AnafiFF 2026
The films
"Cartographies of Absence" - Curated by Stelios Christoforou
A place that exists, but not quite.
A land remembered, distorted, retold.
Across these films, territory becomes unstable: haunted by memory, fractured by history, and reshaped through absence, displacement, and time. Landscapes drift between the real and the imagined, carrying traces of labor, family, catastrophe, and survival. Homes dissolve into ruins, bodies become archives, and memory lingers not as nostalgia, but as something physical, embedded in gestures, objects, and the ground itself. What emerges is a fragmented geography where belonging remains uncertain and every landscape carries the ghost of another.
"Film to exist, exist to resist”" - Curated by Stavros Markoulakis
In places marked by silence, disappearance, and historical erasure, the act of filming becomes an act of resistance. Across these films, cameras turn into tools for survival, witnessing, and reclaiming memory against forces that attempt to erase it. Images are recorded from behind windows, recovered from colonial archives, carried through anonymous voices, or excavated from landscapes haunted by displacement and loss. Moving through experimental forms and fragmented narratives, these works transform cinema into a living archive where private gestures become collective acts of defiance.
From protests secretly filmed in Iran to Palestinians resisting invisibility through sound and testimony, these stories insist on the political power of the image and its ability to endure beyond violence, borders, and silence. Ruins, ancestral remains, damaged celluloid, mines, stars, and forgotten architectures become fragments of a larger constellation where memory continues to survive. What emerges is not only an act of remembering, but a quiet revolution carried through images and voices imagining a more possible future, where to film is to exist, and to exist is to resist.
"Soft Geographies: Between Soil and Sky, Before the City" - Curated by Helene Stergiopoulou
Soft Geographies: Between Soil and Sky brings together six films that approach the natural world not as a passive backdrop, but as a living force intertwined with memory, identity, survival and care. Moving across forests, rivers, coastlines, gardens and urban landscapes, the programme explores the fragile emotional and political relationships between humans, animals and the ecosystems they inhabit and increasingly threaten.
Across fiction and documentary forms, the selected works examine what it means to coexist within environments shaped by extraction, displacement and ecological violence. Forests resist human greed, rivers carry ancestral memory, animals become silent witnesses, while landscapes themselves emerge as living archives of trauma, resilience and belonging.
“Interdisciplinary Measures” - Curated by Tassos Mallios
Let’s play two truths and a lie:
a) the police are not here to protect you,
b) owners carry all the risk,
c) Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government.
You have either guessed correctly or still hold hope for the fairy tales of eternal economic growth. This session invites us to explore contemporary existence in post-capitalism and contemplate the frailty of our illiberal democracies. Illusions hold the facade of a shifting system of power intact, while discipline ensures the smooth transition into a new reality of further consolidation.
So, will we fight or feed the monster?
“Di*k pics and goodbyes” - Curated by Sarnt Utamachote
It is common in our time to receive unsolicited di*k pics on one app while, at the same moment, receiving breakup messages on another. We live in an era where multiple realities and emotions collapse into the phenomenon of digital intimacy. People can become emotional on hypersexualized apps like Grindr or Bumble, feeling hurt or lonely, while others express desire on more formalized platforms such as LinkedIn or within videogames.
Di*k pics and goodbyes brings together short films that reflect this condition of modern life, exploring the connections between sexual pleasure and awakening, digital intimacy, relationships, and cinema. Reflecting contemporary dating and hookup culture, for both queer and straight people, the program shows how both di*k pics and goodbyes are constantly exchanged, where laughter and tears remain deeply intertwined rather than contradictory.
"Only Dreams Can Dictate My Reality" - Curated by Stavros Markoulakis
Somewhere between dreams and memory, where desire burns quietly and the world begins to lose its shape. In times where ghosts return through desired bodies, voices echo across time, and distant stars hold onto forgotten songs, these films drift through landscapes shaped by myth, prophecy, and the unstable logic of dreams. Reality slips into haunted terrains where grief, technology, longing, and the unconscious intertwine, allowing buried emotions and irrational impulses to rise slowly to the surface.
From artificial intelligence entering our most intimate inner worlds to adolescent desire turning feverish and destructive, these stories move between the tender and the uncanny. Bodies become vessels for inherited histories, friendships dissolve beneath cosmic skies, and nature itself begins to answer back through silence, catastrophe, and apparition. What remains are fragments: a voice, a touch, a forgotten song, flickering briefly in the dark, in worlds where dreams dictate our reality.
