TERRAFILIA FEST FILM CYCLE
Saturday, September 20 and Sunday, September 21, 2025, 12–7 PM
For more information about the festival, click here.
Bringing together works by Regina de Miguel, Allora & Calzadilla, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkáčová, Amar Kanwar, Yeo Siew Hua, Omar Mismar, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Eduardo Williams, Deborah Stratman, and Riar Rizaldi, Terrafilia’s Film Cycle merge experimental documentary, essay film, and speculative fictions, to navigate the fractures and continuities of our planetary condition.
From necropolitics to ecological resistance, from ritual to resource extraction, the films trace spectral geographies where the legacies of colonialism, environmental devastation, and social upheaval converge. They open up spaces of dissonance and reflection, staging encounters with more-than-human agencies, volatile histories, and possible futures.
Conceived as an extension of the festival’s explorations, the cycle proposes cinema as a medium attuned to the temporal fault lines of our present—revealing how images can unearth hidden strata, weave critical fabulations, and reassemble our sense of what is still possible.
FILMS
REGINA DE MIGUEL
Nekya: A Film River
Year of production: 2022
Duration: 74 min
Language: Spanish with English subtitles
Director and Screenplay: Regina de Miguel
Produced by: Commissioned by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Supported by the program Apoyo a la Creación by La Caixa Foundation and by the Botin Foundation
Nekya: A River Film is an immersive journey through the layered histories, mythologies, and ecologies of Riotinto, a mining region in southern Spain shaped by its blood-red river. Drawing on the myth of the river Styx and the ancient rite of Neky, a dialogue with the dead, de Miguel blends science fiction and documentary style to explore Riotinto as a site of geological wonder, colonial violence, and forgotten resistance.
Once regarded as an entrance to the Underworld, Riotinto now serves as a testing ground for astrobiology, mirroring the conditions of Mars and reflecting humanity’s ongoing search for life beyond Earth. Yet beneath its scientific significance lies a landscape deeply marked by exploitation: from the harsh labor conditions imposed by the British-owned Rio Tinto Company in the nineteenth century, and the environmentally destructive mining practices, to the historical erasure of the 1888 environmental massacre. This forgotten atrocity is directly connected to the later discovery of the largest mass grave ever found in a rural area during the Spanish Civil War and Francoist dictatorship.
Through evocative imagery and testimonies, de Miguel connects ancient myth to contemporary struggles, calling attention to the ongoing impact of extractivism, the silencing of marginalized communities, and the need to reckon with buried histories. Nekya: A River Film is both an elegy and a call to justice—an invitation to listen to the past in order to reimagine the future.
ALLORA AND CALZADILLA
A Man Screaming is not a Dancing Bear
Year of production: 2008
Duration: 11 min 15 sec
Director: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla
Screenplay: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla
In A Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear, Allora & Calzadilla set film footage they shot in New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, where Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc in 2005, to rhythmic jazz drumming. Exploring issues of ecological witness-bearing and environmental justice within a framework of the traumatized landscape of post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, the film shows the interior of a flooded house in the Lower Ninth Ward, the historically poor and predominantly African American neighborhood that was destroyed by a failed levee system, and the wetlands of the lower Mississippi River Delta out of which the city of New Orleans was carved.
The film features a resident of the Ninth Ward “playing” a set of window blinds in his house. The percussive rhythms he creates on this homemade instrument subtly recall the great musical heritage of the region, while exposing the domestic interior to outdoor light in an inconstant flutter of luminosity, evoking the sediments and uneven traces of recent historical events.
The title is derived from the 1939 poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), by Martinique-born writer Aimé Césaire. The English translation of the verse quoted in the beginning of the film reads: “And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.”
ANETTA MONA CHIŞA & LUCIA TKÁČOVÁ
Capital: Magical Recipes for Love, Happiness and Health
Year of production: 2006
Duration: 12 min 17 sec
Language: Slovakian with English and Spanish subtitles
Directors and screenplay: Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová
In Capital: Magical Recipes for Love, Happiness and Health, it is Das Kapital itself that is taken on the battleground. “Marx did not claim to be a fortune-teller,” Fidel Castro is to have said when proclaiming in 1961 his Marxist-Leninist affiliation and announcing the communist future of Cuba. Yet, the predictions formulated in Capital were treated with the utmost seriousness in the past century and a half, until they were taken by Chişa and Tkáčová to provide them with answers on their fundamental questions in life, such as when they will marry, will they be happy with their love and their professional life, etc. They pose these questions to a fortune-teller, who answers them firstly by randomly opening Marx’s tome and asking them to read a short fragment, which is afterwards “deciphered” and continued with the help of the crystal ball.
