Artists
Artists
CARLOS BAIXAULI. PERFORMANCE: (Through fire and flame)
Artista: Carlos Baixauli Duration: 60′ Place: Hangar Date:Thursday 19/2. Language: catalan
Time: meet at Hangar from 19:00 (with beer, drinks and snacks). Performance at 20:00.
Description: Carlos Baixauli is a performing artist and a filmmaker. Self-described as a pyromaniac filmmaker, he is a Fallas artist who works through audiovisual practice to explore ephemerality and memory, using fire as a central element of his sensory and pyrotechnic cinema.
At Hangar, he will present the analogue cinema performance A foc i flama (Through fire and flame), an event that will become a rereading of the País Valencià through looped 16mm projections, while texts from Valencian socio-political history are read aloud and thrown into the fire. A kind of incendiary happening in which the audience will be able to participate by feeding the fire, burning the texts and sayings that shape the event. This performance takes root in the study of the aphorisms and theses of writer Joan Fuster, ultimately leading to a film adaptation. A bonfire in front of the cinema screen becomes a channel for memories, which we will collectively offer to this Falla.
SHORT FILM SESSION: A FOC I FLAMA (through fire and flame)
Carlos Baixauli’s performative activity, which links fire and celluloid, inspires this session composed of his films alongside works by other artists. A set of works that ignite cinematic experimentation, flaming images that allow cinema to be reborn, again and again, from its embers. A looped session that connects the birth and destruction of cinema. With films by Viktoria Schmid, Carlos Baixauli, Val del Omar, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos and Tomonari Nishikawa.
In memoriam Tomonari Nishikawa (1969 – 2025).
Date and place: Friday 20/2, 19:00, Zumzeig Cinema Duration: 69′
Screening format: DCP
Rojo, Žalia, Blau
Director: Viktoria Schmid Country and year of production: Austria, 2025 Duration: 10′
Synopsis: Three locations filmed over a long period of time: southern Andalusia, a tourist complex on the Baltic coast of Lithuania, and a forest in Lower Austria. A fascinating visual journey that transforms natural landscapes using vibrant Technicolor techniques, creating a striking interplay of vivid colours and shadows.
Fire don’t play with film
Director: Carlos Baixauli. Country and year of production: Spain, 2018. Duration: 2′
Synopsis: The toxic relationship between a lighter and 40 meters of 35mm film.
Fuego en Castilla (Tactilvisión del páramo del espanto)
Fire in Castilla (Tactilvision from the Moor of the Fright)
Director: José Val del Omar. Country and year of production: Spain, 1958-1960. Duration: 18′
Synopsis: “A sleepwalking essay on TactilVision (the author’s original impulse-based lighting system) focusing on the religious sculptures of the French artist Juan de Juni and the Spanish artist Alonso de Berruguete, within a cinema that moves from West to East, from escape to the ecstasy.” (Val del Omar).
València en flames (Valencia in flames)
Director: Carlos Baixauli, Cecilia Luis. Country and year of production: Spain, 2023 Duration: 6′
Synopsis: “A didactic work about the filmmaking tools made possible by the Bolex camera. The frame by frame construction of the film, together with flashes of images from around Valencia, creates the impression of fire’s conquest of the city’s buildings, while simultaneously developing a geographical portrait. Fire takes on a central role in the search for a Fallas-rooted soul within cinema.” (Filmadrid)
Light, Noise, Smoke and Light, Noise, Smoke
Director: Tomonari Nishikawa Country and year of production: Japan, USA Duration: 6′
Synopsis: Nishikawa films a fireworks festival in Japan on 16mm. By delaying and separating the sound traces captured along the optical soundtrack of the film strip, Nishikawa creates a peculiar and unique rhythm that keeps the audience both hypnotised and fascinated.
Flogisto
Director: Carlos Baixauli. Country and year of production: Spain 2024. Duration: 6′
Synopsis: 170 meters of 35mm film consumed by fire. Each
meter is transferred back to its support through a contact print.
Tonalli
Director: Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. Country and year of production: Mexico, 2021. Duration: 16′
Synopsis: Tonalli is conceived as a shamanic composition. The first part is an atavistic preparation for the War of the Flowers. The second features a ceremonial brazier in which different moons can be seen. The third, solar irradiation, represents Tonalli and the vital energy shared by all beings and objects in the world.
WOW (Kodak)
Director: Viktoria Schmid. Country and year of production: Austria, 2018. Duration: 2’30
Synopsis: Kodak’s historic factory demolition. The countdown told through images.
JUANA ROBLES. BODIES, TRACES, WOUNDS
Juana Robles is an experimental filmmaker whose works explore the body, identity, and memory through immersive and tactile cinema. Her work, often filmed on 16mm and Super 8, blurs the boundaries between the personal and the collective, drawing inspiration from performance and ritual.
