V-F-X Ljubljana
6th Festival of Experimental AV Practices
12–17 May 2026
Venues:
Slovenian Cinematheque, Miklošičeva 28, Ljubljana
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Trg prekomorskih brigad 3, Ljubljana
Aksioma | Project Space, Komenskega 18, Ljubljana
6th Festival V-F-X Ljubljana
The sixth edition of V-F-X Ljubljana, a festival traditionally devoted to experimental film and video practices confidently continues on the path carefully set over the first five years. The festival will take place at four venues: the main programme will unfold at the Slovenian Cinematheque, the audiovisual performances will fully come to life on the stage of the Katedrala Hall at Kino Šiška, while part of the programme will be on view at Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana. In cooperation with its tactics&practice programme, this time curated by Marco De Mutiis under the title Becoming Image, we will traditionally open a space for a critical exploration of various digital images at the intersection of computer, internet and film cultures. A new addition this year is the fourth festival venue, +MSUM (Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova), where the traditional festival’s VR Point will be on display in the museum’s premises. This year, VR Point offers the award-winning immersive experience of the history of British rave culture In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats (2023) by Darren Emerson.
The festival will formally open at Kino Šiška, where, in cooperation with the Level Up concert series, we will welcome NÂR, a Lebanese multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer with collaborators, Lebanese photographer Nader Bahsoun and French filmmaker Loïc Verdillon, and Radio Hito, a Brussels-based, Italian-Vietnamese musician. In her cinema concert, featuring a 16mm film projection, NÂR will provide a dreamlike walking tour through the streets of Beirut and Southern Lebanon. Radio Hito, who dissolves the boundaries between the classical Lied tradition, contemporary chanson and ambient electronics, will present the principle of musical economy with her Casio keyboard. We will move to Kino Šiška’s Katedrala Hall also on the penultimate evening of the festival, when the music and visual performance Propulsor – Score for the Ship Galeb will take place, inspired by the history of Galeb, a “ship of peace and friendship” that sailed out into the world in a utopian spirit during the time of the Yugoslav Non-Aligned Movement.
The main part of the festival will take place at the Slovenian Cinematheque, where the programme will be anchored in the exploration of British experimental film. We will host John Smith, one of the most emblematic filmmakers of the post-war British avant-garde, whose constant search for a new film language originated in a -structural-materialist approach to film and who became one of the wittiest portrayers of everyday banality. Another guest will be the -award-winning artist filmmaker Miranda Pennell, who employs various critical archival practices to explore forms of collective creation. Recently, she has been focusing especially on examining and questioning archives and images of the colonial imaginary. John Smith and Miranda Pennell will each be presented with two short film programmes.
We will be visited by members of the film and sound collective Bristol Experimental and Expanded Film (BEEF), who will bring three different programmes. The first will present select titles from the history of 20th-century British experimental film, in which the London Film-Maker’s Co-Op provided an important creative junction. The second programme titled Grain and Grit and devoted to contemporary currents will present more recent films by members of the collective. They are characterised by a creative reflection on the materiality, texture and grain of handmade analogue small-gauge film methods. The third programme – the closing event of the festival – will bring two expanded film performances: through sound and visuality, Melanie Clifford explores the tense perception of stillness and flicker, while, in her two-channel 16mm expanded cinema performance with a live improvised score, Mars Saude explores the questions of vision technologies, violence and victimhood.
One of the filmmakers in focus, who will also be with us in person, is the Japanese animator Shunsaku Hayashi, who is considered one of the more peculiar contemporary filmmakers in the already peculiar field of animated and experimental auteur film. Hayashi also uses analogue techniques in bringing his painting canvasses to life, for he is primarily a painter who insists on hand-painting every individual frame.
This year’s edition of the festival will again present some carefully selected pieces of the Slovenian history of experimental film with the premiere of eight freshly digitised films by OM production, made at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. This fictitious artistic entity with countless alter egos is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year and is still considered one of the most intriguing phenomena within the Slovenian and Yugoslav avant-garde film scene.
One of the festival constants is the section Vistas, whose two programmes feature the highlights of world experimental cinema of the last two years according to the festival team. Like in previous years, we invited curators of important European film archives and film festivals to co-curate the third Vistas programme, which, for this edition, has been renamed Canon due to the predominance of the monuments of the history of world avant-garde. Another key constant of the festival is the programme of Slovenian student films What’s Cooking?, which will include not only the exquisite works by students of the art academies in Ljubljana (UL AGRFT, UL ALUO, AVA) and Nova Gorica (AU UNG) but also those by students of the Visual Arts and Design Programme at the Faculty of Education, University of Primorska in Koper (PE PEF).
Upon the opening of the festival, the exhibition From Shot to Sequence, on view in the café of the Slovenian Cinematheque, will present the results of the traditional pre-festival analogue film workshop led by artist Neža Knez, whose participants again discovered the creative pleasure of filming with a Bolex camera and experimental processing of 16mm film. The workshop films will also be screened as festival trailers before the festival programmes in the Silvan Furlan Hall.
We dedicate this year’s edition of V-F-X Ljubljana to the recently deceased friend and artist Marko A. Kovačič, one of the key figures in Ljubljana’s alternative scene, who engaged in the fields of video, performance art, installations and ambiences. Through his works, he constantly reflected on scientific discoveries and social changes; for him, fictional work was practically the only way to face reality, be it political, existential or personal. That is why this year, the festival’s programming team decided to include Marko’s video performance American Dream (1986) in Canon, the Vistas programme curated by guest curators. Through a game of hide-and-seek, the work deconstructs the dream of the promised land and foreshadows the major transition of the social system toward liberal capitalism. A fitting film for a time when it seems that the social order is once again on the verge of major changes.
