Welcome to Films of Return, a climate film festival curated by A La Luz, featuring the work of over 60 international filmmakers and video-artists. The festival – designed as a virtual exhibition – unfolds across eight themed Screening Rooms, each exploring issues related to the climate crisis.

Official Selection

Special Jury Selection

To be Announced

Screening Rooms

I. Delve

Ulrika Sparre*, Takuya Watanabe, Emilia Haar, Lau Persijn, Felipe De Ávila Franco

II. Ground

Bethany Johnson, James DeLisio, Virginia Woods-Jack, Damien Cattinari, Adam Sébire, Anthony Carr, Marcelina Maria Wellmer, Louis Heilbronn, Mats Landström

III. Heat

Alexander Girav, Marina Rees, Luke Myers, Anne-Katrin Spiess, Kian Peng Ong

IV. Retreat

David Cass (co-curator)*, Adam Sébire, Jessica Houston, Planetary Intimacies, Sarah Bachinger, Israel Hope Irby

V. Flood**

Adam Chitayat, Tom Hansell, Kathleen Rugh, Aletta Harrison, Tessa Garland, Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar (co-curator)*, Sebastian Wiedemann, Joseph Paul Alvarado, Michaela Lind

VI. Eclipse**

Francisco José Vaquero Robustillo, Ipshita Bhattacharyya, Camille Martel, Katie Pustizzi, Eluned Zoe Aiano & Alesandra Tatic, Keri Rosebraugh & Mike Marshall, Joshua Ashish Dawson, Amirmahdi Kalantari & Abraham Paul Velázquez Navarro, Collin Bradford

VII. Root

Sean Allen Fisher, Juan López López, Erin Woodbrey, Nora Jane Long, Heather Bird Harris, Monica Ordóñez & Bryan Tarnowski, Mars Saude, Adam Sébire, Colin Lyons, Nicole Dextras

VIII. Return

Elizabeth Ogilvie & Robert Page, Amy Kaczur, Tim Laing, Alastair Mackie & Fleur Mackie, Gustavo Valdivia & Iván D'onadío, Nick Jordan, Bia Gayotto, Adam Sébire, Nelson Varas-Díaz, Miguel García Orive

Screening Room I

Delve

This first Screening Room lays out the state of play, featuring a diverse collection of films and video-artworks that burrow down deep, taking soundings, readings, measurements and recordings to establish a baseline for the present. From Sparre’s field-based excavations – listening to the Earth’s micro-movements and translating geological time into sensory testimony – to Felipe De Ávila Franco’s forensic attention to industrial detritus and the material traces of extraction, the works delve beneath the visible surface. This first room is not designed to pass judgement, but to function as diagnostics – presenting (often overlooked) realities of our world today. These films reference what is to come, introducing topics such as industrial development, extraction and social inequality; but also hinting at the tools we require to sustainably proceed, to move away from that dreaded point of no return.

Ear to the Ground: Golden Monolith & Black Monolith (excerpt)
Ulrika Sparre

A screening of the full film will be held between 1st & 8th October

To delve deeply: across Ulrika Sparre’s life as an artist, listening was both method and ethical stance. In attending to what is usually imperceptible, she translated deep temporal traces locked in the more-than-human into sensory experience. In the series Ear to the Ground, her soundings became testimonies.

Golden Monolith & Black Monolith stages an existential dialogue between Sparre’s practice of attentive listening and Giacometti’s memories of the cave and the black monolith in his birth village of Stampa. For Giacometti, Stampa – a cluster of impressive granite peaks in the Val Bregaglia – was an enchanted world; he remembered, as a child, a single enormous stone at the mouth of a cave, a “Golden Monolith” he would huddle beneath. Sparre carries that memory into the present. Working in Stampa and in conversation with Szymborska’s Conversation with a Stone, she deployed contact microphones to record the barely audible sounds of the Monoliths – stone formations shaped by weather, geology, and human history, and plausibly among the first influences for Giacometti’s sculptural work. The film explores varying degrees of proximity – intimacies and distances that determine how we perceive non-human presence.

Golden Monolith & Black Monolith weaves Sparre’s field recordings, Szymborska’s poetic refusal of possession, and Giacometti’s reverie into a contemporary meditation on endurance, humility, and the responsibility of attention. To listen well is itself a form of progressive activism.

