Skopje, North Maceodnia Exploring the synergy between artificial intelligence, the internet, and urban metamorphosis, this project intricately unravels the transformation of a city. It examines the complex dynamics at play within urbanism, architecture, and nationalist revitalization, revealing the role of social media and AI in deciphering how the internet perceives the controversial Skopje 2014 project. This film aims to unravel the complex dynamics surrounding Skopje's controversial Skopje 2014 project through an immersive multimedia experience. Blending urban research, personal narratives, and inventive digital storytelling techniques, the film explores how this government-led urban renewal initiative promoted a homogenised Macedonian-Slavic-Orthodox identity by radically transforming the cityscape. It investigates Skopje as a palimpsest, a mixed-ethnic city where layers of contested history, culture, and belonging have been repeatedly inscribed and erased. Moving beyond the architectural transformations, the film illuminates the broader existential struggle faced by cities striving to build a unified identity against the centrifugal forces of globalisation and competing local allegiances. Skopje's erasure of its Yugoslav past also surfaces questions of constructed heritage and invented tradition in the process of nation building. Through this, it aims to explore how the internet remembers Skopje, but most importantly, how AI understands it. "This film extensively utilises AI systems like ChatGPT to conduct research and craft the narrative structure. ChatGPT serves as a creative interlocutor, helping formulate critical questions about Skopje 2014's impacts that shape the film's direction. Generative image tools like Midjourney are used to visualise different conceptualisations of the city. The AI generates photorealistic impressions of Skopje based on textual prompts, encapsulating imagined realities. These AI-created scenes add speculative layers to the documentary's exploration of the city's complex identity. By blending AI-assisted research, generative media, data visualisation, and cinematic storytelling, the film provides multidimensional perspectives on Skopje 2014. The AI elements enhance the narrative while retaining a humanistic approach to the subject matter. Through extensive on-the-ground research and innovative digital storytelling techniques, this project illuminated the complex dynamics surrounding Skopje 2014. The film's immersive visualisations and AI-powered narrative revealed how the government-dictated remaking of Skopje promoted a narrow Macedonian-Slavic heritage while erasing the city's multiethnic fabric and Yugoslav past. The film's use of social media discourse also unearthed more mainstream narratives. Ultimately, the project provided a polyvocal, multilayered record of this controversial urban planning initiative through an immersive experience. The creative use of emerging technologies fundamentally expanded the possibilities of the documentary form. Tools like geospatial analysis, AI, and interactive storytelling enabled a more participatory, nonlinear mode of nonfiction filmmaking. The ability to incorporate speculative and counterfactual dimensions opened up new avenues for exploring the past and future ramifications of Skopje 2014. However, crafting a cohesive narrative from these multifaceted streams of data remained an ongoing challenge. The film required finding the right balance between technological innovation and human storytelling. Still, it demonstrated how computational documentary can reveal new dimensions of complex urban issues and create more affecting, insightful experiences for audiences."

Shropshire, England and Powys, Wales On the border of England and Wales, two ancient pathways cross. Their stories emerge through poetry and song. In this poetry film, the Kerry Ridgeway takes on the character of a lovelorn maiden. The Offa's Dyke Path is explored as a site of repeated movement of people and livestock over time, carving out ditches, hollows and histories. The film plays upon conventions of hauntology within folk music, poetry and folk horror cinema. "The film set out to explore poetry film as a medium for engaging with place. It considers how taking time to pause in a place can affect our relationship to it, and deepen our sense of connection. I found that taking the time to interact closely with a specific location enabled me to forge deeper connections with that place, and to respond creatively in a way that sought connections between the traces of the past and the detail of the present. I found that following instinct and allowing the process to develop organically resulted in a piece that was led by the place interaction, rather than being dictated by preconceived ideas. And that the process of pulling together the audiovisuals with poetic ideas in the editing suite generated new creative ideas and a lasting connection to the place encountered." This poetry film forms part of a collection entitled 'PAUSE', which examines the ways in which we connect to place, and how taking time to pause can impact on those connections. Created as part of practice-led PhD at Keele University in partnership with Writing West Midlands, with additional supervision from staff at the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. This research is supported by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