Robles was born in Tortosa, grew up in Switzerland, and currently lives in Ireland. She is the co-founder of Out of Focus, an experimental cinema initiative based in Kilkenny, and has presented her work internationally. She is the artist selected for the BAICC 2025 film creation residency, organised by (S8) Mostra Internacional de Cinema Periférico and LIFT – Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. In this edition of La Inesperada, we will screen a large part of her work across two sessions, both of which will feature her presence.
Date and place: Saturday 21/2, 19:30, Zumzeig Cinema Duration: 70′
Screening format: DCP
Bounty
Director: Juana Robles Country and year of production: Switzerland, 2020 Duration: 9′
Synopsis: Meeting up with a friend at the self-managed centre The Reithalle in Bern,
chasing lights and emotions from distant summer nights.
Bodyverses: Frances Mezzetti – 2nd Lock
Director: Juana Robles Country and year of production: Ireland, 2025 Duration: 19′
Synopsis: Part of the Bodyverses series, this film follows Dublin artist Frances Mezzetti as she explores her lifelong bond with her sister Maria through performance. Over the course of a year, Frances navigates caregiving, memory, and emotional responsibility, revisiting pivotal moments from Maria’s childhood and major life transitions. Site-specific performances at the family’s former home and the Grand Canal in Dublin, alongside intimate studio work, create a space for reflection, transformation, and release. The film engages with themes of healing, connection, and the enduring power of performance art to process personal and collective histories, transforming everyday gestures and materials into a meditation on family, care, and emotional resilience. (LIFT, Toronto).
Malvaceae
Director: Juana Robles Country and year of production: Switzerland, 2018 Duration: 10′
Synopsis: The search for our own roots, images from a journey through the darkness of temporal existence: an old woman in a white dress, gardens, animals, plants… Malvaceae revolves around transience, especially the biological fragility of human beings, and questions of origin and destiny.
Bodyverses: Alastair MacLennan – Nalam Nalam (preview screening)
Director: Juana Robles Country and year of production: Northern Ireland, Scotland, Ireland, 2026 Duration: 30′
Synopsis: This title from the Bodyverses series focuses on Alastair MacLennan, a pioneering performance artist whose “performances” use his body to explore personal, cultural and social complexities inspired by Zen philosophy and the traumas caused by the political conflict in Northern Ireland (“The Troubles”). The film tracks the cyclical nature of MacLennan’s artistic practice from creation and performance to legacy, in a peregrination from Belfast, where he lived and worked for decades, to his birthplace, Blair Atholl, and later to Dundee, where he studied and donated his extensive “living archive”. A journey that explores the emotional, historical, and conceptual dimensions of his personality and work.
Session held with the support of:
JUANA ROBLES. BODIES, CYCLES, RUINS
Second session showcasing the work of experimental filmmaker Juana Robles, with films that explore abandoned spaces, mutating bodies and identities, and portraits of artists as unique as the images that capture them.
Date and place: Sunday 22/2, 12:00, Zumzeig Cinema Duration: 60′
Screening format: DCP
* Vermouth session: ticket includes a free drink (beer, soft drink, vermouth) at Zumzeig Bistrot after the session.
Honeymoon
Director: Juana Robles Country and year of production: Ireland, 2019 Duration: 4′
Synopsis: The objects that surround and inhabit an abandoned caravan in the remote Irish countryside live their lives unconcerned after their owners’ time has stopped.
Quiet Walnut
Director: Juana Robles Country and year of production: Switzerland, 2018 Duration: 8′
Synopsis: Quiet, Walnut follows a friend through her
emotional states during her mother’s terminal cancer illness in Belgrade.
Nightshades
Director: Juana Robles Country and year of production: Ireland, 2021 Duration: 17′
Synopsis: A weekend trip from the Dutch filmmaker and artist Jaap Pieter’s bedroom and his office at Café Gambrinus in Amsterdam to the coastal village of Katwijk aan Zee. We listen to him reading his love letters aloud.
Alicia
Director: Juana Robles Country and year of production: Switzerland, France, 2024 Duration: 25′
Synopsis: Originally shot on Super 8 film and partially blown up to 16mm for the creation of collages of abstract and composed photograms, the film explores the self-experimental search for artistic, gender and sexual identity of movement artist Toma Alice Péronnet. The connection between art and daily life, as well as the game between egocentrism and personal distance, characterises their work, whose most complex aspect is likely the rebirth and development of the figure of Alicia, originally created in 2004. The body is used as a device, a medium available for exploration of sexual ambivalence and polyvalence, with gender and sex understood as constantly shifting performative acts. (LIFT, Toronto).
Y un gato de porcelana… (And a porcelain cat…)
Director: Juana Robles Country and year of production: Spain, Ireland, 2020 Duration: 5′
Synopsis: With a Super 8 camera, Juana Robles confronts the old post-war landscape of Belchite and Corbera d’Ebre, while revisiting a passage by Pere Portabella (Informe General,
1976). Fixed shots of a country that has not been able to resolve the echoes of its past, images and sounds of devastation that also belong to other wars.
Session held with the support of:
