The opening gesture in 20 Handshakes for Peace (2014) by Mahdi Fleifel sets the terms for “Reclaiming Archives”, a programme in which images—official, historical, and digital—no longer function as stable records of the past. Instead, they appear as sites of staging, distortion, and loss. The films approach archives through their gaps and distortions. Found footage is shown as incomplete and shaped by the systems that produced it.

Henri Bergson believed that the phenomenon called humour arises when the material world falls short of our spiritual aspirations. Had he lived long enough to savour Chantal Akerman’s work, he could have found proof for his thesis. Not only was Akerman a gifted metteuse en scene of Chaplinesque slapstick, but how she depicted romantic love was also a source of uncontrollable chuckling, thanks to this gap between wishful dreaming and all-too-human reality.

Gisberta’s murder holds an important, symbolic place in Portuguese LGBTQIA+ history, similar to the murder of Ihsane Jarfi in Belgian history—a no pasarán after which society decided to enact new laws. Luckily for us (and for her), this film, this short requiem, does not attempt to convince us of the horror by reenacting Gisberta’s death in horrific detail and length, like Animals early last year deemed necessary.

In a series of intimate, domestic scenes that interweave the present with the past, Dhiaa Biya honours the weathered hands of a (deceased) grandmother. Through repetition of the same gestures, the hands of three generations of women merge, free from any obstacles posed by the passage of time. Is there a more beautiful part of the body than the hands to reflect on in order to rekindle the extinguished connection between head and body, a characteristic of these frenzied times?

Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep finds the filmmaker once again looking back at herself, this time by orienting her gaze toward her beloved cat, the titular Henry—a chubby white feline with tricoloured splotches on her fur. Throughout the film, Marthe Peters delivers a playful voice-over addressed to Henry, drawing comparisons between their bodies, their unique habits and traits, while also questioning the love and affection she may be burdening her cat with.

As a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image, yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, together with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, critics, and scholars worldwide to participate in a first-ever poll of its kind. Invitees were asked to nominate ten audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. Through this non-academic approach to canon-building, this has led to an inspiring list of 105 titles.

The camera measures distances. Its focal point coincides with an object in the room and through the emptiness around it, something becomes visible. It is an obvious observation, yet this essential aspect of photography is important in the work of Chloë Delanghe. Her work is situated on the crossroads between intimacy and distance.

Curated by Inge Coolsaet for argos, the short film programme “Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?” responds to the ever-present police brutality by rejecting futile rhetoric and underlining the urgency and affective power of audio-visual art. This potentially intimidating viewing experience may unsettle viewers’ expectations, but it can also transform the apathetic spectator into an active, reflexive watcher.

Loveboard speaks to an era in which relationships are increasingly preserved through digital archives and the large amount of digital detritus this generates. Our personal troves of images have grown significantly in recent decades. The availability and cost of film stock constrained people to choose what to archive, and therefore, to also curate the image of their past. In this sense, digital media is counterintuitive, even antithetical to curatorship: it has the ability to seemingly conserve everything, including moments that seem utterly inconsequential, even banal, that are valued only in retrospect (if at all).

Curator Inge Coolsaet’s argos programme “War Is Not Over” surveys polymorphic responses to some of the major historical conflicts still haunting the West, hybridising once more the space between war and spectacle, reality and fiction—an opportunity for distraction, if not reflection, before we turn to the news cycle again.

Juliette Le Monnyer’s Ramallah, Palestine, décembre 2018 (2025) wants us to bear witness. Within a tight ten-minute running time, this minimalist film unfolds as a controlled documentation of one moment of colonial violence during Israel’s occupation of Palestine—almost unremarkable in its sickening mundanity, even tame when compared to the genocidal atrocities livestreamed over the last twenty-three months.

Over the last thirty years, Sarah Pucill’s films have shown a sustained engagement with feminist politics, surrealist aesthetics, and the material language of cinema. Her work is connected by a visual and conceptual vocabulary that keeps evolving. Figures, motifs, and techniques reemerge—the principle of continuity is key to understanding how the artist’s work coheres, drawing strength from its self-reflection.