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- Looking at Animals at CinemaO in Milan, Italy (22/07/2026 & 23/07/2026)
Films by: Guy Sherwin, Rose Lowder, Joyce Wieland, Stan Brakhage, and Amy Halpern
Looking at Animals @ CinemaO, July 22+23, 2026
The proto-cinematic, chronophotographic locomotion studies by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey often featured animal imagery. Their separate interests in galloping horses, flying herons, and swimming skates were not so much concerned with still-life photography of the different species as they were with the mechanics of motion and thus cognitive or sensory perception. Cinema afterwards, since its birth, be it silent, scientific, Hollywood, documentary, or experimental, has often found itself populated with animals. Not only, Gelatin—made of collagen extracted from animal body parts—is an essential ingredient of film material. Filmmaker Andrew Noren even posited that before any light capturing device, the first animal eyelid was cinema, “scene one, take one”. So when Raymond Bellour remarked that there existed a primordial link between animals and cinema, he was right in more ways than one.
In the face of catastrophic realities like climate disasters, species extinction, genocides, and algorithmic autocracy as a direct result of capitalist and neo-colonialist avarice, a reconsideration of the present anthropocentric epoch is impending. The ensuing ecological turn in Contemporary Art and by extension, artists’ moving images, has found within its fold a proliferation of animal-themed curatorial, artistic, and epistemological projects. This welcome development within the arena of film however has come with a blind spot—towards material and perceptual concerns which inextricably inform cinema’s historical link to animals. One effective strategy to betray anthropocentrism better is by undermining perception as distinct to humans. John Berger’s classic essay “Why look at animals?” is guilty of that precise anthropocentric exceptionalism: between active lookers (humans) and passive subjects (animals). Rather than abandoning film’s potential to challenge such perceptual orthodoxies in favour of its descriptive capabilities, a renewal of epistemologies of perception seems urgent. And it is here that Looking at Animals intends to intervene, from the (somewhat obvious) vantage point of zoological Experimental Cinema, by vitalising the productive contact points between representational animacy and film’s material and structural properties, towards, hopefully a more congenial inter-species future.
- Annik Leroy’s retrospective at Filmoteca de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (15/01/2026 – 29/01/2026), link
Belgian filmmaker Annik Leroy’s tenderly devastating non-fiction films vacillate between the poetic and the essayistic, the personal and the political. They critically probe the history of postwar Europe, the fleeting promises of utopia never fulfilled, the darkness of its soul ever deepening, her locations–the desolate streets of Berlin, a café in Austria, the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, or the wounded city of Sarajevo–testifying a tormented history. Figures as varied as Gottfried Benn, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ulrike Meinhof among others are summoned to exemplify resistance. Leroy’s background in photography and literature deeply informs her filmmaking, her contemplative 16mm black and white frames and the variegated literary point of departures–Jean-Michel Palmier, Claudio Magris, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hannah Arendt and others testify to that. In her films, sound, just as the images, can be romantically expressive or materially evidential. Across four feature-length and as many short films that span more than four decades, we are confronted with an oeuvre that is singular in its radical reach.
Program 1:
Berlin of the late 70s still bears the scars of war. Its haunting Nazi past is within reach for its Jewish inhabitants. The bifurcated city–-gloomy, isolated, and stuck between ruination and reconstruction–-is the protagonist of Annik Leroy’s In der Dämmerstunde – Berlin (1981). A flâneur, the filmmaker herself, wanders its streets, rides the metro, and inhabits its hotel rooms. Mahler and Wagner interject on occasions.
It is preceded by two shorts: Ferne Stimmen (2023), an enigmatic meeting of Hannah Arendt and Ulrike Meinhof, and Cellule 719 (2006), an exploration of isolation and violence based on a letter from 1972 by Meinhof.
Program 2:
Vers la Mer (1999) is an epic journey, from the source of the river Danube in the Black Forest, to its culmination, in the Black Sea; from Germany and Austria through Slovakia and Hungary, to Romania and Bulgaria. Made soon after the fall of the Berlin wall, it is an exercise in lyrical historiography with a hopeful gaze at the future, a rumination on landscape, history and memory, and a treatise on what became of a possible Danubian republic that Claudio Magris once mentioned in Danubio.
