Labo Competition 2
The festival’s competition section focused on innovation, creativity, and experimentation presents films that boldly explore different approaches to filmmaking. From unexpected combinations of traditional methods with new technology to fresh takes on narrative and visuals, LABO combines the joy of discovery with a yearning to push the envelope.
Ali Yahyaa’s poetic debut Beneath Which Rivers Flow straddles the line between science-fiction and environmental documentary. It is set in southern Iraq, where the river is slowly drying up and the main protagonist gradually realizes that the world as he knows it is beginning to irreversibly fall apart. In the Japanese-French animated film Ordinary Life, director Yoriko Mizushiri pulls the viewer into a world of rounded shapes, saturated colors, and captivating everyday rituals. The found footage collage Juggernaut by the German artistic duo Neozoon relentlessly reminds us that, despite the destructive consequences, the world of cis men is driven by competitiveness, rivalry, and an obsession with personal success. Director Dorian Jespers’s unsettling Belgian film Loynes depicts the strange trial of a nameless corpse, set in nineteenth-century Liverpool. And Italy’s The Pørnøgraphər, by the HARIEL filmmaking collective, works with generative AI to immerse viewers in a hypnotic world of fragmented and distorted images.
A jury made up of prominent figures from the domestic art scene will name one of the ten submissions the festival’s Best Experimental Film. The award comes with a financial prize of 1,000 euros.
