by Claudia Praolini
Ubik 2026 is an out-of-competition part of the festival, where the works with the most innovative language find their natural spot. Whereas the aim of short films experimenting new ways of expression has always been one of the core criterion for selecting and evaluating all the films competing at Concorto, Ubik 2026 pushes the limit a bit further, in less-charted territories, where the border between cinema and video fades away. It is a kind of cinema which talks about itself, a cinema which turns its eye towards itself, revealing with no shame the mechanisms upon which video-recording is based. A kind of cinema which, conscious of its structures and language, decides to “unveil the trick”, but exactly thanks to this process, turns the viewing into opaque, as if meta-cinema were a lens which works the other way around, capable of blurring the layers of which reality is made and the experience of viewing itself.
Short films featured:
Cold Call, Stefanie Schroeder, Germany, 2025, documentary, 21′
I Want My People To Be Remebered, Helene Giannecchini, France, 2025, experimental documentary, 26′
Perfectly A Strangeness, Alison McAlpine, Canada, 2024, experimental, 15′
State Of Lowest Probability, Willy Hans, Germany, 2025, experimental fiction, 24′