Istanbul Experimental
7th Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival
Salt Galata, Salt Beyoğlu
May 13 – May 17, 2026
Still from An Uncertain Eternity (2025)
©Ella Morton
©Ella Morton
Salt is hosting the 7th Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, organized by İstanbul Experimental.
Bringing together a wide range of short and feature films that move between memory, resistance, ecology, and speculative futures, the program explores fractured perception and language, intimate narratives of loss and displacement, and collective struggles shaped by labor, migration, and authoritarian violence. Several selections turn toward nonhuman worlds—plants, soil, microbes, and animals—foregrounding alternative modes of communication and coexistence, while others examine domestic space, the body, and everyday environments as sites of tension, imagination, and social construction. Questions of identity, embodiment, and subjectivity unfold through various perspectives, often intersecting with broader inquiries into history, technology, and systems of control. The program also reflects on cinema itself—its material fragility, its archival residues, and its capacity to rework historical images—while embracing abstraction, sound-image relations, and experimental forms as ways of sensing and thinking otherwise.
The program includes a selection from the Tehran-based experimental film collective Left Bank Collective and will also feature three films by Harun Farocki (1944-2014) focusing on image regimes, labor, and visibility politics, running parallel to the exhibition Labor, War, Capital: Revisiting Farocki, on view at İMALAT-HANE Project Space between May 12-23.
The festival will begin with a performance by Grup Ses focusing on the experimental sound practice of İlhan Mimaroğlu (1926-2012), as part of a commemorative program to mark the artist’s 100th birthday, and will conclude with an electro-acoustic performance by Audio Parazit accompanying recordings of everyday life by Yugoslav director Vukica Đilas (1948-2001), compiled in 2006 under the title Home Movies.
The program will also be accompanied by a series of talks and conversations that brings together artists, researchers, and participants. The free-admission program is open to everyone. All films will be screened in their original language with Turkish subtitles. For more information, click here.
PROGRAM
Wednesday, May 13
Salt Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema
16.00 Shorts: Stream of Consciousness(ness)
Fly Train, Ria Riwen Zhang, 2025, 3’43”
Marginal Understandings (Dirt: Part Two), David Finkelstein, 2023, 22’
A is for Apple, Lillian Canright, 2024, 7’45”
4 Ayes, Richard Philpott, 2024, 14’42”
17.00 Screenings and Conversation: “Songs of Experience” - Gernot Wieland
Family Constellation with a Fox, Gernot Wieland, 2025, 18’
You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts, Gernot Wieland, 2025, 16’21”
Portrait of Karl Marx as a young god, Gernot Wieland, 2011, 0’59”
19.30 In Memoriam, Performance: Mimaroğlu 100 Yaşında - Grup Ses
Thursday, May 14
Salt Galata, Auditorium
13.00 Shorts: First Experiment
Collage with Voices 1, Justin Evans, 2025, 14’55”
La Nuit et ses Sortilèges, Demir Demirbağ, 2025, 3’
Unmasking, Florin Garzotto, 2024, 20’49”
Amatilla, Adham Garman, 2025, 5’39”
Hawthorn, Mina Bahra, 2025, 6’48”
14.00 Shorts: Everyday Resistance I
Trump Pinochet, Gerald Habarth, 2025, 2’58”
Walkout, Onur Sekmen, 2025, 5’36”
Also Resisters, Christina Danielle Bartson, 2024, 13’
Happiness, Fırat Yücel, 2025, 18’
We Keep On Looking For You, Diego Andres Andres Murillo, 2025, 14’
