Cinéstesia: 21–30 August 2026, Espoo & Helsinki, Finland.
The Espoo Ciné International Film Festival launches Cinéstesia — a festival strand dedicated to the intersections between cinema, visual arts, and artists’ moving image practices. The programme brings together a curated selection of both contemporary and archival screenings, a professional cross-disciplinary seminar, and collaborative exchange to strengthen global networks within the moving image field. Cinéstesia positions itself as a necessary forum connecting artists, filmmakers, curators, and institutions to build shared knowledge, encourage critical debate, and contribute to a more cohesive, vivid, and visible moving image ecosystem.
The artistic content of Cinéstesia is shaped in collaboration with an annually invited leading international curator. The inaugural edition welcomes renowned UK-based film scholar and critic Erika Balsom whose curatorial contribution will draw together filmmakers and visual artists engaging in the shifting boundaries between cinema and art. Cinéstesia will also spotlight two artists in focus: London-based artist and experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers and Beirut-based filmmaker and film programmer Nour Ouayda. Their bodies of work reflect distinct yet complementary approaches to contemporary filmmaking, spanning from speculative character-driven narratives to embracing the fluid possibilities of docufiction.
Among the archival screenings presented as part of Cinéstesia, one programme pays tribute to a defining moment in the history of experimental film: EXPRMNTL 4, the International Experimental Film Festival whose 1967 edition achieved near-legendary status. Erika Balsom, curator of the programme, introduces the screening as follows:
“In December 1967, West German filmmakers Claudia von Alemann and Reinold E. Thiel travelled to the Belgian seaside town of Knokke-Le-Zoute to report on what would become known as one of the most legendary events in the history of avant-garde cinema: EXPRMNTL 4, the festival organized by Jacques Ledoux, director of the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique. Just months before the tumult of May 1968, EXPRMNTL was a forum for not only the discovery of films such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), which won the grand prize, but also for happenings, protests, and provocations. Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, and others disrupted the proceedings in opposition to US imperialism and the war in Vietnam, while Jean-Jacques Lebel staged a mock beauty pageant called “Miss Experimentation” and Yoko Ono spent hours lying on the floor in a black cloth sack, a performance she called Bag Piece (1964). This screening presents a new restoration of von Alemann and Thiel’s remarkable documentation of the festival alongside four of the more than 170 films that screened there, in and out of competition.”
The screening, taking place on 29 August at 16:45 at Kino Regina, will consist of:
John Latham, Speak, 1962, 10 min
Joyce Wieland, Water Sark, 1965, 14 min
Yoko Ono, Film No. 4 (Bottoms), 1966, 6 min
Robert Breer, Fist Fight, 1964, 11 min
Claudia von Alemann and Reinold E. Thiel, Exprmntl 4 Knokke, 1968, 42 min
The screening programme is accompanied and enriched by the Cinéstesia International Seminar on Film and Visual Arts (25–26 August 2026) that brings together keynote lectures and in-depth artist talks with Cinéstesia’s international guests, along with several panel discussions. The Seminar opens a series of conversations addressing key questions in contemporary moving image practices and its curation, as well as a critical reflection on the persistence of analogue and material processes in an increasingly digital landscape.
Cinéstesia is made possible through the generous support of the Saastamoinen Foundation. Other confirmed partners include EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, the Finnish Film Foundation, AV-arkki – Centre for Finnish Media Art, the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Nordic Culture Point, Svenska Kulturfonden, Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Cinema Orion, and Forum Box.
More information:
www.espoocine.fi
https://kinoregina.fi/teemat/cinestesia/
Cover image: Joyce Wieland, Water Sark, 1965. Photo courtesy of Cinéstesia.