Back to the Future: SPECTRAL, Edition IV, day 3, 21st September 2025, analog/chemical/handmade 16mm/8mm/35mm film festival at WORM, Rotterdam, Netherlands

"Back to the Future is a 3-day festival dedicated to analogue moving images and optical sound - a celebration of the real film medium. The international programme features audio-visual performances, films, presentations, devices, a motion picture panorama, and a radio play.

This 4th edition has a focus on performative & expanded cinema. On show will be works that venture beyond the constraints of the passive cinema to propose an engaged, shared experience of the inimitable ritual of flickering light and shadow. The festival is an initiative of Filmwerkplaats, WORM’s artist-run analogue film lab and a vital hub for DIY film practice in the Netherlands and across Europe. Many of the works presented are created within the context of SPECTRAL, a joint project by six special film labs across Europe."

15:30 Por Dentro Somos Color, Elena Pardo (MX), performance "In Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, Oaxaca, the women’s organization Poj Kaa maintains a community herbarium. Foraging for plants is a way to share knowledge with grandmothers, midwives, healers and shamans. In Teotitlán del Valle, the Ruiz family makes their own journey in search of colours, which they find inside plants and insects that are used to dye the wool with which they weave rugs."

16:15 The Super8 films of Azucena Losana (MX), short film programme "A selection of five Super8 films by Azucena Losana: ‘Pantano’ (2019), ‘Tigre del Carbón’ (2022), ‘Warmi Danzaq’ (2024), ‘Feriado’ (2021) and ‘Metaretratos’ (2020-2025). From rainy seasons and mushroom collecting to imaginary landscapes, from dance, rituals, and the reappropriation of male-dominated traditions to poetry and eco-developed films, the series offers a vibrant portrait of place, nature and resistance."

17:00 Until the darkness goes, Esther Urlus (NL), performance "In a ‘tonal’ coloured 16mm film performance, a sonorous poem of twilight, indistinctness and suggestiveness, Urlus tries to make visible the darkness of a depressed mind. The suffering of an adolescent, the filmmaker’s daughter. Colours and mood are inspired by the famous photograph ‘The Pond – Moonlight’ by Steichen (1904) and the Nocturne paintings by Whistler (1870’)."

18:00 Opblinken, Erwan Tracol & Laurent Reyes (FR), SPECTRAL Residency outcome, performance "Flames shoot up into the sky from the ends of large pipes. Thick smoke billows. A storm is brewing. A swaying figure tries to make its way through. The hectic pace carries us along."

[moving images from high-speed photographs, lenses: KMZ OCT-18 28mm/50mm/135mm, originally designed for Konvas 35mm motion picture camera]