Developing the Vanished

Vampires, It’s Nothing To Laugh At

36min, 2023, Canada

Kinga Michalska

In the 1960s, an anthropologist thinks he has discovered the existence of a vampire woman in a Kashub community in Wilno, Ontario. Kinga Michalska returns to the village still recovering from the trauma of this coverage, using a skillful blend of archival footage and performance to question the relationship between lived reality and scientific "truth".

The film is a critical reflection on how we tell stories of others and asks who is the real vampire - the scientist, the audience, the tourists, the community or the filmmaker themself?

About the Director

Kinga Michalska

Kinga Michalska is a Polish queer visual artist and filmmaker based in Tiohtiá:ke, Mooniyang, Montreal. Their work examines issues of memory, identity, displacement, and hauntings. They are interested in the periphery of who and what makes history: amateur historians, geological processes, small-town gossip, stranger encounters, and speculative fiction. They hold a BA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw and an MFA in Photography from Concordia University. Their work has been shown in multiple exhibitions and film festivals in Canada, Poland, UK, Korea, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Their film VAMPIRES, IT'S NOTHING TO LAUGH AT (2023) played at FNC. Their latest film BEDROCK (2025) has been selected at the Berlinale.

Salam Godzilla

41min, 2019, Switzerland

Gilles Aubry

Agadir, 1960. A violent earthquake destroyed the whole town, except for a few buildings, including the Salam movie theatre. By a strange twist of fate, apparently the film shown that night was Godzilla, King of the Monsters, a famous figure of post-apocalyptic days. This coincidence guides Gilles Aubry, all ears to echoes of the past, as he leads an investigation and tries to spot distant or tenuous traces left by time. Such rich material, where dinosaur tracks, newsreels, or even seismic surveys can resonate with poetic verses sung by Ali Faiq, or the movements of rwais dancers. Shot inside the cinema and in the surroundings of Agadir, the film is driven by an abstract soundtrack recorded on location.

About the Director

Gilles Aubry

Gilles Aubry works between sound and visual arts, experimental music, and academic research. His practice relies on experimental research methods and transdisciplinary knowledge from across the arts, humanities, and technology studies, including film, performance, installation, and radio art. Aubry’s latest book Sawt, Bodies, Species (2023, Adocs) provides an in-depth exploration of sound and aurality in Morocco.

Recent art projects include The Gramophone Effect, a sound piece with Robert Millis and the Indian collective “Traveling Archive”, commissioned by Documenta14 (2017, Kassel and Athens); Black Anthenna, a performance with Nathalie Mba Bikoro for the Tuned Cities Festival (2018, Messene); Salam Godzilla, a film essay shot in Agadir on the 1960 earthquake, premiered at FID Marseille in 2019, and showcased in the exhibition “Love and Ethnology – The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity” at HKW Berlin; Atlantic Ragagar, a film exploring ecological voices on the Moroccan Atlantic coast (Special Mention at Ji.Hlava IDFF 2022); The Whistle, a sound installation by the VACUT Group (Voices Against Corruption and Ugly Trading), commissioned by OTO Sound Museum in Zurich (2022); and L’Makina (2023), a body of works exploring critical technical knowledge in North Africa commissioned by KW and IFA Berlin for the exhibition School of Casablanca.

Light of Light

13min, 2023, Greece

Neritan Zinxhiria

Before his death in 1932, a monk created his own camera in one of the most isolated places in the world. Nearly a century later, a filmmaker discovers and reconstructs the 3000 preserved photographic plates, blending them with his own evocative Super 8, crafting a cinematic pilgrimage, where the past interlaces seamlessly with the present, in a spellbinding visual narrative that defies the constraints of time itself.

About the Director

Neritan Zinxhiria

Neritan Zinxhiria was born in 1989 in Albania. Director of "Chamomile", "The Time of a Young Man About to Kill", "A Country of Two"; having as a centre of inspiration the themes of loss and death, he continues to explore how the latter shapes our memory and culture. His latest short film "Light of Light", a Slamdance Grand Prix Winner, was nominated for a Tiger Award, having its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.