The Song of Stone
Toshio Matsumoto | 1963 | Japanese, with English subtitles | 24 min.

Comprising of series of rhythmically animated photographs taken by diplomat and Japanologist Ernest Mason Satow, this documentary about the quarries of Shikoku Island brings both the stones and the masons to life with the help of a percussive musique concrète score by Kuniharu Akiyama, made using sounds of chisels striking granite.

UNDR

Kamal Aljafari | 2024 | 15 min

The camera’s eye returns obsessively to the same places—archeological sites that are appropriated, land that has existed for thousands of years in the desert. From a bird’s eye perspective, UNDR is a piercing reflection on that which imposes control—the meanings behind image-making and the perception of the places it presents onscreen. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape.

Mountain Roars 

Chonchanok Thanatteepwong, Pobwarat Maprasob | 2025 | Thai, with English subtitles | 13 min

As mountains shift and echoes from explosions rumble in the distance, mysteries lie hidden in every corner of caves, streams, and trees. Strange, flickering lights pulse to the rhythm of the voices of a young man and woman, their stories echoing back and forth as they try to piece together the story of this place.

The Terrible Speed of Mercy

James Richards | 2024 | 5 min

The Terrible Speed of Mercy is a black-and-white video that dives deep into the latent legibility of terrains and surfaces. Drawing from Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï’s 1950s photographs of graffiti-covered walls in the city, Richards creates what seems to be an endless landscape of stone, connected by computer-generated imagery. Steadily panning across roughened surfaces, the camera reveals marks that evoke rudimentary language or face-like figures. Their hollow eyes and wide-open mouths greet us on this surreal filmic journey while a soundscape made of music, distant voices, sirens, and a continuous droning sound expands this hypnotizing and mystical audio-visual experience.

Toshio Matsumoto (1932–2017, Japan) is a pioneer of experimental moving image in Japan, and a visual arts theorist and critic. Early in his career, he explored his own views on postwar Japanese society as a documentary filmmaker. Matsumoto worked closely with the art group Jikken Kobo (‘Experimental Workshop’) and often collaborated with a key member, the composer Toru Takemitsu, for his well-known avant-garde films such as Silver Wheel (1955) and The Song of Stone (1963). Matsumoto explored structuralism, abstract film, and electronic music, and taught for many years at Kyoto University of the Arts and Nihon University School of Art.

Kamal Aljafari (b.1972, Palestine) is a film director and artist whose poetic and experimental cinema traces the haunted material and spectral realities of Palestine as a nation. Born in Ramla and based in Germany, Aljafari’s film transforms ruins and fragments of everyday life into echoes, blurs, and defiant acts of memory. His films investigate the forms and politics behind images that are made visible by his experimentation with various techniques, as seen in a fictionalised response to the gentrification in Jaffa in Port of Memory (2009), the re-editing of archival footage in Recollection (2015), and use of surveillance footage in An Unusual Summer (2020).

Pobwarat Maprasob is a Bangkok-based filmmaker. His films reflect an interest in experimental and documentary film practices, and focus on notions of space, history, and society. Previous short films include Blind Gaze (2019), Shadow of the Wind (2021), Did You See the Hole That Mom Dig? (2023), and Mountain Roars (2025), which was co-directed with Chonchanok Thanatteepwong. Maprasob continues to write screenplays and works as an assistant director on commercial and arthouse film productions.

Chonchanok Thanatteepwong is a Bangkok-based filmmaker with an interest in experimental cinema and surrealist art. Her previous films include the award-winning Crystallized Memory (2022) and Mountain Roars (2025), the latter of which was co-directed with Pobwarat Maprasob. Thanatteepwong continues to work as an editor, assistant director, and art director for various film productions and music videos.

James Richards (b. 1983, United Kingdom) lives and works in Berlin. His artistic practice encompasses expanded film, video, and installation. He primarily works with found footage materials that he rearranges poetically to investigate their new relationship, using collage and editing as a compositional tool. Themes like desire, obsession, memory, and the hidden narratives within existing images are at the core of his immersive and multilayered narratives, and carve a singular space where the personal, political, and digital converge.