Ten Films in the LABO Competition Boldly Venture Beyond the Beaten Paths of Cinematic Expression

The LABO competition programme, a long-standing part of the Pragueshorts festival, once again focuses on innovation, creativity, and experimentation. The selection of ten films ranges from unexpected combinations of traditional filmmaking techniques and new technologies to fresh approaches to narrative and visual form. What unites them is a shared joy of discovery and a desire to push boundaries.

Chinese artist Yuyan Wang’s Green Grey Black Brown is set in a world steeped in oil and shaped by techno-solutionist visions. Delving into Iran’s cinematic archives, Irish experimental filmmaker Maryam Tafakory’s Daria’s Night Flowers distills dozens of Persian-language films into a work dedicated to women constrained by the regime’s repression of forbidden love. The playful mathematical animation of German director Jon Frickey’s Ploo uses vectors to tell the story of undulating sine waves – or, if you like, y = A sin(Bx + C). American director and multimedia artist Dylan Pailes-Friedman’s thoughtful and stylistically complex Someone to Steal Horses With introduces us to an unusual protagonist, a retired racehorse who has just published an eponymous book. And the Austrian guerilla filmmakers of Total Refusal return to LABO with another of their artistic interventions into the world of computer games. Taking a different look at the concepts of victory and defeat, World at Stake presents us with vitally important games where everything counts.

Ali Yahyaa’s poetic debut Beneath Which Rivers Flow straddles the line between science-fiction and environmental documentary. It is set in southern Iraq, where the river is slowly drying up and the main protagonist gradually realizes that the world as he knows it is beginning to irreversibly fall apart. In the Japanese-French animated film Ordinary Life, director Yoriko Mizushiri pulls the viewer into a world of rounded shapes, saturated colors, and captivating everyday rituals. The found footage collage Juggernaut by the German artistic duo Neozoon relentlessly reminds us that, despite the destructive consequences, the world of cis men is driven by competitiveness, rivalry, and an obsession with personal success. Director Dorian Jespers’s unsettling Belgian film Loynes depicts the strange trial of a nameless corpse, set in nineteenth-century Liverpool. And Italy’s The Pørnøgraphər, by the HARIEL filmmaking collective, works with generative AI to immerse viewers in a hypnotic world of fragmented and distorted images.

A jury made up of prominent figures from the domestic art scene will name one of the ten submissions the festival’s Best Experimental Film. The award comes with a financial prize of 1,000 euros, from the festival’s partner, Medicine fashion label.  Pragueshorts Film Festival is organized with the support of the State Audiovisual Fund and the City of Prague. The festival’s main partner is the ČEZ Group.