Stuttgarter Filmwinter | The More-Than-Human Thread

Attitudes are sometimes more relevant than arguments. And it was not on the side of a curatorial thematisation of media that one could find satisfaction at the Stuttgarter Filmwinter. The discourse around media in 2026 seems to be focused on phenomena such as reaction videos, the development of artificial intelligence, virtual communities, and the gamification of cinema, just to mention a few examples – issues for which I could not find convincing arguments in the conception and programme of the festival. But the festival atmosphere was very welcoming, and I had the impression that its heart beats on the side of lo-fi aesthetics: analogue films, participatory workshops, and Dadaist performances, not without a fierce DIY orientation.

The human and the cinematic machine – back and forth

In this vintage “attitude”, I happened to experience two highly qualitative “performances” – read: staged projections – whose concatenation appeared to me quite meaningful. Meaningful for the hybrid territory in which the human factor is confronted, exposed, and intertwined with the machine factor of cinema. Improvisation and noise aesthetics characterise Cinzia Nistico and Igor Iofe’s DISiNCARNATE, a literal disembodiment of the human image into its poetic transcendence through the cinematic machine. (As an echo, I would like to mention Peter Moosgaard’s installation Angel (Fine Dust), where life and movement take the shape of ephemeral traces frozen on glass.)

The opposite movement, from the cinema machine to an increasingly humanising embodiment, is apparent in Agnieszka Mastalerz’s Mould. Repeated twice, with a conversation with the Polish artist during the pause between the two projections, Mould is a two-part film in which a second dancer performs the resonance of the first, until a relationship is slowly built. Through dance, the human body emancipates itself and almost blossoms from the fixed constraints of the film setting, bringing the dancing camera with it. Taken together, these two film performances draw a hybrid territory where the machine is not a human prosthesis, but is aesthetically and emotionally integrated.

Along this challenging line of hybridity, we can place two films in the competition, Gabriel Abrantes’ Arguments in Favour of Love and Evi Stamou’s Who Was Here?, as well as Alisa Berger’s film installation Rupture in the festival exhibition.

The more-than-human core of the festival

If I recall my favourite films of the Stuttgarter Filmwinter, one theme distinctly emerges – and it does not really have to do with the confrontation between the human and the machine. Rather, it is the idea – sometimes just the feeling – of continuity between the human and the more-than-human: animals, plants, minerals. This theme does not emerge through a theoretical reflection on contemporary media, but often involves cinema as a vehicle that allows a displacement of our anthropocentric perspective.

I will introduce my Stuttgart journey through the theme of the more-than-human with Yannick Mosimann’s Things Many Eyes Have Seen. The erosion of the film matter, exposed to salty water, conflates with the erosive life of an island, and with the erosion of the cinematic viewing experience, often hypnotised by a hole in the centre of the screen. The hole both recalls the invisible centre of the human eye and the after-image of the impossible act of staring at the sun.

From here, I like to jump to the “planetary” theme Florian Fischer proposed for his guest curation of a series of films entirely devoted to the experience of continuity between the human and the more-than-human, entitled “Field Notes of the Planetary”. In another programme, Fischer himself brilliantly expresses such a displacement of perspective onto natural and mineral elements in his wonderful three-part film Les rites de passage: here, the human appears as a kind of rediscovery at the end of a cinematic journey in which we have grown accustomed to a more-than-human perspective.

Explicitly focused on a peculiar, tight connection with the planets is the film opening Fischer’s curated programme, Ann Carolin Renninger’s Der Wind nimmt die mit. As in Simon Ellis’ humorous competition film Notes on Planet Three, we borrow the eyes and curiosity of children, whose spontaneous anthropomorphisation of cosmic relations does not prevent us from having a genuinely non-anthropocentric experience – also thanks to the inventive and sensitive use of film material.

With John Downer’s surrealist visual language for Peter Gabriel’s video clip Digging in the Dirt, Fischer adds a kind of animist thread, in which the body and the earth are intertwined in one animated matter. This thread develops into an intriguing reflection on the social and political agency of invasive plants – innocent “agents” of colonialism – in Julia Parks’ The Wool Aliens, and of oil-based products in Green Grey Black Brown by Yuyan Wang, who once again confirms herself as an artist capable of combining a bold visual language drawn from digital archive images with a complex discourse shaped by refined montage.

Here again, I would like to mention two installative works from the festival exhibition, which interestingly intertwine the more-than-human perspective with social and political reflections: Jacques Sorrentini Zibjan’s Films de feu and Doplgenger’s Record of the Termite Landscape.

A further title that could perfectly fit Fischer’s programme on the more-than-human is Inês Lima’s O jardim em movimento, probably my happiest discovery in the Filmwinter competition. In this small story, both scientific and touristic approaches to the environment – embodied by two guides in a natural park in Portugal – delicately dissolve into an emotional sublimation, where rare plants and human bodies merge in a cosmic vibration of desire.

Back to expanded media: an open question

The best film experiences in Stuttgart, for me, turned out to revolve around the thread of the more-than-human perspective. This was in fact the only theme that triggered a sustained line of thought – explicitly in Florian Fischer’s guest curation, and only implicitly in a festival programme that lacked curatorial focus. In the absence of an updated discussion about contemporary media and their impact on the production and reception of moving images, I find it fascinating to raise the question of whether the cinematic exploration of our bond with the more-than-human could constitute the most avant-gardist challenge for expanding our conception of contemporary media.

Are animals, plants, and minerals – inasmuch as we experience them in non-exotic ways – the ultimate horizon for the expansion of our media landscape? Might android or AI-augmented humanity be only a weak prefiguration of that broader environmental wisdom, distributed intelligence, and plural agency that we can discover if we attune ourselves to the more-than-human perspective? And what does the film experience have to teach us in this regard?