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Program/
We are happy announce the program for HIVE's 5th edition!
Day One / 26.09.2025
18:30 - 20:00
Opening Coctail in Lounge
20:00
Selection 1 / Plunge
70 min.
Plunge takes you on a journey to another dimension, where fundamental questions about life, connection, and love are explored from radically different perspectives. Through a series of thought-provoking stories, this selection invites you to confront these themes and challenges you to reflect on them in new and unexpected ways.
Moving Out
Marlene Auer-Pleyl
Austria
20 min.
Ben has a hard time saying no, which is why he is helping at a friends move now. Luckily, he meets Elena, who is busy trying to prevent her sister from moving out. And then, his complicated private life also gets in the way.
Corte
Magdalena Mitterhofer
Italy
24 min.
Six millennials meet renowned writer Noel Riccardi at an old workers' holiday settlement in the Italian Alps. Noel, curious about the younger generation, invites them to join him for an evening of food, drinks, and debate.
Swanlake
Stella Traub
Germany
6 min.
When we are ill, all we want is one thing - not to be ill anymore. The filmmaker sees a swan in a duck pond and dreams with Long Covid of the realm of the healthy. An essay about enchanted sick people and dreaming birds.
Almost Certainly False
Cansu Baydar
Turkey
20 min.
Having fled the war in Syria, Hanna and her young brother Nader find themselves staying in a run-down neighbourhood of Istanbul. Hanna spends her days learning nail design in order to earn a living, while dreaming of finding a way to migrate to Europe. When she meets a Turkish guy, Ibo, on a night out, she finds herself trying to balance her identity and desires with the needs of her young brother.
22:00 - 00:00
Chill-out in Lounge
Day Two / 27.09.2025
14:30
Selection 2 / Spectral Madness
61 min.
Explore the loss and the life that continues afterward. This selection draws us into moments when absence unsettles the order of our lives and reality begins to blur. Through surreal atmospheres and lingering silences, these films reveal how grief reshapes perception, stretches time, and disrupts even the most ordinary rituals.
Fish and Cheese
Sina Guntermann
Germany
7 min.
The 16mm short film ‘Fish And Cheese’ is a sentimental observation of the short-lived friendship between two girls. A dreamy look from the first-person narrator at the invincible girl Vittoria, who remains unforgotten even after she is gone.
The Masked Monster
Syeyoung Park
South Korea
15 min.
Overcome with hunger, a girl trades her brother for a bag of rice. When her hunger is sated, she comes to her senses. But it is too late.
The Thin Line
Jaki Dell'Oro
Germany
5 min.
An elderly man drifts through a vast, empty space — a labyrinth of fragmented memories. His daughter arrives for her daily visit, struggling to care for him as he slips between reality and delusion.
Blessed Are Those Who Grieve
Zora Arose Ritz, Evgenia Chetvertkova, Kayu Yeung
Germany
14 min.
Blessed Are Those Who Grieve is a collective experimental short / essay film—a fragment of a surreal inner landscape. Two performers torment themselves with immense sorrow in sand and slime, while a narrator from Hong Kong, speaking in a dreamlike monologue, attempts to rename a trauma that has been forced into forgetting.
Restbestand
Stefan Koutzev
Germany
19 min.
Within the haunting cycle of mass production, human labor contrasts with the never-ending factory stock of coffins. In light of computer-aided manufacturing and the excessive overexploitation of natural resources, Unsold Copies longs for a moment of rest from the assembly line, while mankind continually buries itself in the remains of a material world.
17:30
Selection 3 / Quiet Madness
64 min.
From above and below, observe the world unraveling in strange ways. Landscapes, systems, and societies shift under forces both absurd and relentless. Occupations, inventions and interventions distort perception. Could the image captured in the eyes be the silence of the future?
UNDR
Kamal Aljafari
Germany, Palestine
15 min.
Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, UNDR constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape.
Workers’ Wings
Ilir Hasanaj
Kosovo
19 min.
Milazim, Fatmir and Liridon are veteran manual labourers who experienced accidents in their workplaces in Kosovo, Europe’s youngest country. In this poetic experimental documentary tribute to a now almost extinct class of people, Ilir Hasanaj gives voice to gentle, sincere and dignified, but almost invisible individuals, who fell prey to harsh and primitive capitalistic machinery and policy in the Balkans.
Crazy Lotus
Naween Noppakun
Thailand
15 min.
A new invention causes mysterious occurrences as people stroll around between infinite possibilities.
Perfectly A Strangeness
Alison McAlpine
Canada
15 min.
In the dazzling incandescence of an unknown desert, three donkeys discover an abandoned astronomical observatory and the universe. A sensorial, cinematic exploration of what a story can be.
20:30
Selection 4 / Lucid Madness
70 min.
Confront the weight of human ambition. Violence normalized, morality bends under the pull of profit, and yet, in the unlikeliest of places, love and empathy quietly emerge. The films in this selection trace the fragile interplay between collective decay and the stubborn persistence of hope, revealing how madness can both consume and illuminate the human spirit.
Brute
Valentina Knežević
Germany
15 min.
