“It’s important to distinguish between beauty, and the notion of ‘pretty,’” says Stefano Rabolli Pansera, the founder and director of St Moritz Art Film Festival. We’re talking in the Swiss town’s Scala cinema: outside, the mountains are dappled with sunlight and the lake water is a clear, bright blue. This is very pretty stuff. In fact, it’s so pretty it feels almost unreal, like a simulation of a mountain landscape, lifted from a postcard or a travel ad. Inside the cinema, the agenda is slightly different. “Some of the movies are very beautiful, but there’s nothing pleasing, or decorative, or accommodating about [them],” Pansera continues. “On the contrary, they’re really very brutal.”
This is true from the very first entry in the four-day programme, Amie Siegel’s Panorama (2023). Using long-forgotten footage from hunting expeditions by the Carnegie Museum, the film traces the bleak and violent processes behind natural history exhibits, turning attempts to catalogue and ‘rationalise’ nature into a kind of archival horror film. Across the course of the next few days, there are more viewing experiences that prove uncomfortable or challenging in various ways, from a grotesque Mike Kelley short, to a 70-minute silent film by the Thai artist Sasithorn Ariyavicha (as in, total silence, enough to hear stomachs gurgling across the Scala’s 108 plush seats).
Now in its fourth year, the theme announced for SMAFF 2025 was “Emerging Virtualities”, and curators were given free rein to interpret this as broadly as possible. “We’re really talking about the merging of different kinds of realities and possibilities of becoming,” says Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, an artist, anthropologist and researcher who joined this year’s curatorial team. “Art, and its possibility to think about elsewhere, to think about otherwise… it shouldn’t be an afterthought or a luxury,” she adds. “It’s the only space where we can seriously negotiate political change, actual change. Art is a space […] to rehearse, to experiment, to have a different relationship with reality.”
Given the diverse approach to the theme, takes on “virtuality” include films haunted by ghosts and spirits – see: Cedric Arnold’s This Light Is Not Ours (2025), or Laura Sellies’ Elia (2023) – and others that show the world from other non-human perspectives, like Superflex’s 2019 exploration of volcanic extremophiles, Hunga Tonga. Of course, there’s also plenty of room for more literal interpretations, as in the AI-inflected realities of Marianna Simnett’s Leda Was a Swan (2025) – winner of the festival’s Love at First Sight Kulm Prize – and Lawrence Lek’s Empty Rider (2024). Another recurring theme? Video games, as both a subject and a medium for exploring virtual realities. From niche software to big titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator, DayZ, and Red Dead Redemption, the virtual worlds of gaming featured across films like Tropical Depression (2025), Knit’s Island (2023), and Night Song of a Wandering Cowboy (2023).
A sense of play is also present in films like Nina Sarnelle’s Breath Work (2025), in which we see air quality activists run, dance, and sing against the backdrop of their polluted Californian neighbourhood. “What is the role of beauty in surviving these times and places?” one participant asks. And so, we’re back to beauty. As suggested by Arjuna Neuman – winner of the festival’s Best Feature Film award alongside collaborator Ferreira da Silva, for Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, a sprawling documentary on the unjust, racist, and extractive processes that prop up technologies we use every day – beautiful images run the risk of smoothing over difficult or ‘ugly’ subjects, but beauty can also offer a way in. Beautiful (and not necessarily ‘pretty’) images can offer a path to deeper engagement with topics that might otherwise go ignored.
Or, as Pansera puts it: “If something can save us, it’s beauty. It’s the only way through which we can really make sense of reality.”
OVERNIGHT COUP PLAN, MARINA XENOFONTOS
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An undercurrent of melancholy runs throughout the Ayia Napa hedonism, young romance, fairground rides, and bedroom karaoke of Marina Xenofontos’s Overnight Coup Plan, winner of SMAFF’s ArtReview Prize for Best Art Film. And maybe this is a feature of all coming-of-age films – mourning the imminent end of adolescence, even as you celebrate its freedoms and opportunities – but, as Xenofontos points out, there’s also a unique melancholy to the summer in Ayia Napa, with its echoes of Cypriot history: specifically, the fascist coup d’etat of 1974. Fast-forwarding to modern-day, the short film follows four teenage girls in the summer before university, offering an intimate glimpse into this moment of heightened emotions, both personal and political, and how it’s altered or amplified when viewed virtually, through the ever-present smartphone lens.
KNIT’S ISLAND, EKIEM BARBIER, GUILHEM CAUSSE, QUENTIN L’HELGOUALC’H
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What would you do to survive during a zombie apocalypse? In the multiplayer, open-world video game Day-Z, players act out this fantasy via digital avatars, tasked with surviving in lands infested by the undead. But Knit’s Island isn’t really about hacking up zombies and shooting rival humans (for the most part). Instead, posing as a pacifist documentary crew, the three filmmakers – who spent almost 1,000 hours in-game to make the project – seek out the strange communities and/or cults that have formed in the world of Day-Z across the last several years, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Some roleplay as anarchic murderers, others form religious sects around old cowboy films and country music, and some just want to socialise in bodies and worlds that aren’t their own. Coming together over the course of the documentary, these players eventually travel to the edge of the virtual environment, where the terrain glitches and the physics of the game-world begin to collapse – and here, the lines between the virtual and reality are truly called into question.