The figure of the fortune-teller in the modern, Western society is pushed to the margins, and comes to represent a type of vanishing alternative economy, reserved mostly for women (as statistics prove) and reminiscent of archaic cultures. The paradoxes of history make it that such cultures can partially be found today in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe, where the decades of embodied Marxism-Leninism were erased from memory and replaced with all sorts of beliefs: in the free market, in God or yoga, in the country’s traditions and spiritualities, not least in fortune-tellers.
While quite ironic in using the incompatibilities between the grave statements of the book, which became an object of hate in entire societies, while at the same time laying the foundations for hope to others, and the puzzling predictions of the fortune-teller, Capital draws attention to the way in which primitive methods of coping with the future are more resilient in society than scientific promises of collective emancipation. It is maybe this ambivalence that best characterizes this body of their work: Chişa and Tkáčová are, on the one side, sharp critics of capitalist economy, and on the other side, with experience of their countries’ past, they are doubtful to the mere resuscitation of recent Utopias. Text by Marius Babias.
AMAR KANWAR
The Scene of Crime
Year of production: 2011
Duration: 42 min
Language: Text in English and Spanish
Director: Amar Kanwar
Produced by: Co-commissioned by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna and Public Press, New Delhi; supported by the Centre Pompidou, Paris
Amar Kanwar has been filming the industrial interventions that have reshaped and permanently destroyed parts of the landscape of Odisha for over a decade. Since the 1990s, national and international corporations have established large-scale mining and industrial sites in various parts of the traditionally agrarian state. Rich bauxite and iron ore deposits have been transformed into gigantic extraction sites, connected to large-scale infrastructural investments. The resulting conflicts between local communities, the government, and corporations over the control of agricultural lands, forests, rivers, and minerals, have led to the forcible displacement of indigenous communities, farmers and fisherfolk and have engendered an ongoing regimen of violence, oppression, and brutality that is random, unpredictable, disruptive, and invisible.
The Scene of Crime (2011) offers an experience of landscape just prior to erasure as territories are marked for acquisition by industry, interweaving various narrative threads with modes of image making, text inserts, and divergent temporalities that unfold in “a passage towards a more interconnected multiple relationship with the world.” The documentary and archival images of Odisha’s breathtaking landscapes and its inhabitants, captured with poetic sensibility and intimate precision, appear in a distinct reduction of sound and speed. The zones of light and color arise in different shades and scales of time, overlapping with, yet remaining outside of viewers’ time and space, allowing the gaze to explore the lush beauty of the landscape whilst opening up fissures for reflection, for the search for submerged evidence: It “re-relates and brings to the center a set of experiences, a set of understandings, a set of senses, a set of testimonies that has been dropped by the side or not given any value or importance.” The film combines with a unique constellation wherein the index of evidence, presented along with the scene of crime, shifts from modality to modality, from multiple modes of expression that undo the divisions of formal, found, factual, objective, fictional, narrated, and invented into a new library of evidence that acts to delegitimize or rather re-legitimize the terms of definitions.
This film marked the beginning of his project, The Sovereign Forest, which premiered at Documenta 13 and was shown at TBA21-Augarten in 2013.
YEO SIEW HUA
An Invocation to the Earth
Year of production: 2020
Duration: 16 min
Language: Tagalog with English and Spanish subtitles
Director: Yeo Siew Hua
Assistant director: Yang Ysiwanxuan Vicki
Screenplay: Yeo Siew Hua
Research and writing: Dan Koh
Incantation: Zarina Muhammad
Performance choreography: Eng Kai Er and Chloe Chotrani
Cinematography: Russel Morton
Editor: Daniel Hui
First camera assistant: Calvin Phua
Second camera assistant: Istravino Manuel
Second camera operator: Eric Lee
Art directors: Nicole Ho and Tricia Lim
Art assistants: Lim Sham, Chloe Tan, Suzie Shin, Renee Ting, Melissa Lim, and Zou Zhao
Mask and effigy design: Mike Chang
Creature sound design: Jared Chan
Location sound: Hussin Ismail
Sound design and mixing: Yen Yu Ting
Key grip: Zhang Yuanhui
Voiceover: Zarina Muhammad, Tini Aliman, Marco Viaña, and K. Rajagopal
Foley artists: Jared Chan, Loo Zhen Yang, and Jeremiah Chew, Elijay Castro Deldoc
Cast: K. Rajagopal, Tini Aliman, Zarina Muhammad, Chloe Chotrani, Eng Kai Er, Marco Viaña
Grip: Nelson Yeo
Fire supervision: Chester Hey
Produced by: Commissioned and produced by NTU CCA Singapore and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for st_age with the support of Akanga Film Asia, GRYD, and 13 Little Pictures
Director Yeo Siew Hua’s An Invocation to the Earth speaks to the plight of those who strive to protect ecosystems in a time of planetary and human rights crises. Conceived during the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival in 2019, when large-scale fires were consuming the forests of Indonesia, it confronts climate collapse through the lens of pre-colonial folktales and animistic rituals. Deep in the tropical rainforest of Southeast Asia, a series of incantations invoke the spirits of yore, including the tricksy Kancil (mouse-deer) and the ferocious Buaya (crocodile). These ancient animals enact their folkloric vendetta in a furious dance of dominance, yet their long-overdue vengeance is shrouded in smoke. Meanwhile, an effigy of a tree is burning, summoning a whole other host of specters and ancestors.
