CYFEST Video Screening Program: Sensory/Nuances, 2025

Sergei Parajanov

Hakob Hovnatanyan, 1967, 10 min 40 sec

Operator: Karen Mesyan Composer: Stepan Shakaryan 

Production Yerevan Chronicle and Documentary Film Studio 1967/ Courtesy to Union of Film Professionals of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia

This film is dedicated to the classic of Armenian painting, Hakob Hovnatanyan, one of the finest European portrait painters of the 19th century. He was the first Armenian artist who moved beyond religious themes, which had dominated Armenian fine art for 15 centuries.

One of Parajanov’s early works, the film directly engages vision by focusing on painterly texture and the sensual atmosphere of art. Here his creative method begins: a “static cinema,” where each frame resembles a painting. His aesthetic language is not just about what is seen but how it feels to the eye.

Mathilde Reynaud

Lemna, 2023, 13 min
Production: Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains with the support of DRAC and Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (Fond SCAN)

In a realm of suspension, two women naturalists observe the plant world in the digital age. They merge their bodies into a strange, luminous environment. Their story recalls the legacy of 19th-century English and American women botanists, carrying the spirit of emancipation across past and future. Their dialogues, born from the study of plants, intertwine with the technical language of 3D software, revealing a shared sensitivity between scientific and digital practices, marked by feminist empowerment.

Amy Karle

Bringing Bones to Life, 2016, 4 min 25 sec

Amy Karle’s Regenerative Reliquary (2016) is a living-systems bioart sculpture that uses 3D-printed, generatively designed scaffolds housed in a bioreactor, an illuminated “mechanical womb” to invite stem cells to attach and form bone-like tissue over time. Merging digital fabrication, wet-lab practice, and conceptual art, the work transforms a human-hand design into a site of potential growth and repair. Regenerative Reliquary opens questions at the frontier of bioart and medicine: What new bodies and therapies might we build? How do transhumanism, synthetic biology, and AI reshape our understanding of life and self? Karle frames the piece as both experiment and offering: a reliquary for future possibility and a meditation on the awe and ethics of creating with life’s building blocks x AI.

Alessandro Zannier

Spartina Maritima / ARCA-DNA series, 2023, 32 sec 

Graphic programming: Alex Piacentini (OOM)
Sonification: Davide Commone / Alessandro Zannier
DNA research database: Marco Dotto, Olga De Castro, Grazia Marina Quero, Otho Mantegazza, Alberto Barausse, Laura Airoldi (UNIPD)

As part of his ARCA-DNA project, Alessandro Zannier reflects on the concepts of Habitat, Backup, and Extinction. The installation features soundscapes composed from fragments of the Venetian environment, arranged according to the DNA sequences of Spartina maritima, an endangered saltmarsh plant and one of the largest living organisms by mass and area.

The idea of Backup, linked to his 2023 concept album Arca (as Ottodix) and DVRI residency in Venice, envisions a vast space ark—echoing Noah’s Ark and the turtle Chelonia mydas—as a refuge for humanity. This work acts as a black box containing the DNA of a place: habitat backups stored against catastrophe, seed capsules designed to be sown elsewhere, enabling future generations to recover the deep essence of a lost landscape—its maps, history, artworks, environmental data, species, and archives.

Ethel Lilienfeld

EMI, 2023, 13 min
Production: Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains with the support of DRAC and Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (Fond SCAN)

Ethel Lilienfeld explores the influence of the virtual body on reality in her hybrid project EMI, which includes a short film and a webpage with NFTs. Embodying the ideals of beauty and perfection, EMI is a virtual influencer who, like her human counterparts, promotes brands and products to followers.

Using EMI as a performative tool, Lilienfeld places the audience in a provocative situation that exposes the codes of consumption. Striking images heighten the tension between fantasy and madness, addressing social norms, aesthetic standards, and questions of identity and gender. Behind its seductive form, EMI investigates the growing commodification of the body online, guiding us to the threshold between the beautiful and the repulsive, the real and the imaginary, the living and the dead.

Louis-Paul Caron

Le déni, 2024, 2 min

French artist Louis-Paul Caron explores the contradictions of our time related to the environmental crisis in both static and animated works created with artificial intelligence. His pieces capture moments suspended in uncertainty, where urgency coexists with indifference.

Drawing on the aesthetics of American realist painting, Caron enhances the narrative dimension of his works by creating temporal ambiguity. The use of AI introduces subtle visual anomalies that mark them as belonging to an alternate reality—halfway between dream and memory. The nostalgic tone of these visions testifies to the fragility of our time and questions our attitudes toward the environment.
Text by Zlata Teplyshova

Julia Sharkina

Birth of the Sacred Deer, 2025, 5 min

A film and performance about an individual journey into the subconscious in an effort to merge with the essence of nature, revealing to the viewer paths of inner vision. An encounter with a totem animal becomes a moment of spiritual rebirth.