The Festival team
PROGRAMME
TUESDAY, 12 May
2 – 5 pm — VR Point / Darren Emerson: In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats @ +MSUM*
4 pm — From Shot to Sequence, exhibition opening @ Slovenian Cinematheque Café*
5 pm — Becoming Image @ Slovenian Cinematheque
7 pm — Simone C Niquile: Duckrabbit.tv, exhibition @ Aksioma*
9 pm — NÂR x Loïc Verdillon x Nader Bahsoun + Radio Hito, cinema concert and music performance @ Kino Šiška (festival opening)
WEDNESDAY, 13 May
11 am – 5 pm — VR Point / Darren Emerson: In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats @ +MSUM*
5 pm — What’s Cooking? (a curated selection of student films, participating: AVA, AU UNG, UL AGRFT, UL ALUO, UP PEF) @ Slovenian Cinematheque
7 pm — Shunsaku Hayashi I @ Slovenian Cinematheque
9 pm — Miranda Pennell I @ Slovenian Cinematheque
THURSDAY, 14 May
11 am – 5 pm — VR Point / Darren Emerson: In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats @ +MSUM*
5 pm — Vistas I, curated by the festival team @ Slovenian Cinematheque
7 pm — BEEF I: British Experimental Film @ Slovenian Cinematheque
9 pm — John Smith I @ Slovenian Cinematheque
FRIDAY, 15 May
11 am – 5 pm — VR Point / Darren Emerson: In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats @ +MSUM*
5 pm — Vistas: Canon, curated by the guest curators @ Slovenian Cinematheque
7 pm — John Smith II @ Slovenian Cinematheque
9 pm — Shunsaku Hayashi II @ Slovenian Cinematheque
SATURDAY, 16 May
11 am – 5 pm — VR Point / Darren Emerson: In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats @ +MSUM*
5 pm — BEEF II: Grain and Grit @ Slovenian Cinematheque
7 pm — Miranda Pennell II @ Slovenian Cinematheque
9 pm — Propulsor – Score for the Ship Galeb, AV music performance @ Kino Šiška
SUNDAY, 17 May
11 am – 5 pm — VR Point / Darren Emerson: In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats @ +MSUM*
5 pm — Vistas II, curated by the festival team @ Slovenian Cinematheque
7 pm — OM production: Before Second Coming @ Slovenian Cinematheque
9 pm — BEEF III: Performance @ Slovenian Cinematheque
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TICKETS
Slovenian Cinematheque: 4,80 € **
Kinu Šiška: 10 €
* Free admission
** People with disabilities, unemployed individuals, students, etc. – for discounts or exemptions, see the standard price list of the Slovenian Cinematheque and Kino Šiška.
Exhibition From Shot to Sequence on view throughout the festival during the Cinematheque’s café opening hours. It opens an hour before the first screening of the day.
More info at the festival website vfx-ljubljana.si.
COLOPHON
Festival Team: Anja Banko, Juca Bonaca, Vesna Bukovec, Peter Cerovšek, Matevž Jerman, Robert Kuret, Gašper Milkovič Biloslav, Varja Močnik, Igor Prassel
Slovenian Cinematheque Team: Kaja Bohorč, Veronika Zakonjšek, Nadja Šičarov, Marko Turkuš, Tine Vrabič, dr. Stojan Pelko, direktor
Visual Identity and Catalogue Cover Design: Brina Vidic
Catalogue Design: Vesna Bukovec
Catalogue Editors: Anja Banko, Robert Kuret
Proofreading in Slovene: Mojca Hudolin, Aleš Belšak
Text Translation: Maja Lovrenov
Film Translation and Subtitling: Ana Grmek, Denis Debevec, Diana Jenko, Janina Kos, Maja Lovrenov, Miha Jenko, Tanja Bulajić
Photos: Participating Authors
Festival Photographer: Asiana Jurca Avci
Video Documentation: Miha Turk, Evita Podobnikar, Branko Lenarčič
VR Point: Roman Rus
Website Design: Brina Vidic
Social Media: Juca Bonaca, Lara Plavčak
Online Festival Trailers: Ester Ivakič, Juca Bonaca
Production: SCCA-Ljubljana / DIVA Station
Co-production: Slovenian Cinematheque
Co-production of AV performances: CUK Kino Šiška
Co-production Tactics&Practice #17: Becoming Image: Aksioma
Festival is supported by: Slovenian Film Centre, a public agency of the Republic of Slovenia; City of Ljubljana – Department of Culture.
VR Point is supported by Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and City of Ljubljana – Department of Culture.
AV music performance and cinema concert are supported by Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.
The performance by Radio Hito is part of the Level Up series, supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and Liveurope.
Partners: Aksioma, AU UNG, AVA, KUD Channel Zero, +MSUM, Nomago, UL AGRFT, UL ALUO, UP PEF
Sponsors: B&B Hotel Ljubljana Park, TAM-TAM, Vito Macheronni, Abi Falafel, Sato Bento, Veganika, Piccola
Media partners: Mladina, Radio Študent
Thanks: Janez Cerar, Nik Drozg, Rok Govednik, Katja Hohler, Jasna Hribernik, Matjaž Ivanišin, Janez Fakin Janša, Jasna Jernejšek, Andrej Kamnik, Klubvizija, Neža Knez, Tomaž Kučer, Polonca Lovšin, Ema Maznik Antić, Ana Mizerit, Marcela Okretič, Peter Rauch, Tina Smrekar, Sanja Vatič, Simon Tanšek, Adela Železnik