Biklijada - 300 years of bullfighting without a single bull killed in a country where people have always killed each other.
Cow Killer
Farhad Mohamadzadeh
Iran
25 min.
Naser's sick cow is about to die, but it lives due to Khazar's (his granddaughter) wish for it to be healed.Naser recognizes this as a miracle and goes after other sick cows, along with Khazar, to repeat the miracle.
Skin on Skin
Simon Schneckenburger
Germany
30 min.
Two men displaced in the hell of the German meat industry. Something lies between them. Something makes them dream again.
22:00 - 00:00
Chill-out in Lounge
Day Three / 28.09.25
14:00
Selection 5 / Rock Paper Scissors
60 min.
The randomness of our physical existence on this planet doesn't recognise any human-made borders. We do not choose where or as who we are born, or what circumstances we will face. This selection explores the political implications of this randomness. It looks at how the circumstances we are born into can have a profound impact on our lives, and how the choices we make can have far-reaching consequences. It shows that we are all subject to the forces of politics and power. But it is also a reminder that we are not powerless even if the odds are stacked against us.
Imaginary Rescripting
Kexin Hong
Netherlands
20 min.
Imaginary Rescripting is an essay film that explores how imagined realities, constructed through psychopolitics, collective memory, and digital media, are weaponized to fabricate divisive “Others” and reenact collective trauma.
Offside - An Unequal Game
Katja Stirnemann
Switzerland
15 min.
The filmmaker is fed up, she questions gender codes in sports. Material from her personal family archives meets found footage. As old codes are dismantled, the remaining pieces are formed into new questions.
La Première Image
Olia Verriopoulou
Greece
25 min.
During the first days of the military dictatorship, Loukas is suffocating in his family's apartment, which he is not allowed to leave. He then invents a new game that connects him to the outside world: answering the telephone. But the house's phone line gets mixed up with that of the Studio cinema.
17:00
Performance / Progressive
Nadir Sönmez
Nadir Sönmez lives in İstanbul and refuses to frame gay art merely as heroic survival under conservatism. Instead he reclaims the language of nationalism and traditional masculinity as counter weapons to openly map the terrain of male to male desire.
This performance brings together videos, spoken texts, a lecture and an installation. The videos reimagine homoeroticism by valorizing the everyday man. The texts reflect on how singleness is lived in our societies and unsettle the hierarchy between romantic partners and friends. The lecture unpacks the research behind the works and considers the potential of queer activism within video art. The installation explores how gay sexuality enables men from across different professions and social classes to come together.
Sönmez is one of the co directors of Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship with his video Cruising presented at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in 2025. Taking this work as a departure point and slipping past authority through irony he questions the idea that Europe’s “better life” and “freer art” should define queer existence in Turkey.
This performance brings together videos, spoken texts, a lecture and an installation. The videos reimagine homoeroticism by valorizing the everyday man. The texts reflect on how singleness is lived in our societies and unsettle the hierarchy between romantic partners and friends. The lecture unpacks the research behind the works and considers the potential of queer activism within video art. The installation explores how gay sexuality enables men from across different professions and social classes to come together.
Sönmez is one of the co directors of Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship with his video Cruising presented at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in 2025. Taking this work as a departure point and slipping past authority through irony he questions the idea that Europe’s “better life” and “freer art” should define queer existence in Turkey.
19:00
Selection 6 / Awakening
70 min.
Awakening is about the moments of realization and transformation we experience as we grow and age. It speaks to the subtle yet profound turning points in life that shape who we are and reminds us that we can move closer to our authentic selves by daring to rewrite both the stories we are told and the ones we tell ourselves.
Glasout
Mert Akbal
Germany
2 min.
The film Glasaus is a deconstruction of romantic ideals. The repetitions that are made audible go against the void, touch on the attempt at togetherness and end in nothingness again. Longings from one physicality, from one spirituality to another, take on structure, even find their way into dialogue, but then fade away again.
Blind Spots
Bayron Norman
Mexico
20 min.
In an innocent oversight during a golf lesson, Emiliano hits his mother's boyfriend with a golf club, causing him the loss of an eye as a result of the accident. Burdened by an overwhelming sense of guilt, Emiliano rejects his mother's attempts to help, fracturing the relationship between the boy, his mom, and the only father figure he knows.
I don’t know if i'll have to say everything again
Vitória Fallavena, Thassilo Weber
Brazil
14 min.
Fernando meets his mother weekly at a café. Today, he's gonna tell her he's getting married. Ana, who suffers from Alzheimer's, has trouble remembering that her son is gay. Does she really forget, or would she rather not remember?
Nostalgia
Ádám Varga
Hungary
13 min.
A renowned judge of a legal dynasty has passed away.To honor his legacy, a production team plans a commemorative documentary.His son — long burdened by the family legacy — turns to his own estranged son for help.
Barbed Wire
Gustavo de Carvalho
Brazil
21 min.
In Brazil’s rural countryside, two sisters and their new stepfather are forced to spend an evening in the emergency room of a hospital, facing complex encounters with strangers— while they struggle with their own family dynamics.
22:00
Closing
