Saint Petersburg International Experimental Film Festival (SPIEXFF)
is an independent festival held in Saint Petersburg, dedicated to experimental cinema. We strive to bring together people engaged in unconventional practices for the exchange of experience and the promotion of independent cinema.
For the first edition of the festival in 2026, 40 films from 15 countries
were selected and divided into seven Official Selection programs.
Each program was curated by the festival team based on different principles, themes, techniques, and approaches.
The selected films move between abstraction and reality, fiction and documentary approaches, analogue and digital practices: сollage, essay film found footage, analogue DIY techniques, flicker films, machinima, animation, photo film, cameraless cinema, and other forms of experimentation with the moving image. It was important for us to select films representing a wide range of avant-garde and contemporary experimental cinema in order to observe what it looks like today.
Alongside the main selection, we have prepared a Retrospective Program dedicated to debut films by filmmakers from around the world. This idea resonates with the debut edition of the festival, offering an opportunity to look at the first steps of filmmakers in the formation of their language.
Beyond cinema, we strive to expand artistic practices through music and sound. For this edition, we have prepared two musical events where sound artists present different approaches to attentive listening through electroacoustic music, drone, noise, and sound art.
Each event and program represents a unique experience through which we seek to expand our own understanding of cinema, music, and other artistic mediums, in the hope of bringing people together through a shared love of art.
is an independent festival held in Saint Petersburg, dedicated to experimental cinema. We strive to bring together people engaged in unconventional practices for the exchange of experience and the promotion of independent cinema.
For the first edition of the festival in 2026, 40 films from 15 countries
were selected and divided into seven Official Selection programs.
Each program was curated by the festival team based on different principles, themes, techniques, and approaches.
The selected films move between abstraction and reality, fiction and documentary approaches, analogue and digital practices: сollage, essay film found footage, analogue DIY techniques, flicker films, machinima, animation, photo film, cameraless cinema, and other forms of experimentation with the moving image. It was important for us to select films representing a wide range of avant-garde and contemporary experimental cinema in order to observe what it looks like today.
Alongside the main selection, we have prepared a Retrospective Program dedicated to debut films by filmmakers from around the world. This idea resonates with the debut edition of the festival, offering an opportunity to look at the first steps of filmmakers in the formation of their language.
Beyond cinema, we strive to expand artistic practices through music and sound. For this edition, we have prepared two musical events where sound artists present different approaches to attentive listening through electroacoustic music, drone, noise, and sound art.
Each event and program represents a unique experience through which we seek to expand our own understanding of cinema, music, and other artistic mediums, in the hope of bringing people together through a shared love of art.
20 September
22:30
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
20:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
17:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
12:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
19 September
22:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
19:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
18 September
19:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
17 September
16 September
18:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Opening +
Official Selection#1 + Q&A with filmmakers
Official Selection#1 + Q&A with filmmakers
Official Selection#2 +
Q&A with filmmakers
Q&A with filmmakers
Official Selection#3 +
Q&A with filmmakers
Q&A with filmmakers
Official Selection#6 +
Q&A with filmmakers
Q&A with filmmakers
17:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Official Selection#4 +
Q&A with filmmakers
Q&A with filmmakers
Official Selection#7 +
Q&A with filmmakers+
Festival Closing
Q&A with filmmakers+
Festival Closing
20:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Official Selection#5 +
Q&A with filmmakers
Q&A with filmmakers
Experimental Music
Experimental Music
16mm Film Workshop
13:00
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Lectorium, Sevcable Port
Retrospective Program
schedule 2026
Saint Petersburg School of New Cinema
Saint Petersburg, Russia
Support and Distribution Films
by Light Cone
by Light Cone
- Michael Maziere, Untitled (1980)
- Martin Arnold, Pièce Touchée (1989)
- Tomonari Nishikawa, Apollo (2003)
- Rei Hayama, A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects (2009)
- Shiho Kano, Landscape (1998)
- Jerome Hiler, Words of Mercury (2010-2011)
Program:
Curatorial text:
87 min
This program is dedicated to the phenomenon of flicker — one of the most radical techniques of experimental cinema, which changes conventional ways of perceiving image and sound, transforming them into a liminal cinematic experience. The historical starting point here, of course, was Tony Conrad’s structural film The Flicker (1966), which opened up a new field of possibilities for the authors of experimental cinema, who subsequently used this technique with varying degrees of intensity.
However, it was important for me to intentionally expand the notion of flicker itself and to trace how this principle manifests across a variety of examples: in the pulsation of sound, ultra-rapid editing, phase repetition, color mixing, the duplication of text, and the layering of abstract imagery.
All of this makes it possible to address the potential fragmentation of film — its capacity to break apart into discrete impulses, ruptures, and intervals. Yet it is precisely through the rhythm and tension of these ruptures that filmmakers reassemble their works, transforming fragmentation into a unified sensory experience.
However, it was important for me to intentionally expand the notion of flicker itself and to trace how this principle manifests across a variety of examples: in the pulsation of sound, ultra-rapid editing, phase repetition, color mixing, the duplication of text, and the layering of abstract imagery.
