Syntax of Intervention   When we frequently invoke the term “experimental”  to describe the qualities—or even the very essence—of moving images, what we refer to may no longer point singularly to a genre, method, style, or spirit. The boundaries of “experimental film” as a category of visual culture remain in constant flux. As Jacques Rancière argued in The Future of the Image , the images refer to nothing else, yet it is not what people frequently claim them to be intransiti

Site of Experimentation: Towards the Sinophone Moving Image   In an age saturated with images—where screens compete for attention and algorithms dictate what we see—what role can film festivals, as cultural events grounded in curatorial practice and physical gathering, still play? As international film festivals increasingly become sites for social issues and political protest, how are we to rethink the relationship between the politics and aesthetics of the moving image? As

A Geology of Time Time is often imagined as a forward-moving line that neatly connects past, present, and future—a notion so long taken for granted continues to shape how we think about time itself. Historian Reinhart Koselleck’s concept of “temporal layers” (Zeitschichten) unsettles this entrenched paradigm, inviting us to reflect on the intricate nature of time. In Koselleck’s view, time resembles a geology more than a line: a stratigraphy of experience in which disparate l

Hostile Landscapes , Zhang Hanwen, 2025 A Critical Intermediate State The duration of a mid-length film often provokes unease. It belongs neither to the briskness of a short film nor to the grandeur of a feature, yet within this in-between space brews a particular tension. Like a cluster of solitary neutrons—uncharged, orbitless—they hold structures together while forever on the verge of fission. BISFF 2025’s “Neutron: Mid-Length Films”  presents seven films from Catalonia, t

Becoming-With Images We live within images—images that have become our “second nature,” shaping the environment of our existence and defining the ways in which modern individuals think and dwell. This observation is hardly novel. Yet the saturation of images that envelops us has long numbed our senses and left us impoverished in perception, revealing a strange and fragile condition of existence itself. As beings situated within specific historical and contextual circumstances