
Kala azar, 2020
Janis Rafa
Duration, 91’
At the margins of a city somewhere in the south of Europe, a young couple start their day with their daily work: collecting deceased pets from their owners in order to cremate them and return their ashes. This paid job aside, they also collect and cremate the roadkill they find as they drive around in their car, which also seems to be their home. In this endless life cycle, human beings and animals coexist harmoniously, until the couple causes a roadkill themselves. Set against a visually stunning and desolate landscape with an eerie sensuality, Kala azar is a film about death and life itself.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A between Janis Rafa and Daphne Vitali, curator of the artist’s current solo exhibition We Betrayed the Horses, at EMΣΤ.
Main Film Credits
Directed by Janis Rafa
Written by Janis Rafa
Cinematography | Thodoros Mihopoulos
Editing | Patrick Minks
Cast | Pinelopi Tsilika (female), Dimitris Lalos (male), Michelle Valley (mother), Tassos Rafailidis (father), Oğuz Han Kaya (Oğuz), Gökhan Kaya (worker), Maria Alliferi (woman with dead fish), Adrian Frieling (brother with dead bird #1), Martin Benge (brother with dead bird #2), Nikos Pantelidis (director of crematorium), Antonis Tsiotsiopoulos (hunter), Pavlos Kourtidis (security guard at crematorium), Lenika Arfani (veterinarian)
Produced by SNG Film (The Netherlands)
Co-produced by Heretic (Greece)
Supported by Netherlands Film Fonds, Greek Film Centre, ERT
Producers | Digna Sinke
Co-producers | Konstantinos Kontovrakis, Giorgos Karnavas
Production manager | Leda Bouzoukou
Production design | Elena Vardava
Costumes by Vasilis Barbarigos
Make-up | Sissi Petropoulou
Music | LOOR / Gwilym Sainsbury
Sound | Nikos Kostantinou
Sound mix | Marc Lizier
Assistant director | Evdokia Kalamitsi, Stevi Panagiotaki
Production assistant | Takis Papadopoulos
Thursday 26 June | 21: 00
Cinema for Companion Species
—Abi Palmer, Jafar Panahi, Michela de Mattei and Invernomuto
Exploring the spaces and dynamics of domesticity and domestication from an interspecies perspective, Cinema for Companion Species brings together a series of short and medium films, all very recently made. Through them, affects and forms of care, joy and grief between humans and animals emerge in complex, humorous and joyful manners. Inventing forms of making visible and being closer to the animal realm and experimenting with languages and formats, the various artists and filmmakers reveal the profound connection that exists between cinema and the animal realm.
Abi Palmer, Abi Palmer Invents the Weather, 2023
Rain, 12΄ 07″ ; Heat, 11΄ 06″; Fog, 09΄ 30″; Light, 09΄ 33″
Unable to reach the outside world during the Covid-19 pandemic, British artist Abi Palmer began a year-long process of performing the outside world for her indoor cats Cha-U-Kao and Lola Lola, translating each season into a cat-accessible format. Using foraged and found materials from local wildlife, Palmer staged a series of DIY performances. Taking a crucial feature from each season, Palmer broke down the elements into four boxes using sensory found objects from local woodlands to reinvent the experience of autumn rain, winter fog, spring sunlight and summer heat. Each film documents Palmer’s process of collecting fragments of nature and assembling the boxes. The accompanying voiceover, written and narrated by Palmer, is a love letter to her cats and the climate, and explores the tensions between what we can and can’t control. The resulting films are a playful meditation on disability, climate, and life.
Michela de Mattei and Invernomuto
Paraflu, 2025
Duration, 23΄ 28″
Paraflu traverses the mountain landscapes of Northern Italy to follow the return of the wolf. It examines this predator as an archetypal symbol of conflict, marvel and transformation, while also questioning the complexities of coexistence between humans and wildlife. Paraflu references the writings of philosopher and naturalist Baptiste Morizot, who describes the wolf as possessing the magical art of misdirection.
