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.
Parallel Programmes
“To document is to learn how to die” - Curated by Katerina Markoulaki & Raisa Desypri
This pressure of the real upon consciousness is especially acute for the maker of aesthetic objects.
Tim Carpenter- To photograph is to learn how to die (2022).
From documentary to essay film to docufiction, we indulge into the archiving and de-accessing process. In this 5 avant garde slot, we wonder around the ancient greek ruins,Epirus mountains, the pro-Nakbha Palestinian fields, Serifos early 20th century miners and Heraklion Archaeological Museum, posing questions on the institutional management of history and the creative role of documenting, destruction, materiality and most important resistance.
“REALITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION” - Curated by Stelios Christophorou
A body appears on screen.
A room that watches.
A figure suspended between myth and code.
These films move through different technological languages, yet share a common ground: the instability of presence. The image is no longer a trace of something that happened, but a site where reality is constructed, mediated, and at times entirely fabricated. Rather than approaching technology as a tool, the programme treats it as a condition, one that shapes how we see, desire, remember, and perform ourselves. Algorithms, surveillance systems, virtual spaces, and digital networks become invisible architectures through which bodies, emotions, and identities are continuously negotiated. What remains uncertain is not only what we are looking at, but who, or what, is looking back.
“Pixelated and Queer” - Curated by Sarnt Utamachote
With selected short films from the last 20 years of XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin (founded in 2006 by Bartholomew Sammut), Pixelated and queer looks at the changing nature of cinematic mediums, from 2D videogames, internet culture, and analog Super 8, to dubbing techniques, virtual expanded realities, TikTok, and social media. Corresponding to ANAFI 26's theme “How soon is now”, the question of what is contemporary: in this case, cinematic mediums, can be explored, in how queer cinema has gone through for the last 20 years.With selected short films from the last 20 years of XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin (founded in 2006 by Bartholomew Sammut), Pixelated and queer looks at the changing nature of cinematic mediums, from 2D videogames, internet culture, and analog Super 8, to dubbing techniques, virtual expanded realities, TikTok, and social media. Corresponding to ANAFI 26's theme “How soon is now”, the question of what is contemporary: in this case, cinematic mediums, can be explored, in how queer cinema has gone through for the last 20 years.
