By Rebecca Ceccatelli. Cover images by Gianmarco Rescigno.
It’s midnight on November 16th, 2025. The gentle guardian with red glasses approaches the exit of Cinema La Compagnia in Florence, a bunch of keys in hand. We stand on the sidewalk, gazing down the corridor that leads to the screening room. The 18th edition of Lo Schermo dell’Arte has just concluded with its final screening. With a soft “arrivederci,” the man closes the cinema’s barrier.
For 18 years, Lo Schermo dell’Arte has brought art, video art, and artist films to the cinema scene in Florence. Despite being smaller in scale compared to larger European festivals, it has consistently focused on highlighting the evolution of the moving image, exploring how artists engage with new forms and how the moving image continues to be perceived and used within contemporary artistic practice. The festival acts as a lens through which we can observe shifts in artistic experimentation, offering an intimate yet rigorous view of the current landscape of visual culture.
This year’s edition centered on a pressing question: what can art do in dark and unsettling times, when international and humanitarian law seems defeated? The festival brought these discussions to the big screen, addressing urgent issues such as the Palestinian reality, Blackness, the effects of decolonization, human-environment relationships, the implications of technology in our lives, gender identity, and the creative process.
We highlighted a selection of artists and their films presented at the festival—artists who captured our attention and show every sign of becoming key figures in the artistic landscape in the months and years ahead. You better watch out!
Mila Turajlić: Reimagining Yugoslav Newsreels Through Immersive Performance
With Mila Turajlić’s performance, the screen splits in two, and suddenly the artist herself becomes part of what is projected, of what we watch from our seats. Non-Aligned Newsreels is a long-term artistic research project that Turajlić has been developing for years, the results of which have already been showcased by major institutions such as the Berlin Biennale and MoMA in New York. At the core of the project is the extensive archive of Yugoslav newsreels (Filmske Novosti), where Turajlić identified footage shot by Yugoslav cameramen during Tito’s travels to countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Through multiple methods of engaging with this archive, the artist organizes workshops, performances, video montages, and meetings to give voice to forgotten films, offering new perspectives on the past and on global solidarities. At Lo Schermo dell’Arte, Turajlić presents Fragments: a performance in which her live voice invites the audience to engage with footage shot in Africa in the 1950s, accompanying the liberation of numerous states. During the performance, Turajlić improvises a montage of these materials with oral histories, bringing to light—sometimes with irony, empathy, or rigor—a forgotten perspective: that of Tito’s cameramen. The French version of the performance has become a production of the Théâtre National de Bretagne and will tour France until 2027.
Randa Maroufi: 2025 Focus Artist with Five Featured Films
Maroufi is not new to the festival. In fact, she participated in the VISIO project in 2022, an annual initiative by Lo Schermo dell’Arte dedicated to emerging European voices working with moving images. She returns this year to complete the circle, but this time the spotlight is entirely on her, with a dedicated focus featuring a series of screenings, including L’MINA (2025), winner of the Leitz Cine Discovery Prize for Short Film at the Critics’ Week of the most recent Cannes Film Festival.
Randa Maroufi is a Franco-Moroccan artist working with photography, video, installation, performance, and sound. Her style is strongly political and reflective: she stages bodies—both in public and intimate spaces—to interrogate representation and the truthfulness of images.
Maroufi creates an ambiguous tension between documentary and fiction, playing with the “reconstruction” of real scenes to critically reveal social dynamics such as gender, power, migration, and memory. Consequently, her approach is highly dialogic: she actively involves the people she films or photographs, often recreating situations with them rather than merely observing.
As a result, every film she presents transforms into a series of tableaux vivants, where characters remain static, as in The Park (2015), or move within a clearly defined performance, as in Stand-by Office (2017). By offering perspectives on realities where her political and critical voice emerges through the composition of scenes, scripts, and reconstructions, the images she creates seem to freeze or stretch time, making space for emotional tension and intimacy.
Barki and Bennani: Exploring Family, Identity, and Queer Stories Through Bouchra
Barki and Bennani are a duo that has been attracting attention for years. The two artists created the animated series 2 Lizards, first presented on Instagram in the spring of 2020, and later acquired by the permanent collections of the MoMA and the Whitney Museum.
Bouchra, produced for Meriem Bennani’s recent solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada, is the duo’s feature-length debut. The film explores the relationship between Bouchra, a queer Moroccan filmmaker living in New York, and her mother, a cardiologist in Casablanca, both depicted as coyotes.
Bouchra struggles with the impact her sexuality has on her relationship with her mother, while at the same time feeling eager to move forward with her life and career, convinced that her art can help her address tensions and unresolved issues. Blending fiction, autobiographical elements, and anthropomorphic animals that engage in real conversations, the animation becomes a tool to tackle complex and current themes, such as gender issues and family relationships, through a hybrid language born from new technologies, rich in iconographic and symbolic references.
Alessandro Del Vigna: Bringing Anni Albers’ Bauhaus Legacy to Life on Screen
Alessandro Del Vigna is a young Italo-Romanian director and producer, trained in Cinema, Television, and Multimedia Production at the University of Bologna and a graduate of the Luchino Visconti Film School in Milan. His cinematic style is elegant and meditative, capable of weaving together documentary, historical archives, and contemporary reflections in short but dense formats. In 2025, Del Vigna directed the short film Weaving Anni Albers, produced by Start Srl with the support of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, a hypnotic journey through the work of Anni Albers, a pioneer of textile art and a key figure of the Bauhaus.
The film blends archival materials from the Albers Foundation with contemporary footage of textile processes carried out at the Italian company Dedar, while a voice-over reads texts written by Albers herself, emphasizing the profound connection between fabric, architecture, and landscape.
The short film transforms fabric into a metaphor for dialogue between past and present, intertwining memory, technical innovation, and the spiritual dimension of the Bauhaus project, suggesting that Albers’ legacy continues to resonate in the contemporary design world. Through a poetic and visually refined approach, Del Vigna confirms his talent in merging historical reflection with artistic experimentation, positioning himself as one of the most promising voices in the contemporary art cinema landscape.
Khalil Joseph: Exploring Black History Through Film and Imagination
Khalil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions is the cinematic version of his eponymous video installation presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The work is a bold and ever-shifting exploration of Black history, identity, and cultural possibility, merging fictional and historical figures into an imaginative narrative of Blackness that spans 247 years across land and sea. Conceived as a cinematic experience mirroring the sonic textures of a music album, the film moves fluidly across different modes, creating an uninterrupted flow of images guided by an associative logic that unites personal memories, speculative storytelling, archival footage, and materials drawn from YouTube, social media, cinema, television, journalism, and references to other artists’ works.
In this act of collective storytelling, the narrative intertwines W. E. B. Du Bois’ Encyclopedia Africana with a transatlantic Afrofuturist biennale set aboard a cruise ship called Nautica. Joseph integrates reflections from Black scholars and intellectuals, including Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, and collaborates with artists such as Arthur Jafa and Garrett Bradley. Serving as a kind of inventory of collective Black memory and the history of the diaspora, the film blends fiction and documentary to convey the cultural complexity of African American presence across all living manifestations of national culture, offering an immersive, multilayered meditation on Blackness and its enduring legacies.