London, UK "Harbouring Illness" is a portrait of three women living with long-term health conditions in an East London neighbourhood. Through their stories, the film offers insight into the everyday challenges of living with chronic illness amidst an overstretched and underfunded healthcare system. It delves into the effects of social isolation and the struggles that come with maintaining a healthy life in the face of substandard living conditions. "Harbouring Illness" invites the viewer to contemplate new possibilities for living a flourishing life beyond the confines of conventional medical understandings of health and well-being. "Multimorbidity, commonly defined as the co-occurrence of two or more long-term health conditions, is considered a major challenge to contemporary care services. Why multimorbidity poses such a challenge and what kind of challenge it is, is not straightforward. In the short documentary "Harbouring Illness" I explore the experiences of working-age adults living with multimorbidity in a socio-economically deprived borough in London. Starting from a photography project, I involved three study participants in the production of this film. In particular, we explore the effects of social isolation and the struggles that come with maintaining a healthy life in the face of substandard living conditions. I found that taking the time to interact closely with a specific location enabled me to forge deeper connections with that place, and to respond creatively in a way that sought connections between the traces of the past and the detail of the present. I found that following instinct and allowing the process to develop organically resulted in a piece that was led by the place interaction, rather than being dictated by preconceived ideas. And that the process of pulling together the audiovisuals with poetic ideas in the editing suite generated new creative ideas and a lasting connection to the place encountered."

Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, New Zealand A ‘Dash of Home’ participates in the settler-colonial practices of seeing Indigenous land through European image-making practices. Drawing from historical colonial images of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand, the film disrupts the English settler’s drive to see a ‘dash from Home’ in colonial images. The film co-opts colonial image-making strategies by introducing more-than-representational materials into the space of drawing. A ‘Dash of Home’ offers a critical engagement with colonial imagery that gives historical images immediacy, emphasising the material impact of historical representations on the past, present and future. A ‘Dash of Home’ participates in the settler-colonial practice of contemplating Indigenous land as European landscape. Lifted from the publication English Reaction to the New Zealand Landscape, the phrase ‘dash from Home’ describes the strategy of portraying Aotearoa New Zealand, through the landscape preferences of future setters. A ‘Dash of Home’ foregrounds the collective and iterative processes in which colonial images are made. Botanical illustrations from James Cook’s first voyage, town plans and ‘on the spot’ views of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, produced by the New Zealand Company, were drawn and re-drawn, passing through different hands, changing mediums, and travelling between different lands. Each re-drawing presented the physical aspects of the land but, more significantly, heightened the drawings’ affective qualities, becoming a vehicle for ongoing colonisation. This film seeks ways of altering the ‘dash of home’ mentality through simple and literal moves of adding and extracting materiality within the fictional space of the drawing. A ‘Dash of Home’ continues the tradition of adding the familiar to an unknowable land but equally explores what conceptions of home must first efface before contemplation can take place. "After making the film, I began to reflect on the commonalities between the different representations shown in the work: botany, town plans and landscape scenes. This led to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century practice of scientific illustration called ‘truth-to-nature.’ Scientists and artists collaborated to represent the typical or ideal seen in nature. In the context of my work, truth-to-nature provided a linking mechanism between botany and the more expansive geographical projections, such as landscape plans and perspectives. I began to interpret my work as co-opting or extending truth-to-nature to a broader range of colonial representations. My approach and understanding of ‘truth’ are reimagined in this work. ‘Truth’ in truth-to-nature is not what was physically seen but a kind of contemplative sight. A sight that is distanced from the existing world, allowing new, usually detrimental, ways of seeing. In my work, the idea of ‘truth’ is still emerging. One interpretation is that truth is found in revisiting a specific location’s past and showing that its historical representations have real material effects while offering a mode of inquiry for countering a singular future. Films’ duration, movement and sound offer vitality and immersive affects to our interaction with historical images. For this project, film is a medium that makes the images feel immediate. Film, as opposed to still images, also offered a way to show my participation with the images through time, not fixed in time, as with the source images. One challenge of this project was finding nuance to the tactic of staging colonial image-making strategies while simultaneously countering them."

Yogyakarta, Indonesia Indonesian/English A short documentary portraying the creative response of street artist to environmental issues, especially in urban spaces. The distinctive voices of artists enrich the horizon of the discourse of environmental communication. The documentary argues that collaboration among academia, artists, and the public is pivotal to encouraging people's awareness of the current environment situation. The Director states: This film is part of my doctoral research on the practice of street art in the signification and production of space. It is pivotal as the research (visual) data to investigate the practice of street art in Yogyakarta responding to urban issues, especially environmental problems. Making films during a pandemic situation is very challenging. The social distancing policy restricts outdoor activities and social contact. Besides, I also have to adjust the activities of street artists. We had a lot of discussions to come up with ideas that can be visualized. Making street artworks in public spaces must also involve the public in obtaining permission to use their properties, and at the same time, involve them in the process of visual art making.