15.00 Screening: Dear Makers, Louise Deltrieux, 2023, 56’
16.00 Shorts: The Matters of Memory
Después Del Silencio, Matilde-Luna Perotti, 2024, 13’40”
Color Separation, Diane Nerwen, 2026, 5’15”
Language Decay, Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2025, 2’55”
The Same Sweat Is Still Flowing Through The Same Pores, Neža Knez, 2026, 26’45”
17.00 Shorts: Glass Bottom Ferry, On Borders and Submerged Utopias, Chus Domínguez, 2025, 88’
19.00 Screening: Foreign Objects, Daniel Clayton Watkins, 2025, 84’
Friday, May 15
Salt Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema
Screening Program: Labor, War, Capital: Revisiting Farocki
15.30 Images of the World and Inscription of the War, Harun Farocki, 1988, 75’
17.00 As You See, Harun Farocki, 1986, 72’
18.30 Workers Leaving the Factory, Harun Farocki, 1995, 36’
19.30 Screening: Objects in the rear mirror appear closer than they really are, Markus Maicher, 2025, 61’
Friday, May 15
Salt Galata, Auditorium
13.00 Shorts: Ecocinema I
475861, Anish Dasari, 2025, 10’39”
Ouarda Ouarda: Yet Another Flower Film, Samy Benammar, 2025, 5’1”
Species Of Analogy, J.M. Martínez, 2024, 13’
Objectionable Fruit, Hogan Seidel, Gabby Follett, 2025, 15’
A Flagellate Searching For Love, Leena Pukki, 2024, 10’40”
14.00 Shorts: Fresh Air
Pearls on Swine, Smita Thomas, Sohaib Ilyas, 2025, 18’40”
The Loneliness Of Lizards, Inês Nunes, 2025, 15’
How Now, House?, Tess Martin, 2025, 13’
15.00 Shorts: Spirit & Flesh
People Mountain People Sea, Bolang Shui, 2025, 15’37”
Autobiography Of My Diabetes, Matthew Lancit, 2026, 20’
La Dureté Du Mental (Mental Toughness), Charles-André Coderre, 2025, 20’
16.00 Shorts: Haunted Yet Alive
The House Was There Before Me, Elian Mikkola, 2025, 25’40”
Elegy for the Lost, William Hong-xiao Wei, 2025, 30’
17.00 Talk: “1960’lı Yıllar Yugoslavya Alternatif Sineması: Yeni Sinema, Deneysel Sinema ve Kara Dalga” - Bengi Muzbeg
18.00 Shorts: Everyday Resistance II
Insomnia, Artem Senkovsky, Xenia Gaun, 2025, 8’38”
Momentum, Nada El-Omari, 2025, 19’1”
Space_Invaders.exe, Malaz Usta, 2024, 11’
Bosnian War Movie, Marko Lončarević, 2025, 12’45”
Saturday, May 16
Salt Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema
Screening Program: Labor, War, Capital: Revisiting Farocki
15.30 Images of the World and Inscription of the War, Harun Farocki, 1988, 75’
17.00 As You See, Harun Farocki, 1986, 72’
18.30 Workers Leaving the Factory, Harun Farocki, 1995, 36’
19.30 Shorts: Before the Fire - Left Bank Collective
It was snowing in that room, Fatemeh Akbari Mehr, 2025, 32’57”
Ghorab Jendoon, Fatemeh Akbari Mehr, 2025, 5’18”
Epilogue in Prologue, Zahra Qodsi, 2025, 14’19”
Hegemony, Maryam Mortazavi, 2025, 7’41”
Listen, do you hear the wind of darkness?, Maryam Mortazavi, 2025, 6’40”
Lady in Red, Maede Mohsenpour, 2025, 5’48”
A Mountain Away, Musa Ebrahimi, 2025, 15’20”
Saturday, May 16
Salt Galata, Auditorium
12.00 Shorts: No Exit, Only Repetition
Listen To The Wind Eight Hundred Times, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, 2025, 15’
Wrecks Of The Day, Jean-Yves Roy, 2025, 8’27”
Searching for A Forest, Samir T. Radwan, 2025, 7’44”
North, Hogan Seidel, 2026, 3’2”
Rule No. 5: Shadow Your Man Closely, Miro Manojlovic, 2023, 9’59”
13.00 Shorts: Ecocinema II
Does the Sea Have a Heart?, Miglė Križinauskaitė, 2025, 7’21”
An Uncertain Eternity, Ella Morton, 2025, 29’
Chasing Whales, La Fille Renne, 2025, 5’26”
14.00 Shorts: Fiction of Fiction is Real
[sun]film, Derek Taylor, 2025, 3’10”
Koki, Ciao, Quenton Miller, 2025, 11’10”
First Breath on Mars, Malic Amalya, 2025, 19’46”
The Tragic Movement Of The Spheres, Simon Rieth, 2025, 12’46”
