Film Festival: Sunsets: Cosmogonies and Ends of World
A film festival of artists’ film and video, hosted by Dimora delle Balze, curated by Lucia Pietroiusti. In 2025, the festival included visions of beginnings and ends of worlds.
Aliton Krenak & Selvagem, The Serpent and the Canoe, 2021
The films in the festival, Sunsets: Cosmogonies and Ends of Worlds articulated themselves across four programmes, subtitled ‘How We Ended’, ‘How We Began’, ‘How We Ended’ and again ‘How We Began’. The repetitions here, as well as the choice of beginning with the end, are all intentional in the context of the festival concept’s overall proposition. They speak of the Earth’s metabolic process of transformation and renewal. Over the course of four screenings, the films observe and understand a world as an organisation of forms, lives, spaces and knowledges – all emergences which are always and necessarily temporary.
We learn of the rise and fall of magnificent civilisations, or the wreckages of colonial incursion; much is told us by the silence of those forms of knowing and making worlds that have been erased by time, by power or by catastrophe. Yet, when we experience a world from within it, its end may fall outside of the realm of the thinkable. It may be impossible to imagine our world ending altogether, to imagine ourselves –us here, sharing this quiet moment – as belonging to one such world. The certainties that hold our world together appeared stable for a long time. How do we account, then, for planetary and social breakdown, for the kinds of transformations that we are likely to experience in our, or our children’s, lifetimes?
We note the aporia that befalls the scientific community when species extinction, or climate transformation, outpaces the language available to describe it, in other words, the real outpaces its symbolic scaffolding. Simultaneously, in the political arena, the so-called ‘culture wars’ appear to manifest the disentanglement of semantics, definitions and languages from the political realities and struggles of lived life.
What would taking a metabolic view of today’s multiple crises look, feel and sound like? A view that accounts for endings as just one necessary step in a longer cycle of beginnings and endings, all intertwined, all both constant and constantly changing? The films by the collective Selvagem, spearheaded by Indigenous activist and philosopher Ailton Krenak, offer the conceptual infrastructure for this question, demonstrating that Indigenous cosmologies and insights from Western philosophical and scientific traditions share deep truths about the nature of being.
The third edition opened with a performance by Marcus Coates, “In Conversation with the Soil”.
Programme of Sunsets: Cosmogonies and Ends of Worlds
Karrabing Film Collective, The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2018
31 July 2025: How We Ended
Ailton Krenak / Selvagem, Metamorphosis, 2021
Peter Nadin, Aimée Toledano, Taxonomy Transplanted, 2012
Marcus Coates, The Last of Its Kind, 2017
Agnieszka Polska, The Book of Flowers, 2023
Kyriaki Goni, The Mountain Islands Shall Mourn Us Eternally (Data Garden Dolomites), 2022
Cauleen Smith, Song for Earth and Folk, 2013
Agnieszka Polska, The Book of Flowers, 2023
7 August 2025: How We Began
Ailton Krenak / Selvagem, The Serpent and the Canoe, 2021
Yin-Ju Chen, Sonic Driving: The Upper World, 2018–21
Peter Nadin, Natsuko Uchino, Aimée Toledano, The First Mark, 2008
Agnieszka Polska, The Talking Mountain, 2015
Karrabing Film Collective, Just because you can't see it..., 2018
Eva Papamargariti, All that now flows through me, 2024
Ailton Krenak / Selvagem, The Sun and the Flower, 2021
Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013
21 August 2025: How We Ended
Karrabing Film Collective, The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2018
Alice Bucknell, The Alluvials (final level playthrough), 2024
Karrabing Film Collective, The Family and the Zombie, 2021
Asim Khan, Decomposition into Ghazal, 2020
Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Daughter of Dog, 2024
28 August 2025: How We Began
Ailton Krenak & Selvagem, Time and Love, 2022
Yin-Ju Chen, Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong, There Is a Garden. I Will Meet You There, 2023
Eva Papamargariti, Strong, Feeble, Unfixed, 2022
Lina Lapelyte, In the dark, we play, 2025
Ailton Krenak & Selvagem, An Invisible Arrow, 2022
Agnieszka Polska, The New Sun, 2017