Charlotte Clermont (Canada): With a background in experimental cinema, Charlotte Clermont creates a dialogue between video and audio explorations to examine our perceptions of the real. She holds a Master’s degree in Time and Space from Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts. Her master’s project du soleil, que ça existe was nominated for the Nordic and Baltic Young Artist Award. Her works have been presented in Canada and internationally at festivals and exhibitions such as the Festival international du film sur l’art (Canada), Fracto (Germany), Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux de Paris , International Film Festival Rotterdam, Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Germany), CROSSROADS, Arctic Moving Image and Film Festival (Norway) and Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland).

Silvia Turchin (US) is a Bay Area experimental filmmaker whose work is concerned with the loss latent within quotidian spaces. Her films are experiential in style, encouraging viewers to immerse themselves in visual and sonic observation of urban and natural landscapes. Her films include Summer Light for Tula, F-Line, 131 Russ, Oh Christmas Tree and Dogs of the 9th Ward. Silvia has screened at festivals and venues such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Filmfest Dresden, Mill Valley Film Festival, Big Muddy Film Festival, Frameline, Shapeshifters Cinema and Basement Films’ Experiments in Cinema.

Emma Penaz Eisner (US) is a filmmaker and visual artist who engages with enduring mythical, existential and psychological themes, often using dream logic in her visual storytelling. She has presented her short films, photographs and moving image art worldwide in art gallery exhibitions and international film festivals, including Seattle International Film Festival, Revelation Perth International Film Festival (Australia) and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Scotland). Recognized with over twenty juried awards, her work spans experimental filmmaking, live action combined with handcrafted animation, digital and analogue photography and stop-motion animation. Originally from San Francisco, she now lives in Los Angeles, where she founded and runs Eyes//Pen Workshop, an independent multi-media production studio for her arts practice.

Kathleen Quillian (US) works across the spectrum of still and moving imagery, including pre-cinematic devices, 35mm slides, stop-motion animation and 16mm film. Triangulating between natural phenomena, metaphysics and speculative reasoning her work explores liminal spaces and the collective and individual ways humans understand and engage with the unknown. She has exhibited in venues and festivals internationally including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, Animasivo, REDCAT, the Exploratorium and Pacific Film Archive, among others. She is also the co-founder and Programming Director of Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland CA.

Born and raised in Iran, Maryam Tafakory is an artist-filmmaker working across moving image, text and performance. Her practice unfolds through long, unfinished research and gathers into constellations of speculative nonfiction pieces. She layers archival fragments, poems, newspaper clippings, audio recordings, declassified documents and state-produced images to trace the space between what is recorded and what is erased. Her research turns to historical gaps, unspoken rules, the various practices of censorship and to the bodies, stories and histories that are silenced or made illegible. Her work engages not only with what is missing, but with how absence itself is produced, regulated and sustained. Her ongoing films and performances follow these regimes of control, their internalisation and the unseen architectures that hold them in place. In dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema, pre-revolution censorship and the histories of women involved in clandestine leftist groups of the 1970s, her work continues to unfold as interconnected pieces. Portrait by Oscar F Orengo.

Kate Solar (Canada) is a filmmaker based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. Her documentary and experimental film work probes the boundaries of memory, examining what exists in the interstitial space between landscape and documentation. Approaching the analog film frame as tactile material offers new ways to investigate archive poetics. Solar holds a BFA from NSCAD University. Her practice has been supported by Arts Nova Scotia, AFCOOP, the Centre for Art Tapes, Struts Gallery and more.

Kamila Kuc (US/Poland) is a Polish-born filmmaker based between London and Seattle. Her work brings together performance, movement and hybrid nonfiction forms to explore memory as something embodied, relational and constantly shifting. She is interested in what lingers beyond language—gestures, sensations and traces carried in the body. Through improvisation and collaborative processes, she creates spaces where these experiences can emerge and be shared. Her work explores memory, ancestry and womanhood as sites of tension and transformation, shaped by inheritance and resistance. Informed by her therapeutic training, she approached the body as a threshold where experience is both held and reconfigured. Her films become spaces of encounter, where intimacy offers a quiet form of reflection, endurance and repair.