Complemented by NBC that draws on a military brochure for citizens with instructions on what to do in the event of a Nuclear attack.
Program 3:
Tremor – Es ist immer Krieg (2017) is populated by voices and murmurs that refuse to die, transporting us to different places and times. We begin with Pasolini’s voice, and shots close to the ground approximate his view when he met his violent death. Ingeborg Bachmann is heard, and is matched both by urban scenes from Vienna and vast depopulated landscapes. Volcanic terrains and Giacinto Scelsi’s music are woven in. One of the only two faces seen in Tremor is that of an old woman, recounting her father’s suicide shortly after World War II broke out.
In Ekho (1976), we hear a woman narrating her own failed suicide attempt.
Program 4:
In La Force Diagonale (2023, with Julie Morel), Claire Vivianne Sobottke’s visceral embodiment of Hannah Arendt has few precedents in the history of cinema. The montage between locations and texts are always crucial for Leroy, and here it is no different–Arendt’s voice echoes in Sarajevo, the letter she wrote in the Gurs internment camp is presented in situ. The film is also a portrait of several people, disconnected yet interwoven, whose lives bear witness to the lasting impact of political history. Everything is non-linear, sparse, and fragmented, a complex web in which the present is no more discernible from the past.
- L’Eau/Water (1985) by Velu Viswanadhan, Curation and Presentation, Monokino, Ostend, Belgium, 2025, link
- A Searching Eye – A Retrospective of Karl Kels, OffOff Cinema, Gent, Belgium, 2025. Part 1, Part 2
- Introduction to Mani Kaul’s Dhrupad (1983) at Duisburger Filmwoche, 2025
- A discussion with Annik Leroy and Julie Morel at Cinematek, Brussels, 2025, watch
- Collecting Images (co-curated with Daniel A.Swarthnas): Five film programs on Peter Hutton and Mark LaPore, exf f., Frankfurt, 2025, link
- Book presentation- Distant Voices + Introduction to Vers la Mer (Annik Leroy, 1999), Stations, Berlin, 2025
- Asian Voyages: Two film programs and a listening session devoted to the work of Deben Bhattacharya, Sinema Transtopia, Berlin, 2025. Film Program 1, Film Program 2, Listening session
- Sea sights (co-curated), Monokino, Ostend, 2024 link
Films by: Jennifer Nightingale, Rose Lowder, Jun’ichi Okuyama, Peter Hutton, Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, and Amy Halpern
- Vedic Elementalism – The Films of Velu Viswanadhan, exf f., Frankfurt, 2024, link
- In Memoriam: Amy Halpern, exf f., Frankfurt, 2023, Program 1: Fleeting Glances, Program 2: Prolonged Looks, link
- Echoes from South Asia, Sinema Transtopia, Berlin, 2023, link
Films by: Annabel Nicholson, Alia Syed, Mani Kaul, James Broughton & Joel Singer, Mark LaPore, Uma Segal, Yugantar Collective, Laleen Jayamanne, Velu Viswanadhan, Anuradha Chandra, and Gautam Valluri.
- Dream-Delirium-Apparition: A program of found footage films, 2020, link
Films by: Joseph Cornell, Matthias Müller, Cécile Fontaine, Naomi Uman, and Martin Arnold.
- Through the struggle, for the struggle, Cinema Galeries & INSAS, Brussels, 2019, link
Films by: Renate Sami & Petra Seeger, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Günter-Peter Straschek, Ingemo Engström & Gerhard Theuring, Annik Leroy
- Other screenings as part of Cinema Parenthèse, Brussels, 2018-2019
Films programs dedicated to Werner Nekes, Paolo Gioli, Emily Richardson, James Edmonds etc.
- Mythical Poetry: The Cinema of Govindan Aravindan, Close-Up Cinema, London, 2017, link
- Storm de Hirsch: Goodbye in the mirror, Close-Up Cinema, London, 2016, link