15.00 Shorts: Are We Already Future, Yet?
Umwelt/4470 - Part I, Charlie Tweed, 2024, 4’20”
Should Virtual Petz Die?, Carlo Galbiati, 2024, 12’
Sympathetic Fluids, Matthew Pagoaga, 2025, 13’17”
The Future is Virtual, Michael Mackenzie, 2025, 14’35”
16.00 Shorts: Animation
SKRFF, Corrie Francis Parks, Daniel Nuderscher, 2024, 7’
Con:err Continuity Error, Mike Stoakes, 2026, 12’42”
Clazomenae Memories, Gökay Gedik, 2025, 8’16”
The In-The-Head Film, Konstantin von Sichart, 2025, 11’50”
The Self and the Other, Chen Ma, 2024, 5’57”,
“2nd Day & the End of the World”, Sara Koppel, 2025, 12’28”
17.00 Shorts: Sound, Light & Algorithms
P U L S E, David Ellis, 2025, 3’9”
Feedback, Hüseyin Mert Erverdi, 2025, 4’
Natural Attraction, Isaac Kerlow, 2025, 11’
Licht & Ton, Jan Rehwinkel, 2025, 5’50”
Before and Above Us, Mario Mu, 2024, 4’18”
For Those Who Pull Their Own Teeth, Fatih Umdu, 2026, 11’
18.00 Shorts: She Who Passes Through Time, Nicole Hewitt, 2026, 64’
Sunday, May 17
Salt Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema
14.00 Screening: barrunto, Emilia Beatriz, 2024, 70’
16.00 Conversation: “Görünürlükten Öte: Deneysel Sinemada Kadın Yönetmenler” - Nurşen Bakır, Dilek Aydın, Ela Kazdal
17.30 Award Ceremony
18.00 Screening and Performance: Audio Parazit
Bringing together a wide range of short and feature films that move between memory, resistance, ecology, and speculative futures, the program explores fractured perception and language, intimate narratives of loss and displacement, and collective struggles shaped by labor, migration, and authoritarian violence. Several selections turn toward nonhuman worlds—plants, soil, microbes, and animals—foregrounding alternative modes of communication and coexistence, while others examine domestic space, the body, and everyday environments as sites of tension, imagination, and social construction. Questions of identity, embodiment, and subjectivity unfold through various perspectives, often intersecting with broader inquiries into history, technology, and systems of control. The program also reflects on cinema itself—its material fragility, its archival residues, and its capacity to rework historical images—while embracing abstraction, sound-image relations, and experimental forms as ways of sensing and thinking otherwise.
The program includes a selection from the Tehran-based experimental film collective Left Bank Collective and will also feature three films by Harun Farocki (1944-2014) focusing on image regimes, labor, and visibility politics, running parallel to the exhibition Labor, War, Capital: Revisiting Farocki, on view at İMALAT-HANE Project Space between May 12-23.
The festival will begin with a performance by Grup Ses focusing on the experimental sound practice of İlhan Mimaroğlu (1926-2012), as part of a commemorative program to mark the artist’s 100th birthday, and will conclude with an electro-acoustic performance by Audio Parazit accompanying recordings of everyday life by Yugoslav director Vukica Đilas (1948-2001), compiled in 2006 under the title Home Movies.
The program will also be accompanied by a series of talks and conversations that brings together artists, researchers, and participants. The free-admission program is open to everyone. All films will be screened in their original language with Turkish subtitles. For more information, click here.