The film is dedicated to the fallen environmental defenders of Southeast Asia, a region ridden with ecological threats, in the hope that their spirits will be reborn. In the Philippines, more than 150 environmental defenders have been killed with impunity between 2016 and 2020. It is already one of the deadliest countries for activists opposing illegal logging, destructive mining, or corrupt agribusiness. The Filipino Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 further imperils their safety, labeling environmental activists as terrorists and allowing detention up to twenty-four days without charges, warrantless arrests, and the suppression of rights to privacy.
OMAR MISMAR
Abou Farid’s War
Year of production: 2021
Duration: 31 min
Language: Arabic with Spanish and English subtitles
Director, screenplay and edition: Omar Mismar
Coloring: Belal Hibri
Music Composition: Nour Sokhon
Sound Mixing: Ziad Moukarzel
Translation: Ziad Chakaroun
Master Mosaicist: Abou Amir
Animation file preparation: Nadim Zablit
Produced by: Commissioned by Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) for st_age in collaboration with Ashkal Alwan
Archaeology inspector and conservator Abou Farid shares with artist Omar Mismar part of his image library documenting the condition of mosaic works in the aftermath of several raids on Ma’arrat Al-Numan Museum in Idlib, Syria as well as the independent preservation efforts that ensued. The images give way to an aleatory conversation interweaving questions of cultural heritage and territory, preservation techniques and destruction, traceability and looting, and the production and circulation of images in times of war.
This film reflects from a very human perspective on the stories and lifelines of the many people forced by different regimes to work and live under constant threat in a state of continuous crisis. It is a story of love and respect towards culture and commitment to one’s work, a fight for survival.
ASUNCIÓN MOLINOS GORDO
Barruntaremos (Inklings)
Year of production: 2021
Duration: 9 min 38 sec
Country of production: Spain
Language: Spanish with English subtitles
Director and Screenplay: Asunción Molinos Gordo
Cinematography: Sonia Pueche
Sound Design: Alberto Carlassare
Cast: Pedro Sanz Moreno
Produced by: Commissioned by Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary for st_age; curated by Soledad Gutiérrez.
Barruntaremos (from the Spanish verb barruntar, meaning to foresee or sense) explores ways of inhabiting and perceiving the world through traditional ecological knowledge. Narrated by Pedro Sanz Moreno, a shepherd from Segovia, Spain, the film centers on Cabañuelas, an ancestral form of weather forecasting still practiced in parts of Spain, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Drawing on careful observation of clouds, winds, stars, soil, and animal behavior—especially during early August and mid-December—Sanz Moreno has developed a system for predicting weather patterns that relies on more-than-human cues, such as the movements of ants, birds, caterpillars, sheep, and donkeys.
Through this lens, Molinos Gordo challenges romantic notions of landscape in art history, instead framing it as a site of interspecies knowledge and interaction. Inspired by philosopher Vinciane Despret’s idea of an “affected perspective,” the video highlights how perception is shaped by attunement to the lives and needs of others. The work ultimately positions traditional knowledge as a tool for navigating the climate crisis—what Sanz Moreno calls “an interference in the signals of the landscape.”
TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN
Đại Bác Nghe Quen Như Câu Dạo Buồn (The Sounds of Cannons, Familiar Like Sad Refrains)
Year of production: 2021
Duration: 9 min 42 sec
Country of production: Vietnam
Language: English with Spanish subtitles
Director: Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Camera: Dương Hoàng Long & Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Flycam: Nguyễn Thái Huy Vũ & Võ Chí Thạnh
Assistant Camera: Hà Văn Huy
Editor: Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Postproduction Audio: Nam Nguyen, Vick Vo Hoang & Wallsound
Music written by: Trịnh Công Sơn performed by Khánh Ly
Production Manager: Nguyễn Xuân Phương
Produced by: Commissioned by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for st_age, in collaboration with The Propeller Group and MAG Vietnam
The bombing of several regions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the Vietnam War (1955 to 1975) by the United States Armed Forces, what is considered the largest aerial bombardment in human history, left hundreds of thousands of unexploded ordnances hidden underground, that still pose a tremendous threat to local inhabitants today.