Portugal French and Portuguese. English subtitles This coming of age film follows Filipe and Hugo while they spend the summer in Trás-os-Montes, Portugal. From childhood memories, lazy summers filled with boredom, to their aspirations of a better life, the film explores the ambiguous relationship these youngsters foster with rural Portugal, and their way they navigate across various identities, languages and terrains. Then Director writes: Film-making was a central component of the project, since the research design. It enabled to create a long term relation with the participants, and to access their memories and imaginations. But also, in a project focusing on the making of places in peripheries, it enabled me to highlight particular landscapes and rural areas' atmospheres and architectures. Portugal is a country of emigration: one in five Portuguese live abroad. In the last decades, the regions bordering Spain are the most affected by these departures In the northeastern region of Trás-os-Montes, a third of the population has left since the 1960s. This is where I met with two youngsters, sons and grandsons of emigrants: Hugo and Filipe. Hugo lives close to Paris and spends every summer at his grandparents’ in Trás-os-Montes. There he reconnects to his roots and the slow pace of the village. Filipe did the same: for years, he spent every summer at his grandma’s before his family eventually moved back to Portugal, a few kilometres from his grandma’s home. But what awaited him once he graduated from the local college? As many before him, he emigrated. When we meet, during the summer 2019, he works in London. In February 2020, the world enters a pandemic Filipe is laid off, he packs and comes back to his village in Portugal. Filipe dreams of new horizons, and the answer lays in front of him of going back to where he was born, Paris. While Hugo, in Paris, dreams of living and working in Portugal but, not in the village, not in Trás-os-Montes This is a film about a region which performs as a shrine, a physical container of memories of happy childhoods and simpler times, that one visits once a year and puts a small bouquet of flowers at its feet. Some stay close-by, and live out of its pilgrims, but very few are able to experience it as a real and viable home.

Venice, Italy Italian with English subtitles The short documentary explores the world of culture, nature and gastronomy through the eyes of a chef - Lorenzo Barbasetti di Prun. As he explains his vision - he invites the observer to join him on an adventure for a search of new values of the Venetian Lagoon through the creation of dishes based from wild plants across the marshlands. We carried out the first interviews with the PI of the research and other researchers to gain useful information. Then we filmed a dialogic interview with Lorenzo that spanned 2 hours and which we edited in the film keeping only the audio. For the visual material we invited Lorenzo to shows us the "barene" and the places where he works. Here we continued with more interviews. The main challenges were given by our previous inexperience in making films (most of us were at their first experience), the very limited budget (less than 100 euros), and the very limited time (the film was made in one week after the pitch as a part of a summer school).

Holy Island, England English This short film-poem (55 sec) was made by Ceri Morgan (prose-poet) and Pawas Bisht (documentary film-maker) last summer as part of a project led by Bisht entitled, 'Participatory Storytelling and Arts for Inclusive and Transformative Nature Recovery and People-Nature Connection'. The film-poem was made following a site visit to Holy Island with Natural England, and came out of conversations around artistic/knowledge form(s), audience engagement, tensions between place-making and place-safekeeping, and the impact of climate change, including coastal erosion. In the final line, the sea is poised ready to swallow the island like an oyster/pearl. Field notes were made (written, photographs, moving images) during a site visit that was also a participatory activity, featuring discussions with a community group, artists and colleagues working on sustainability and/or environmental history, and Natural England colleagues. Morgan then wrote a word-based prose-poem based on these notes and discussions, which Bisht combined with film footage he took on the day to make a film-poem. The method aimed to explore and experiment with forms that could be both art and criticism/research within geohumanities and environmental humanities. The film-poem appears to be more effective than either the word-poem or the film on their own. It seems accessible in terms of speaking to a broad audience, and viewers have been very moved by it. Challenges were technical ones - how to write a prose-poem that would include an environmental message without 'telling' (something to avoid in creative writing), and how to make the film fit the text (this required extensive editing).

Australia The methodology is creative practice research to explore how using interview as a method changes the way we film and understand nature. This short film aims to challenge the viewers current relationship to nature. Composer Gail Priest has been exploring how much stretching can the “figure” (of the voice, the field recording, the word even) take before it breaks and becomes abstract filaments. Her work approaches this duality as an exploration of areas of slippage. The sonic results tend towards the hyper-dynamic and super-saturated always attempting to sensorially immerse the listener and heighten awareness of the aural realm. This film combines the two approaches to with the aim to create an audio-visual experience for the audience designed to shift perspectives on nature.

Cairo, Egypt Arabic with English Subtitles One of five short films made by young residents of Al Khalifa neighbourhood in Cairo, Egypt. In Through Our Eyes the filmmakers decided to look at their urban environment through the eyes of some local animal inhabitants. Made during the Urban Dreams filmmaking workshop. During their two week mid-year school break in 2023, young residents of the al-Khalifa neighbourhood in historic Cairo. got acquainted with urban wildlife helped by various field visits inside and outside the neighbourhood. The young filmmakers then went on to conceptualise, draft and shoot their short films using their phones, in order to share stories of place that reveal their relationship with Al-Khalifa’s natural and urban heritage. Winner of the International Union of Architects (UIA) 2023 Golden Cubes Award (Audio Visual Category)