All of this makes it possible to address the potential fragmentation of film — its capacity to break apart into discrete impulses, ruptures, and intervals. Yet it is precisely through the rhythm and tension of these ruptures that filmmakers reassemble their works, transforming fragmentation into a unified sensory experience.
Curator: Mark Petrovitsky
retrospective
program
program
1989
Words of Mercury
WORDS OF MERCURY is a silent film projected at 18fps. It has many layers of super-impositions which were all shot in the camera. It moves from a stark Wintery world and slowly develops into a place of overgrowth and richness that is almost suffocating and which re-invites death.
2010-2011
Jerome Hiler
A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects
The ‘Single-8’ is a film standard developed by Japanese photography company Fujifilm in 1960. (Width: 8 mm, polyester) Single-8 was widely used as a general home-movie, recording media for enterprises and used by many independent filmmakers. After reached its peak in 70’s, the film was giving way to the video. There were some movements for the continuance of Single-8 by people in the film industry and cultured person when Fujifilm announced the end of its developing service in 2008 subsequently to the end of sales of Single-8 in 2007. The film A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects (2008–2009) was made in this struggle. The film was completed in 2009, it is still missing the magnetic body for sound recording on film. Repeated sequence of “a child buries dead insects, and she’s running away,” was duplicated directly by hand. This film is only one thing, copy does not exist.
You can see the woman sitting still and the landscape in turn. In this film, the character is not the heroine, and is equated with the landscape.As the subject is equated with the existence of a film too, the difference of time each having is presented in this film. (S.K.)
2009
Rei Hayama
Landscape
1998
Shiho Kano
Apollo
"It shows my interest in materials, medium, and apparatus of cinema. The sound will be produced from the visual on the optical soundtrack – for some parts, I used a 35mm still camera to expose the soundtrack area, and I scratched off the film emulsion directly for other parts. This is my senior thesis project at Binghamton University, and Julie Murray was my advisor." — T.N.
2003
Tomonari Nishikawa
Pièce Touchée
Based on a single, 18-second shot from a relatively unknown 1950’s hollywood movie, this classic film constructs a new narrative out of the choreographies and emotions that lay hidden in the source material. Using the optical printer as a microscope, Arnold re-animates the individual frames from the original film and amplifies the inadvertent movements and hesitations of the actors. By insisting on these cracks that appear in the hyperscripted world on the screen, Arnold acts out an almost physical excorcism of gender codes.
Martin Arnold
Untitled
UNTITLED explores two adjacent spaces; a room and the street outside as seen from the room. Through an exhaustive use of focus-pulls, dolly zooms, pans and superimposed zooms, Maziere draws out, with great clarity, the numerous ways of seeing these two spaces and their various interpretations. Sometimes the room is an interior world illuminated with light from the single window. At other times the room is a blackened void and the window a screen. At other moments the window permits a view out and we see the outside as a view from the window. Then we 'are' outside and the camera teases out the infinity of ways in which the space may be experienced. The camera manipulations successfully redefine the exterior space, reminding us that seeing is relative; since each sweep of the camera displaces its predecessor, the notion of a cardinal viewpoint is undermined. The relativism of the viewpoint is not to be confused with something apparently similar, namely the subjective expression of an individual's vision. The film sets up a system of elements; room, window, view out, exterior, camera, light, and darkness and sets these in motion. UNTITLED is a positive film. It stresses that seeing is a creative process, an act by which we construct and define ourselves in relation to our surroundings. The distinction between self and surroundings, observer and observed are blurred.” – Nicky Hamlyn, ‘From Structuralism to Imagism’, Undercut n. 19.
1980
Michael Maziere
Lectorium Sevcable Port
20 September / 13:00
Saint Petersburg School of New Cinema
Kinora Film Foundation
Saint Petersburg, Russia
- Laura Moreno Bueno, Ulía (2024)
- Mike Stoltz, With Pluses and Minuses (2013)
- Colby Richardson, Convolve (2016)
- Nan Wang, Oscillation in Sight #01 (2023)
- Allan Brown, Wishful Thinking (2017)
- Colby Richardson, Head (2019)
- Nan Wang, Liquid Landscape (2017–18)
- Esther Urlus, Elli (2015–16)
- Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes, Confidente (2016)
Program:
Curatorial text:
76 min
This program is dedicated to the phenomenon of flicker — one of the most radical techniques of experimental cinema, which changes conventional ways of perceiving image and sound, transforming them into a liminal cinematic experience. The historical starting point here, of course, was Tony Conrad’s structural film The Flicker (1966), which opened up a new field of possibilities for the authors of experimental cinema, who subsequently used this technique with varying degrees of intensity.
However, it was important for me to intentionally expand the notion of flicker itself and to trace how this principle manifests across a variety of examples: in the pulsation of sound, ultra-rapid editing, phase repetition, color mixing, the duplication of text, and the layering of abstract imagery.
All of this makes it possible to address the potential fragmentation of film — its capacity to break apart into discrete impulses, ruptures, and intervals. Yet it is precisely through the rhythm and tension of these ruptures that filmmakers reassemble their works, transforming fragmentation into a unified sensory experience.