PROGRAM
Wednesday, May 13
Salt Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema
16.00 Shorts: Stream of Consciousness(ness)
Fly Train, Ria Riwen Zhang, 2025, 3’43”
Marginal Understandings (Dirt: Part Two), David Finkelstein, 2023, 22’
A is for Apple, Lillian Canright, 2024, 7’45”
4 Ayes, Richard Philpott, 2024, 14’42”
17.00 Screenings and Conversation: “Songs of Experience” - Gernot Wieland
Family Constellation with a Fox, Gernot Wieland, 2025, 18’
You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts, Gernot Wieland, 2025, 16’21”
Portrait of Karl Marx as a young god, Gernot Wieland, 2011, 0’59”
19.30 In Memoriam, Performance: Mimaroğlu 100 Yaşında - Grup Ses
Thursday, May 14
Salt Galata, Auditorium
13.00 Shorts: First Experiment
Collage with Voices 1, Justin Evans, 2025, 14’55”
La Nuit et ses Sortilèges, Demir Demirbağ, 2025, 3’
Unmasking, Florin Garzotto, 2024, 20’49”
Amatilla, Adham Garman, 2025, 5’39”
Hawthorn, Mina Bahra, 2025, 6’48”
14.00 Shorts: Everyday Resistance I
Trump Pinochet, Gerald Habarth, 2025, 2’58”
Walkout, Onur Sekmen, 2025, 5’36”
Also Resisters, Christina Danielle Bartson, 2024, 13’
Happiness, Fırat Yücel, 2025, 18’
We Keep On Looking For You, Diego Andres Andres Murillo, 2025, 14’
15.00 Screening: Dear Makers, Louise Deltrieux, 2023, 56’
16.00 Shorts: The Matters of Memory
Después Del Silencio, Matilde-Luna Perotti, 2024, 13’40”
Color Separation, Diane Nerwen, 2026, 5’15”
Language Decay, Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2025, 2’55”
The Same Sweat Is Still Flowing Through The Same Pores, Neža Knez, 2026, 26’45”
17.00 Shorts: Glass Bottom Ferry, On Borders and Submerged Utopias, Chus Domínguez, 2025, 88’
19.00 Screening: Foreign Objects, Daniel Clayton Watkins, 2025, 84’
Friday, May 15
Salt Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema
Screening Program: Labor, War, Capital: Revisiting Farocki
15.30 Images of the World and Inscription of the War, Harun Farocki, 1988, 75’
17.00 As You See, Harun Farocki, 1986, 72’
18.30 Workers Leaving the Factory, Harun Farocki, 1995, 36’
19.30 Screening: Objects in the rear mirror appear closer than they really are, Markus Maicher, 2025, 61’
Friday, May 15
Salt Galata, Auditorium
13.00 Shorts: Ecocinema I
475861, Anish Dasari, 2025, 10’39”
Ouarda Ouarda: Yet Another Flower Film, Samy Benammar, 2025, 5’1”
Species Of Analogy, J.M. Martínez, 2024, 13’
Objectionable Fruit, Hogan Seidel, Gabby Follett, 2025, 15’
A Flagellate Searching For Love, Leena Pukki, 2024, 10’40”
14.00 Shorts: Fresh Air
Pearls on Swine, Smita Thomas, Sohaib Ilyas, 2025, 18’40”
The Loneliness Of Lizards, Inês Nunes, 2025, 15’
How Now, House?, Tess Martin, 2025, 13’
15.00 Shorts: Spirit & Flesh
People Mountain People Sea, Bolang Shui, 2025, 15’37”
Autobiography Of My Diabetes, Matthew Lancit, 2026, 20’
La Dureté Du Mental (Mental Toughness), Charles-André Coderre, 2025, 20’
16.00 Shorts: Haunted Yet Alive
The House Was There Before Me, Elian Mikkola, 2025, 25’40”
Elegy for the Lost, William Hong-xiao Wei, 2025, 30’