Those Beneath the Grass
Takuya Watanabe

Those Beneath the Grass is a video work which formed part of an installation by Takuya Watanabe. The film explores the entangled histories and relationships between humans and plants, focussing on the quiet, repetitive labor of grass cutting. In the depopulated village of Ohara (Fukui Prefecture, Japan) only one elderly resident remains – Masao. The landscape, once shaped by human habitation, is now steadily being reclaimed by thriving vegetation – yet he continues to mow the grass each day.

As the camera turns to the ground beneath our feet, a quiet diversity of plant life is revealed. By tracing their origins, the work uncovers narratives of global trade, rural-urban imbalance, and the reciprocal ties between people and plants. The mowed paths become “contact zones”: spaces where human and plant life intersect and influence one another. In attending closely to the grass, it gradually reveals how these interspecies entanglements reach into broader social structures.

“At first glance, the plant community we witness seems to have been devastated by Masao’s mowing,” Watanabe told us. “Yet if he were to leave the village and human intervention ceased, the smaller plants here would soon lose their ground to larger ones and would not survive. In other words, whether mowing is seen as positive or negative depends on which fragment of the whole one chooses to crop, and any such judgment remains uncertain.”

KAMI NO AIKA
Emilia Haar

Emilia Haar’s KAMI NO AIKA also treats the act of listening as an ethical act, blurring boundaries between myth and science, human and non-human. It draws on Japanese Shinto beliefs – that mountains, rivers, stones and winds are imbued with Kami (nature spirits) – aligning us with these beings, who have become “witnesses to the ongoing estrangement between humankind and nature.”

“With the Kami as our point of reference,” Haar writes, “we begin to hear unfamiliar frequencies that reveal how the world is undergoing change.” The film’s dystopian imagery pairs with this auditory sensitivity, making visible and audible the elegy of the Kami as they look upon human power and disruption.

Haar works with field recordings and percussive vinyl samples to produce minimalistic soundscapes. In KAMI NO AIKA, this might mean layering extreme sounds, low and high in frequency – the crack of melting ice or the groan of shifting rock – into one uncanny soundscape.

Sparre’s Ear to the Ground series uses contact mics to capture each stone’s “inner sounds” – a “secret language” of slow vibrations. Lau Persijn’s Underneath It Flickers (below) treats a Brussels empty lot as alive, asking how to “listen to a space considered empty.” Haar’s film contributes to this deep-listening practice, making the faintest natural voices audible and relaying the notion that consequential changes often lie just beyond perception.

Underneath it Flickers
Lau Persijn

Lau Persijn’s Underneath It Flickers begins with a simple, urgent question: how do we listen to a space considered empty? Set in La Friche Josaphat – a verdant fallow land in Brussels threatened by real estate development – the film answers by showing that the site is anything but vacant. By attending to the jay, the train, the moss and the soil’s tremors, Persijn re-reads this urban refuge as a living body worthy of protection. The work becomes an ecological testimony: a filmed argument for the value of what planners might discard.

Digging, listening, developing. By burying strips of 16mm film, deploying geophones and sensitive microphones, the artist surfaces barely perceptible sounds and micro-movements. These materials arrive as traces rather than statements, and the film stages them as a kind of collaboration with place. Subtly, the film converses with Sparre’s Golden Monolith & Black Monolith: both projects insist that attentive listening is how we register what a landscape holds and how we might begin to defend it.

Rumbling Within
Felipe de Ávila Franco

In stark contrast, Rumbling Within by Felipe de Ávila Franco invites the audience to scrutinise the surfaces of drilling apparatus. Artificial shapes with sharp edges – 3D scans of drill-bit pieces – present notions of repulsion and harm alongside more organic features that evoke an idea of smoothness and even sensuality. Moving slowly and immersed in the void, these visuals are accompanied by an ominous low-frequency soundscape drawn from real seismic-monitoring recordings of offshore drilling, allowing viewers to feel the vibrations produced by these operations.

By focusing on the surfaces of extractive technologies, Rumbling Within encourages contemplation of the intrinsic connections between human development, resource exploitation, and ecological impact. Its close, deliberate gaze exposes the hidden processes shaping our present.

In dialogue with the other works in this Screening Room, de Ávila Franco’s film extends the practice of deep listening. The artists in this Room share a commitment to slowing down, observing, and registering what might otherwise go unnoticed – establishing a baseline for understanding our current environmental moment.