Suspended between investigative narrative and abstract representation, the film shifts across multiple perspectives: the wolf, the shepherd, the hunter, the magician and the spectator. Set in a territory where collective fears and cultural dynamics clash with those of nature, the film’s title harks back to a real event: an act of revenge against a pack of wolves, poisoned with Paraflu, a common antifreeze. Shot on 16mm film, Paraflu combines real footage with AI-generated scenes and voiceovers trained on the voices of Italian illusionist Mago Silvan and ecofeminist Val Plumwood.
Jafar Panahi
Life, 2021
Duration, 19΄
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been working in isolation since long before the pandemic, when Life was made. He has been under house arrest in Tehran since 2010, on political charges, and has also been banned from filmmaking, which he resists. Life was shot in his apartment in Tehran, featuring the family’s pet iguana, Iggy. Bringing together documentary and fiction, Life features Panahi and his wife, Tahereh Saidi Balsini, who use their cell phones to record their domestic lives with candid specificity The family’s warm-hearted, ordinary doings under lockdown become memorable emblems of the pandemic’s vast implications, and the iguana stands both for its condition of a pet animal whose life is permanently confined to a domestic space and for a sense of wildnerness, love and tolerance across the di<erent family members.
A Q&A with Filipa Ramos will follow
The discussion will be conducted in English
Total running time: 84΄ 44″
MAY
Sunday 25 May | 21:00
An evening with Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel.
A selection of films and a discussion with the director.
ΕΜΣΤ kicks off its summer CineFIX open air, rooftop screenings with a selection of films by Mahdi Fleifel chosen by the director himself. A Q&A will follow.
Born in Dubai, Mahdi Fleifel lives and works between Denmark, England, and Greece. A graduate of the British National Film & Television School, he founded the London-based production company Nakba FilmWorks in 2010.
Fleifel’s latest film, To a Land Unknown, premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) at Cannes 2024 to critical and audience acclaim. With over 100 festival screenings, 20 awards, and a Gotham Award nomination for Best Breakthrough Director, the film is set for theatrical release in more than 30 countries, cementing his reputation as a bold voice in contemporary cinema.
His debut feature, A World Not Ours, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won over 30 awards, including the Berlinale Peace Prize and the Grand Jury Prizes at Edinburgh and DOC:NYC.
In 2016, Fleifel won the Silver Bear at Berlinale for A Man Returned, which was also nominated for the European Film Awards. His Cannes-selected A Drowing Man later earned a BAFTA nomination, while I Signed the Petition won Best Documentary Short at IDFA. His short 3 Logical Exits premiered at IFF Rotterdam.
Mahdi Fleifel
A World Not Ours, 2012
Duration, 93’
With English and Greek subtitles
A World Not Ours is an intimate portrait of three generations of exile in the refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh, in southern Lebanon. Based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, the film is a sensitive, and illuminating study of belonging, friendship, and family.
Filmed over more than 20 years by multiple generations of the same family, A World Not Ours is more than just a family portrait; it is an attempt to record what is being forgotten, and mark what should not be erased from collective memory.
Mahdi Fleifel
I Signed the Petition, 2018
Duration, 10’ 30”
With English and Greek subtitles
Immediately after a Palestinian man signs an online petition, he is thrown into a panic-inducing spiral of self-doubt. Over the course of a conversation with an understanding friend, he analyses, deconstructs and interprets the meaning of his choice to publicly support the cultural boycott of Israel.
Mahdi Fleifel
20 Handshakes for Peace, 2014
Duration, 3’
English dialogue
“I remember the handshake very clearly. My dad recorded the ceremony on video and would play it over and over again. He could not believe what had happened. In fact, none of us could. One time he threw his shoe at the TV and shouted so loud, the next door neighbors complained about him.” Listening to the last interview with Edward Said while watching the ceremony made me realize that father’s anger was because chairman Arafat was the first one to reach out his hand.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
45th Parallel, 2022
Duration, 15’
English dialogue
Filmed on location to activate the legal and symbolic potential of the site, 45th Parallel unfolds as a monologue in five acts, performed by acclaimed filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel. The story centres on Hernández vs. Mesa, a judicial case covering the fatal shooting in 2010 of an unarmed fifteen-year-old Mexican national by a US Border Patrol agent. At the supreme court Mesa’s bullet, which crossed the US/Mexico border, began to implicate missiles fired in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Libya. If this murder could be tried in the US, so too could 91,340 drone strikes.
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