Sea and Its Waves (dir. Liana Kassir, Renaud Pachot, 2023, 121 min.)
A passionate ode to Beirut – that troubled but still mesmerising city – this story of a night spent on the docks, where brother and sister Mansour and Najwa wait anxiously for a boat to take them away to Norway, is like a film poem composed out of darkness. Local characters loom out of the night, each one with a story that reveals another aspect of this wounded culture, but merging into a narrative that is both observational and surreal, heightened by unexpected musical flourishes, pools of light that suddenly illuminate the city’s skyscrapers and people whose woes are never fully explained. In their debut drama, Liana and Renaud have reached for a new cinematic language to illuminate the city’s profound trauma.
The film will be presented by curator Marija Nemčenko
The programme, curated by Zumrad Mirzalieva from DAVRA Research Collective, brings together four films that navigate the shifting meanings of home, family, and belonging across Central Asia. Moving between personal memory and collective ideology, the works explore how displacement and extinction of species, of ideals, of languages, continue to shape the region’s imagination. Together, they trace the fragile links between past and present, confronting loss, inheritance, and transformation.
The films will be presented by film & media researcher, film curator Ilona Jurkonytė
With Hasan in Gaza (rež. Kamal Aljafari, 2025 m., 106 min.)
Three MiniDV tapes of life in Gaza from 2001 were recently rediscovered. What started as a search for a former prison mate from 1989 led to an unexpected road trip from the north to the south of Gaza with Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown.
A cinematic reflection on memory, loss, and the passage of time, capturing a Gaza of the past and lives that may never be found again.
Komîna Fîlm a Rojava (The Rojava Film Commune) is a collective of filmmakers based in the eponymous autonomous region in northern Syria. It works across the region to develop and build infrastructures for filmmaking, screening, and education, fostering new audiences and an awareness of filmmaking as a medium for empowerment and a tool for liberation.
Ancestral Visions of the Future (dir. Lemohang Mosese, 2025, 90 min.)
Ancestral Visions of the Future is a deeply personal work from filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. With fragmented narratives and mythical images, he crafts a haunting reflection on dislocation and belonging.
The film also explores Mosese’s childhood and his relentless dance to evade death and wrest meaning from loss. From the dusty gravel roads where he played with toy wire cars as a seven-year-old to the dispassionate streets of exile where he dissolved into anonymity, Mosese confronts the moments that shattered and shaped him. His memories intertwine with the presence of his mother, a figure of vigilance and defiance.
But Ancestral Visions of the Future is more than the story of one man’s exile – it is also an elegy for a city and a people caught between the weight of memory and the inevitability of loss. And it is a poetic ode to cinema.
The Dupes (Dir. Tewfik Saleh, 1972, 107 min.)
The film follows the story of three Palestinian refugees united by loss and a shared hope for a better future. Helped by a water tanker driver, the three men attempt to cross the border into Kuwait, the “promised land”. This masterful screen adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s novel, “Men in the Sun,” holds a monumental place in the history of Arab cinema and is one of the first Arab films to explicitly address the Palestinian tragedy. It was directed by the Egyptian filmmaker Tawfiq Saleh and shot in Syria and Iraq.
Following meticulous restoration work, which was led by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna and the family of director Tewfik Saleh, we can now rediscover this pivotal work of Arab cinema history as it was first presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972.
The film will be presented by director, artist, and activist Philip Rizk.
The 6th video art, artists’ film and moving image festival VIDEOGRAMOS returns with a programme that invites to rethink migration, displacement, diaspora, and exile. Running in Vilnius from 18 November to 10 December, the festival’s series of events will explore how movement shapes our relationship to place, community, and identity.
Extending its previous explorations of horizontal solidarity networks and geographic pluralism, VIDEOGRAMOS’25 opens a new chapter. What does it mean to be on the move as the world around us grows increasingly fragmented? How do we preserve empathy when borders and identities become sites of defence rather than spaces of encounter?
Migration in the programme unfolds in multiple layers — through displacement and belonging, loss and discovery, longing and creation — while also recognising urgent realities such as global warming, economic crises, wars and conflicts that continue to uproot lives and futures.