Symbiotic Era

Lichens are the Way

43min, 2024, Czech Republic & Slovakia

Ondřej Vavrečka

Selected by 2024 CPH:DOX

Lichens are amazing organisms. A combination of a fungus and algae, two life forms that once upon a time decided to enter into symbiosis with each other. Fungi have difficulty photosynthesising and algae have difficulty incorporating sugar. Therefore, their union is beneficial for both parties. Or in other words: It is better to live together than to live alone. ‘Lichens are the Way’ is a loving and thought-provoking close-up study of radically different life forms, and of what happens when we turn our attention to beings and life forms outside our own scale. Czech Ondřej Vavrečka shot his radically imaginative, organic film in Canada, where lichenologist Trevor and his partner have created a home together in the symbiotic spirit of the object of their studies.

About the Filmmaker

Ondřej Vavrečka

Artist, filmmaker, musician, and writer based in Prague. The practice moves between moving image and installation, between essay, object, score, and stitching. It is shaped by questions of matter and ecology, understood in a broader sense of the world and its elements. It also engages repair, accumulation, and the life of images. Attention is given to the inner processes that accompany their formation, including relations, intensities, absence, and dramatization. Also working as a teacher and researcher.

A child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off

18min, 2020, Philippines

Shireen SENO

Selected by 2021 Taiwan International Documentary Festival

Conducting a series of studies on bird migration inspired by the migration experience of filmmaker's father, the film aims to deal with a sense of mobility in various forms and times.

About the Filmmaker

Shireen Seno

Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. A recipient of the 2018 Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, she is known for her films which have won awards at Rotterdam, Punto de Vista, Shanghai, Olhar de Cinema, Vladivostok, Jogja-Netpac, and Lima Independiente and have screened at such festivals as New Directors/New Films, Yebisu International Festival of Art & Alternative Visions, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and institutions including Tate Modern, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Portikus, NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore, Taipei National Center for Photography and Images, Museum of the Moving Image, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul, Museum of Contemporary Art & Design Manila, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, and M+. Seno was a 2022 Film Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program and 2023 Visiting Professor for ArteVisione at c/o in Milan. Her first solo exhibition in Europe, A child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off, at daadgalerie in Berlin in 2023, travelled to Esplanade - Theatres By the Bay in Singapore in 2024. Her work is in the collections of Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive and Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

Shireen Seno and John Torres had their exhibition, Cloudy with a chance of coconuts in 2019 at Portikus in Frankfurt. John Torres and Shireen Seno are the recipients of the 2025 Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+ and Singapore Art Museum – Moving Image Commission. In Manila, they run Los Otros, a critically-acclaimed film and video platform committed to the intersections of film and art, with a focus on process over product.

Something Mutual

5min, 2024, Mexico

Magaly Ugarte de Pablo

Something Mutual is a visual essay that navigates the landscape of urban flora in Mexico City, giving a voice to the plants that surround us. A contemplative journey that seeks to unearth the sentiments of the city's nature, decipher the enigmatic narratives of its existence, and reveal an intricate web of relationships between flora and humanity.

The Age of Flowering Plants

18min, 2025, Mexico

Magaly Ugarte de Pablo

Selected by 2025 IFFR

Valeria works in a nocturnal flower shop where the plants emit eroticism. In her circle of friends, some humans have long, pointed ears, others have wings. Filmmaker Magaly Ugarte de Pablo tells a supernatural tale with roots in the Mexican fantasy tradition and a futuristic gender perspective. A gothic universe of self-discoveries, sexual awakenings and human beings in metamorphosis.

Magaly Ugarte de Pablo

Magaly Ugarte DE PABLO (1988) was born at the border between Mexico and the USA. She is a photographer and filmmaker currently based in Mexico City. Her work often examines landscapes, still lifes, architecture and portraits, and the desert appears frequently. She offers seductive compositions from the ordinary through photography and film. Her interests include astronomy, the body and gender studies, the preservation of our species, new technology and their relationship to humans, science fiction depiction in literature and film and supernatural folklore.

Ginkgo And Other Times

15min, 2023, Germany

Tang Han

Humans live on the same planet as ginkgo — a living fossil that has been around for 200 million years. Ginkgo may be nothing more than a street tree integrated into the city; urban planners often choose it because of its prominent ability to adapt to various climates and resist pollution and pests.

Through the exploration of the ginkgo tree and taking inspiration from ecological ethics in nature writing and ancient Chinese folk tales, this film critically examines shifting human greed, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, and contemplates the continuity of life and the temporality of the ginkgo in relation to that of other existences.

About the Director

Tang Han

Tang Han (b. Guangzhou, China) is a visual artist based in Berlin.

She works across the mediums of film, video, installation. Her practice delves into the micro-intricacies of everyday life and the natural world through storytelling, exploring questions about representation and meaning, and shedding light on the interplay between the seen and the spoken in diverse cultural contexts.

Her works have been exhibited internationally at numerous institutions, including the 14th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre (2025), Para Site, Hong Kong (2024), Science Gallery London (2024), Taikang Art Museum, Beijing (2024), 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, Sesc 24 de Maio, São Paulo (2023), West Den Haag, the Hague (2023), Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Seoul (2023), Hong-gah Museum, Taipei (2023), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2023), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2023), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022), OCAT Shenzhen (2020), among others. She has screened works at film festivals and institutions including the Bangkok Kunsthalle (2025), Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin (2023), New National Gallery, Berlin (2023), Beijing International Short Film Festival (2023), International Festival of Films on Art, Montreal (2022), Taiwan International Documentary Festival (2022), DOK Leipzig (2021, 2022), Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival (2021, 2022).