here and not here + Aerial + Boy Cried Wolf
Three poetic short films about memory, the gaze and identity in a world in constant shift: 'here and not here' by Andrea Zimmerman, 'Aerial' by Aida Berisha and 'Boy Cried Wolf' by Max Göran.
here and not here
Andrea Zimmerman / Palestine & United Kingdom / 2025 / International Premiere / 30 min
A cinematic diary from the West Bank and the Golan Heights – places caught between occupation, oppression, and a lived, collective experience.
A film diary, dispatches from a place that both does and does not exist – a state in waiting, a geography beyond, but permanently besieged by, conflict, the sites of pressured being and the willed spaces of dream, desire, imagination and resistance. Filmed in the Occupied West Bank and Occupied Golan Heights as part of the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s ‘Ways of Traveling’ Residency 2020 – 2023 (inspired by John Berger), ‘here and not here’ seeks a poetics of expression that acknowledges the perennial challenges of Occupation while refusing the imposed, pejorative, partial and reductive mediatised definitions of a people under constant and escalating oppressions. Charting encounter – with and between people and place and the more than human – here and not here celebrates not the ‘cruel optimism’ of a false hope but rather celebrates the lived experience of a profoundly precious yet always precarious ‘everyday life’.
Aerial
Aida Berisha / Denmark & Italy / 2026 / World Premiere / 13 min
A ritualistic and dizzying audio-visual poem, following singer Lei Lowe on an eruptous pilgrimage through ancient Sicilian landscapes where she communes with the Earth in search of emancipation.
Springing from a childhood lullaby written by Lei’s parents, the film grapples with the most intimate kind of archaeology, exploring the relationship between photographer and performer, observer and self. While navigating the volcanic terrain, she becomes characters that reflect and externalise her journey of grief and rebirth in an almost extraterrestrial world. Texture, contrast, and shadows create an abstract dialogue between the viewer and the film’s ethereal nature. An amorphous love-letter to cinema, which weaves in elements of horror, sci-fi and documentary.
Boy Cried Wolf
Max Göran / Germany & Sweden / 2026 / World Premiere / 23 min
Performative video work recorded in an underground tunnel, where an artist explores authority, obedience, and whether wolves are actually harmless.
Max Göran, the artist or director or performer, walks into a tunnel that doubles as a film set, or maybe just itself. She tests out a story told by a friend: a Finnish scientis once smeared his face with blood and let wolves lick it, to prove they weren’t dangerous. But the storyline slips. A routine won’t go right. An off-screen voice, part director, part overbearing mother or maybe witch, demands another take. Pre-takes and after-takes become the thing. Wolves finally arrive. Somewhere between rehearsal and dream, the work turns into something else: about conventions of contemporary art, video art, about sex (as in sex), about dissolving borders of subjectivity, friendship and obedience, about what counts as ‘real life’ when it happens inside the dreamworld of a camera.



