So comments Stefano Rabolli Pansera, Artistic Director of the St. Moritz Art Film Festival, which will open for its fourth edition on August 24th. Held at the Cinema Scala in the Engadin valley, the festival brings together artists, filmmakers, and audiences for four days of avant-garde cinema and video art, in dialogue with the high-altitude landscape that surrounds it. As Pansera states, “This year’s incredible selection stage emotional, spatial, and ontological virtualities – emerging worlds of potentiality that question the fixity of time, identity, and place.”
This year’s theme, Emerging Virtualities, curated by Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, Leonardo Bigazzi, and Roísín Tapponi, probes the shifting boundary between the virtual and the real. Here, the virtual is considered beyond the artificial and into the boundary-shifting natural world. It includes emotional and psychological dimensions, speculative reconstructions of history, and non-human experience. From artificial intelligence and gaming environments to algorithmic storytelling and climate simulations, the works in the programme challenge the viewer to rethink what presence, memory, and embodiment can mean in an age of accelerated abstraction.
Among the featured participants are Marianna Simnet, whose Leda Was a Swan (2025) will be opening the festival. Through this work, Simnett examines the violence of an ancient myth with a mix of performance and artificial intelligence. Lawrence Lek’s short Empty Rider (2024) considers electronic personhood as a self-driving car stands trial for attempting to murder his company’s CEO. Another highlight is Wim Wenders, who will be closing the festival with his Anselm – Das Rauschen der Zeit (2023), an immersive 3D documentary about the life and work of Anselm Kiefer.
Elsewhere in the programme, artists explore memory, environmental trauma, and posthuman perspective through formal experimentation and speculative world-building. Films by Anicka Yi, Alexander Walmsley, Nina Sarnelle, and Valentin Noujaïm stretch across mediums and timelines – from simulated weather systems and algorithmic ecosystems to Dante-inspired surveillance narratives. Desire, history, and embodiment surface throughout, as the virtual becomes a tool for confronting what remains unresolved or unseen. Lawrence Lek, Empty Rider (2024), Courtesy of St Moritz Art Film Festival
SMAFF’s jury this year includes figures such as Mohamed Almusibli (Director of Kunsthalle Basel), writer and editor Fi Churchman, and curators Mario D’Souza and Daria Khan, who will select winners across several categories including the Best Art Film – ArtReview Prize, and the Love at First Sight – Kulm Prize.
Emerging Virtualities is a testament to cinema’s power to give form to the intangible, evoking what has not yet materialised, but is already present in feeling and thought.