Seminar - Cinema giovane
Edition 2026THE SANITY OF DISCOMFORT
I know it’s heartbreaking and you should be heartbroken. That means your heart is working. If you're heartbroken and it's distressing that means that you are sane You are a functioning individual. If you are uncomfortable and your maladjusted to a sick society it means that you are healthy. I am mourning for all of us, but also I can't embrace despair even though it sometimes feels very attractive and sensible to do so. The intense words used by the rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) ci stanno ispirando nella costruzione del seminario. are inspiring us in the shaping of the seminar. We come to it from different histories and geographies, through different relationships to loss and perpetration. The "we" here is a coalition, not a consensus, held together by a shared refusal to be adjusted to a sick world. From despair, but not from defeat, we will try to create connections, parallels, otherworlds, forms of refusal, and forms of cinema that reflect genocide. Basma al-Sharif, Davide Oberto. Marta Popivoda
Using precise visual language, dark humour, and attention to landscape and sound, Palestinian artist/filmmaker Basma al-Sharif works across film, installation, writing and photography. Creating lyrical, poetic works her practice addresses ongoing violence and its representation, she explores the legacy of colonialism within inescapable power systems. Al-Sharif received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007, was a resident of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in 2009, the Pavillon Neuflize OBC at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014-15. She received a Jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009, was awarded a Visual Arts of the Fundación Botín in 2010, Mophradat’s Consortium Commissions in 2018, she was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme for 2022-2023 and was nominated for the Prix Aware for 2024. In 2025 al-Sharif published her first monograph titled Semi-Nomadic-Debt-Ridden-Bedouins and her film Morgenkreis (Morning Circle) won the Grand Prize at the 39th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, the Best Documentary short at the Sharjah Film Platform 8, and ARTWORKS Best FilmAward at the 14th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival. Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Berlin Documentary Forum, and Manifesta 8. Her films have screened in the international film festivals of Locarno, Toronto, Berlin, Mar del Plata, Milan, London, New York, Montreal, and Yamagata amongst others. Basma is based in Berlin and represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris.
Marta Popivoda is a filmmaker, artist, and researcher. The main concerns in her work are the tensions between memory, history, and ideology, as well as the relations between collective and individual bodies. Popivoda approaches them from a feminist and queer perspective. In her recent work, she uses landscape dramaturgy, feminist storytelling, and principles of radical slowness to produce scenes of antifascist and eco-feminist memory. Her work has been presented worldwide in the cinema and visual arts contexts, such as Berlinale, Locarno, IFFR, NYFF, IDFA, Visions du Réel, MoMA New York, Tate Modern London, MAXXI Rome, Manifesta Biennial, Berlin Biennale, etc., and featured in the Guardian, Sight & Sound, Screen, Artforum, and e-flux. She received numerous awards for her films and artwork, including the prestigious Berlin Art Prize for the Visual Arts at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. She teaches film at the University of the Arts in Amsterdam and is a member of the European Film Academy.