Blog: Film festivals

Open Call – International Experimental Film Festival 2025

The 3rd International Experimental Film Festival (IEFF) – 2025
organized by the Institute for Experimental Arts

“The future of film is female and experimental. We need to destroy and reconstruct cinema itself.” – Maya Deren

About the Festival The 3rd International Experimental Film Festival is an international encounter dedicated to experimental film art, announcing its call for submissions. The festival will take place in Greece, creating a dynamic space for screenings, installations, performances, conferences, film concerts, and workshops. The festival seeks to expand the possibilities of film beyond traditional formats and spaces, creating a zone of creative contagions between cinema and the visual arts, historical works and current production, analog and digital, filmmaking and critical thinking.

“I make films to prevent myself from disappearing. Each frame is an act of resistance against the prescribed narratives.” – Chantal Akerman

Our Vision of Experimental Cinema Experimental cinema is a free, radical, and purposeful cinema that responds to the aesthetic, political, or philosophical need to see and explore cinematic horizons, away from large industries and hegemonic formulas of creation. It is through experimental cinema that we find authentic ways to create audiovisual art.

“Experimental film is not just about breaking rules – it’s about proving those rules never really existed.” – Barbara Hammer

We celebrate a cinema that breaks the narrative, and most of all visual, bounds to which we’re used. A cinema that elaborates on film medium to its fullest, by including even the most extreme possibilities. A cinema that confronts, disrupts, and reimagines. As John Cage said it well: “an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen” – the cinema we’re looking for is a cinema of the unpredictable.

“The experimental is political. Every frame can be an act of rebellion.” – Agnès Varda

FESTIVAL MISSION

The 3rd IEFF continues to be the pioneering space in the exhibition of experimental content in cinema, which seeks to show excellence and innovation in the independent production of the film world. We celebrate aesthetic diversity, new narratives, and new media and formats; a program that reveals the complexity of social, cultural, and artistic phenomena. We understand experimental cinema as a divergent cinema that vanishes the boundaries with art, emphasizing the experimental modes of creation.

“In experimental cinema, we find the freedom to imagine different futures and to remember different pasts.” – Trinh T. Minh-ha

Special Focus for 2025

- Feminist Experimental Practices
- Gender and Technology
- Body Politics in Digital Age
- Queer Experimental Narratives
- Decolonial Experimental Cinema
- Eco-feminist Approaches to Film
- Cross-disciplinary Collaborations
- Digital/Analog Hybrid Works
- Experimental AR/VR Projects

ABOUT

The Institute The Institute for Experimental Arts was founded in 2008 in Athens, Greece as a non-profit platform of creative expression and research in the fields of theater, performance art, digital media, installation, poetry and art theory. The Institute is committed to existing as an open meeting point for poets-writers, directors, actors, theater engineers/technicians, performance artists, photographers, video artists and the writers who develop new analytical tools on contemporary art, media & communication.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE

The festival will always see the development of the cinematic language with critical thinking, regardless of the terms ‘cinema industry’ or independent cinema. For this reason, the 3rd IEFF will bring a critical discourse through curatorial programs, symposium, and public lectures to broaden the knowledge of the ever-changing cutting-edge cinema aesthetics.

“Cinema is not neutral. Experiment is our way to fight back.” – Sally Potter

SUBMISSION CATEGORIES

We accept all works that fit into the experimental film category and all its sub-genres including:

- Found footage
- Essay film
- Expanded cinema
- Experimental animation
- Abstract film
- Experimental documentary
- Video art
- Virtual reality
- Direct animation
- Any other experimental approaches

There are no genre, topic or length restrictions.

The 3rd IEFF features Avant-Garde and Experimental films of any length.

IMPORTANT REQUIREMENTS

+ All films with dialogue must have ENGLISH or GREEK subtitles
+ Submissions without subtitles will be considered incomplete
+ Films that have screened before are eligible

AWARDS

We believe in culture as a pluralistic and intangible value. The awards assigned by our diverse jury are purely symbolic. Selected films will be judged by an exceptional jury and seen by a vast audience of film lovers.

Golden Arrow Awards Categories

- Best Film
- Best Short Film
- Best Director
- Best Original Screenplay
- Best Music
- Best Performance
- Best Picture

Submission Deadlines and Fees Deadline:
August 15, 2025
Submission fee: 25 euro per video or media project
Program Announcement: October 2025

Contact Information For any questions: theinstitutecontact@gmail.com

RIGHTS

The International Experimental Film Festival reserves the right to use small portions and stills of accepted films for promotion of events.

We actively encourage submissions from women, non-binary, and gender non-conforming filmmakers, as well as creators from underrepresented communities. Our commitment to diversity extends to our jury selection and programming decisions.

“The revolution will be filmed experimentally.” – Su Friedrich

The 3rd International Experimental Film Festival is a project of the Institute for Experimental Arts, celebrating the radical potential of cinema to transform our understanding of art, society, and ourselves.