However, it was important for me to intentionally expand the notion of flicker itself and to trace how this principle manifests across a variety of examples: in the pulsation of sound, ultra-rapid editing, phase repetition, color mixing, the duplication of text, and the layering of abstract imagery.
All of this makes it possible to address the potential fragmentation of film — its capacity to break apart into discrete impulses, ruptures, and intervals. Yet it is precisely through the rhythm and tension of these ruptures that filmmakers reassemble their works, transforming fragmentation into a unified sensory experience.
Curator: Gevorg Galstian
FLICKER
2013
Wishful Thinking
Trotters come round the bend with Immanuel Velikovsky as race caller. Why can't we believe in “if” anymore.
“The audio interference that he (Brown) whips up and cycles has the effect of sounding like a brewing storm. The stuttering images of horse-drawn chariots again evoke a coming apocalypse. Is Brown wishing for the end of the world, or for aesthetic gale winds that can bring order to chaos?” Greg de Cuir
“The audio interference that he (Brown) whips up and cycles has the effect of sounding like a brewing storm. The stuttering images of horse-drawn chariots again evoke a coming apocalypse. Is Brown wishing for the end of the world, or for aesthetic gale winds that can bring order to chaos?” Greg de Cuir
2017
Allan Brown
Oscillation in Sight #01
Oscillation in Sight is a series of film experiments that opposed the idea of representation and reconstruction of the appearance of motion in the real world. By making her own 16mm camera, the filmmaker can capture images without restrictions such as frame size, gate, speed, and shutters. In Oscillation in Sight #1, we will be gazing at a small transparent piece of plastic on a spinning motor, that appears to be phasing in and out of existence, oscillating between the familiar and distorted visions.
2023
Nan Wang
Convolve
Filmed on Super 8, Convolve transforms pages from Greg Bright’s Fontana Mazes into a convoluted passage, using prisms, water refractions and warped chrome to obscure the already obscured path of The Maze. The score for this film is created by taking an analog-video feed of the film, and using the video output of the camera as an audio input. The black and white lines of the mazes sculpt the tone and structure of the audio in real-time, resulting in a jarring, alien soundscape.
2016
Colby Richardson
With Pluses and Minuses
A ground-less and boundless 16mm film in which a wall becomes a window to a swirling landscape.
Mike Stoltz
Ulía
The limits of the landscape are always the same, because they do not understand political borders, but geographical features. A line that separates the sea from the sky, mountainous waves that cut across the sky. Regardless of where you are, these limits follow the same pattern. This film proposes as a starting point the use of these limits to create a sort of landscape collage, to reconstruct the image of the landscape by combining space and time from the capture of the image; from the present, and not from the subsequent construction in post-production, hence the key role of the analogue image.
2024
Laura Moreno Bueno
Confidente
If I didn’t blossom, if I remained unbloomed, it’s because my roots were poisoned. I know it's false, an induced error, but... this is me.
2016
Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes
Elli
Elli consists of a seascape shot from the spot that marks the start of World War II in Greece. However, it is mainly a follow-up to filmmaker Esther Urlus’s inquisitive interest in colour mixing in film. In this case, the optical mixing created by various flicker effects.
2015-16
Esther Urlus
Liquid Landscape
The result of a two-year research study on the aesthetics of liquid patterns. By using a mixture of liquid soap and film developer, rich visual patterns were created from the transit moments when liquid hits the 16mm film strip. Microscopic worlds and macroscopic landscapes emerge.
2017-18
Nan Wang
Head
Filmed on super 8 in an underground concourse located directly beneath Winnipeg's famous Portage and Main intersection. HEAD takes a structuralist examination of the often overlooked 360 degree concrete relief mural that spans the entirety of the underground passageway.
2019
Colby Richardson
Kinora Film Foundation
Saint Petersburg School of New Cinema
24 May / 18:00
17 May / 18:00
Curators:
Gevorg Galstian
Kim Ji-hwan
Francisco Rojas
Mark Petrovitsky
Sound Curator:
Andrey Kashin
Designers:
Anastasia Dargis
Margarita Asylgaraeva
Coordinators:
Masha Demyanova
Anastasia Nikolaenko
Media Specialist:
Polina Antipova
Translators:
Oleg Triers
Polina Antipova
Technical Specialist:
Maxim Kuzhba
In collaboration with:
Kinora Foundation
Saint Petersburg School of New Cinema
Special Thanks:
Sevcable Port, Lectorium
Light Cone, Paris
Sixpackfilm, Vienna
Gevorg Galstian
Kim Ji-hwan
Francisco Rojas
Mark Petrovitsky
Sound Curator:
Andrey Kashin
Designers:
Anastasia Dargis
Margarita Asylgaraeva
Coordinators:
Masha Demyanova
Anastasia Nikolaenko
Media Specialist:
Polina Antipova
Translators:
Oleg Triers
Polina Antipova
Technical Specialist:
Maxim Kuzhba
In collaboration with:
Kinora Foundation
Saint Petersburg School of New Cinema
Special Thanks:
Sevcable Port, Lectorium
Light Cone, Paris
Sixpackfilm, Vienna
Team 2026