17.00 Talk: “1960’lı Yıllar Yugoslavya Alternatif Sineması: Yeni Sinema, Deneysel Sinema ve Kara Dalga” - Bengi Muzbeg
18.00 Shorts: Everyday Resistance II
Insomnia, Artem Senkovsky, Xenia Gaun, 2025, 8’38”
Momentum, Nada El-Omari, 2025, 19’1”
Space_Invaders.exe, Malaz Usta, 2024, 11’
Bosnian War Movie, Marko Lončarević, 2025, 12’45”
Saturday, May 16
Salt Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema
Screening Program: Labor, War, Capital: Revisiting Farocki
15.30 Images of the World and Inscription of the War, Harun Farocki, 1988, 75’
17.00 As You See, Harun Farocki, 1986, 72’
18.30 Workers Leaving the Factory, Harun Farocki, 1995, 36’
19.30 Shorts: Before the Fire - Left Bank Collective
It was snowing in that room, Fatemeh Akbari Mehr, 2025, 32’57”
Ghorab Jendoon, Fatemeh Akbari Mehr, 2025, 5’18”
Epilogue in Prologue, Zahra Qodsi, 2025, 14’19”
Hegemony, Maryam Mortazavi, 2025, 7’41”
Listen, do you hear the wind of darkness?, Maryam Mortazavi, 2025, 6’40”
Lady in Red, Maede Mohsenpour, 2025, 5’48”
A Mountain Away, Musa Ebrahimi, 2025, 15’20”
Saturday, May 16
Salt Galata, Auditorium
12.00 Shorts: No Exit, Only Repetition
Listen To The Wind Eight Hundred Times, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, 2025, 15’
Wrecks Of The Day, Jean-Yves Roy, 2025, 8’27”
Searching for A Forest, Samir T. Radwan, 2025, 7’44”
North, Hogan Seidel, 2026, 3’2”
Rule No. 5: Shadow Your Man Closely, Miro Manojlovic, 2023, 9’59”
13.00 Shorts: Ecocinema II
Does the Sea Have a Heart?, Miglė Križinauskaitė, 2025, 7’21”
An Uncertain Eternity, Ella Morton, 2025, 29’
Chasing Whales, La Fille Renne, 2025, 5’26”
14.00 Shorts: Fiction of Fiction is Real
[sun]film, Derek Taylor, 2025, 3’10”
Koki, Ciao, Quenton Miller, 2025, 11’10”
First Breath on Mars, Malic Amalya, 2025, 19’46”
The Tragic Movement Of The Spheres, Simon Rieth, 2025, 12’46”
15.00 Shorts: Are We Already Future, Yet?
Umwelt/4470 - Part I, Charlie Tweed, 2024, 4’20”
Should Virtual Petz Die?, Carlo Galbiati, 2024, 12’
Sympathetic Fluids, Matthew Pagoaga, 2025, 13’17”
The Future is Virtual, Michael Mackenzie, 2025, 14’35”
16.00 Shorts: Animation
SKRFF, Corrie Francis Parks, Daniel Nuderscher, 2024, 7’
Con:err Continuity Error, Mike Stoakes, 2026, 12’42”
Clazomenae Memories, Gökay Gedik, 2025, 8’16”
The In-The-Head Film, Konstantin von Sichart, 2025, 11’50”
The Self and the Other, Chen Ma, 2024, 5’57”,
“2nd Day & the End of the World”, Sara Koppel, 2025, 12’28”
17.00 Shorts: Sound, Light & Algorithms
P U L S E, David Ellis, 2025, 3’9”
Feedback, Hüseyin Mert Erverdi, 2025, 4’
Natural Attraction, Isaac Kerlow, 2025, 11’
Licht & Ton, Jan Rehwinkel, 2025, 5’50”
Before and Above Us, Mario Mu, 2024, 4’18”
For Those Who Pull Their Own Teeth, Fatih Umdu, 2026, 11’
18.00 Shorts: She Who Passes Through Time, Nicole Hewitt, 2026, 64’
Sunday, May 17
Salt Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema
14.00 Screening: barrunto, Emilia Beatriz, 2024, 70’
16.00 Conversation: “Görünürlükten Öte: Deneysel Sinemada Kadın Yönetmenler” - Nurşen Bakır, Dilek Aydın, Ela Kazdal
17.30 Award Ceremony
18.00 Screening and Performance: Audio Parazit