In this film, Tuan Andrew Nguyen juxtaposes archival footage from the US army with recently recorded images of an unexploded ordnance (UXO) deactivation in the Vietnamese coastal province of Quảng Trị. The province is one of the main UXO hotspots in the Mekong region, with 8,540 casualties and 3,431deaths recorded since the end of the Vietnam War. More widely, it is estimated that UXO explosions have caused 40,000 deaths in Vietnam; 29,000 in Laos, of which 40% are believed to be children; and more than 64,000 in Cambodia since the end of the war.
For Nguyen, this work is part of a regenerative process. It aims to contribute towards the healing of a land that was dispossessed by its contamination. Landmine and UXO pollution has especially affected rural populations, leaving a dramatic trail of fatalities and amputated limbs, and those populations must be liberated from the threat of death that lies beneath the surface.
Taking its title from a line in the late sixties song Đại Bác Ru Đêm (Lullaby of Cannons for the Night) by Vietnamese songwriter and poet Trịnh Công Sơn, the film follows one of the unexploded ordnances and gives it a voice through an animistic transformation. From its drop, to its detonation in the rainforests of Vietnam, it offers closure to a menacing narrative that had been on hold for decades.
EDUARDO WILLIAMS
Pude ver un puma (Could See a Puma)
Year of production: 2011
Duration: 17 min
Language: Spanish with English subtitles
Production: Alexan Sarikamichian
Screenplay: Eduardo Williams
Director of Photography: Manuel Bascoy
Editor: Eduardo Williams
Original Music: Eduardo Williams, Alex del Río
Art Direction: Victoria Marotta
Cast: Nahuel Perez Biscayart, Fernando Contigiani, Juan M. Soler, Felipe Villanueva, Jerónimo Quevedo, Mariano Rapetti, Nehuén Zapata
Production Company: Universidad del Cine
The accident leads a group of young boys from the high roofs of their neighborhood, passing through its destruction, to the deepest part of the earth.
DEBORAH STRATMAN
Last Things
Year of production: 2023
Duration: 50 min
Language: English with Spanish subtitles
Director: Deborah Stratman and Gaëlle Boucand
Screenplay: Deborah Stratman
Cinematography: Deborah Stratman
Editing: Deborah Stratman and Gaëlle Boucand
Music: Thomas Ankersmit, Olivia Block, Nicolas Collins, Brian Eno, Okkyung Lee, Matchess, Sacred Harp Singers of Cork
Sound: Simon Apostolou
Production: Deborah Stratma, Anže Peršin and Gaëlle Boucand
Voices: Valérie Massadian and Marcia Bjørnerud
Produced by: With the support of Centre national des arts plastiques, the TËNK platform, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art and with participation of the CNC, Shifting Foundation and University of Illinois at Chicago
What happens to us / Is irrelevant to the world’s geology / But what happens to the world’s geology / is not irrelevant to us. – Hugh MacDiarmid
From before the beginning until after the end; evolution and extinction as told through the prism of minerals. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.
Catalyzed by two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, joint pseudonym of Belgian brothers Boex who wrote sci-fi before it was a genre, the film takes up their pluralist vision of evolution, where imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning the future. Also key are Roger Caillois’ writing on stones, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, Robert Hazen’s mineral evolution theory, the symbiosis theory of Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway’s multi-species scenarios, Hazel Barton’s research on cave microbes and Marcia Bjørnerud’s thoughts on time literacy.
In one way or another, these thinkers have all sought to displace humankind and human reason from the center of evolutionary processes. Passages from Rosny and interviews with Bjørnerud accompany us through the film. Stones are its ballast. We trust rock as archive, but we may as well write on water. In the end, it’s particles that remain.
RIAR RIZALDI
Mirage: Eigenstate
Year of production: 2024
Duration: 30’00
Language: Indonesian with English and Spanish subtitles:
Director: Riar Rizaldi
Screenplay: Riar Rizaldi
Cinematography: Aditya Krisnawan
Editing: Riar Rizaldi
Music: Harsya Wahono, Stella Gareth
Sound Design: Harsya Wahono
Production Design: Arda Awigarda
Producer: B.M. Anggana
Cast: Hannah Al Rashid, Uji Hahan Handoko
Produced by New Pessimism Studio.
Mirage: Eigenstate, weaves together analogous investigations into the nature of reality, positioning Western science as just one methodology among many in a constellation of pluralistic worldviews. The film explores diverse interpretations of reality – from tropical Sufi mysticism and monorealism to theories of quantum mechanics. Edited in the style of American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan’s 1980s television series Cosmos, which sought to explain the origin of life and the fourth spatial dimension, Mirage: Eigenstate draws on the tradition of scientific mass communication, where complex concepts are made accessible through straightforward explanations, often accompanied by imagery.
JUMANNA MANNA
Foragers
Year of production: 2022
Duration: 64 min
Language: Original version with Spanish subtitles
Foragers (2022, 65 mins) depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further dispossesses them from their land, while the occupation's state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect.
Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely, who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.