MONUMENT, JEREMY DRUMMOND
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In the last few years, monuments – especially the kind that celebrate long-dead white men, colonisers and slave traders… so, a lot of them – have become a flashpoint for conflict between political activists and their rivals. In this aptly-titled short film, the artist draws attention to these politically-charged statues across the US, and the voids left behind when they’re torn down or simply left to rot. (See: a graveyard of presidential busts, long-forgotten and full of holes, like victims of another zombie attack.) Should we see these voids as the wounds of a dying empire, or as a space to build something better, and more equitable, for future generations? That remains to be seen.
EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITY PROJECTIVE RECONSTRUCTION #36B (MADE IN ENGLAND), MIKE KELLEY
Mike Kelley’s ability to provoke, disturb, and deconstruct the darkest aspects of our lives is legendary, but watching Made in England, it’s shocking just how little he requires to get the job done. ‘Starring’ five cups of different shapes and sizes, the 2011 film plays on British archetypes, luring you in with bawdy humour and absurd accents before taking a dark turn toward abuse and sexualised violence. Suddenly, it’s not funny at all, and Kelley forces us to dwell in our discomfort until it becomes almost unbearable. Even if it is, at the end of the day, just silly voices and sound effects over various arrangements of quintessential English tableware.
OPERA OMNIA, VALENTIN NOUJAÏM
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Conceived as a companion piece to music by the Manchester-based duo Space Afrika, Opera Omnia is a “musical industrial opera film” that reimagines the city as a modern-day Dante’s Inferno. Casting two teenagers as the protagonists of their own urban epic, it tracks their descent into a dark and dreamlike underworld, populated by sublime opera performers and shadowy figures in black tie.
FIRST PERSON, TANG CHAO
Remember that video of a monkey playing Pong telepathically, after having a Neuralink chip implanted in its brain? Soon, that could be us… for better, or for worse. In First Person, Tang Chao explores what happens when we get closer and closer to the media we consume, as our tech evolves from buttons, to touch screens, to wearable devices and, yes, even brain-computer interfaces. There’s frantic livestreams, intimate email exchanges, and the artist in a wild-eyed gorilla suit. The future is sometimes funny, sometimes frenetic, sometimes anxiety-inducing, and often all three at the same time.
PARAFLU, MICHELA DI MATTEI AND INVERNOMUTO
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Paraflu is an Italian antifreeze, a chemical that’s sweet-tasting but potentially fatal (a dangerous combination) to animals that ingest it. In this horror-inspired film of the same name, locals lace meatballs with the substance in an effort to kill wolves that are wandering ever closer to their village and their flocks of sheep. This is an IRL ecological issue, based on reports from the artist’s home town, but the film expands the narrative beyond the narrow limits of human perception. Between shots of young shepherds and ground meat are glimpses of the world as seen from a wolf’s perspective, a “magic trick” performed with the help of AI. While many artists use these technologies to churn out endless, digestible, capital-C ‘Content’, here we see a glimmer of how it might be used to decentre humans and expand the kinds of stories that can be told about the world we’re living in.
WHIPPING ZOMBIE, YURI ANCARANI
More zombies! But maybe not the kind you’re thinking of… This film (AKA Kale Zonbi) by the Italian filmmaker Yuri Ancarani takes us to Haiti to witness a ritual of whipping, death, and rebirth, performed in a trancelike state to a soundtrack of relentless drums. Documented for the first time by Ancarani, the hypnotic dance plays out as a remembrance of ancestral violence and slavery, tangled up in scenes of contemporary labour and domesticity.
THE (UN)EVENT (SIDE C), LINN PHYLLIS SEEGER
event (side c) (2024))
In just a few short years, Google Maps – or something like it – has come to feel necessary for navigating the world around us. Can any of us actually imagine using a paper road atlas in 2025, or asking a friend to write down directions instead of just checking our phone? Technology has made the world feel frictionless and convenient, but at the same time we’re plagued by the sense of something lost. The (Un)event (side c) was devised as part of an installation piece that aims to articulate what the US academic Lauren Berlant called “the event of feeling historical in the present”. Driving around a virtual New York City, virtual cars collide, clip through walls, and ultimately fail to arrive at any real destination, acting as symbols of a turning point in how humans relate to the world around them,
THE MECHANICS OF FLUIDS, GALA HERNÁNDEZ LÓPEZ
This short film takes a 2018 Reddit post, by a self-proclaimed incel called Anathematic Anarchist, as its starting point. The post is, essentially, a suicide note, titled: “America is responsible for my death.” What follows is a deep-dive into incel-adjacent rabbit holes of the internet and dating apps, doubling as a documentary essay and an intimate, empathetic exploration of isolation in the online age. While Anathematic Anarchist’s true fate remains unclear, one thing is for certain: tech’s promise of “bringing the world closer together” has been well and truly broken.
