This screening is part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival Artistic Research Week 2026, featuring graduation films by Master of Film students from the Amsterdam Filmacademie.

In this screening, you will see The Atom's Tale by Lena Kuzmich followed by a presentation and a Q&A and Ampulex Compressa by Kleoniki Stanich also followed by a Q&A.

The Atom's Tale by Lena Kuzmich

The Atom’s Tale is a science-fiction short film that follows the speculative journey of a single atom as it moves through geological, biological, and technological realms. Combining animation, documentary, and scripted scenes, the film traces the atom’s passage through matter, life, and media.

Structured as a speculative tale, the atom acts as both catalyst and connector, linking multiple storylines across vast stretches of time. The story begins with an atom embedded in stone, until a plant root dislodges it and releases it into the living world. After passing through various biological forms, it settles on the ocean floor where, over millions of years, it becomes part of petroleum. This material is later refined and used in the production of a screen. When the screen is eventually discarded, it is recovered from a waste site and repurposed into a speculative device that listens to vibrations in spider webs, imagining new ways technology might interface with more-than-human worlds.

By tracing the atom’s journey from rock to plant, and from oil to media technology, the film explores the circulation of matter, the deep-time origins of technology, and the lingering presence of more-than-human worlds within and around us.

Ampulex Compressa by Kleoniki Stanich

The narrative of Ampulex Compressa follows Flo, a woman whose body becomes intermittently inhabited by another woman murdered days earlier, suggesting a form of reanimation grounded in solidarity.

Drawing from the biology of the emerald cockroach wasp, which uses cockroaches as surrogate bodies for their larvae after it zombifies them, the film expands the notion of the undead beyond established tropes. The film becomes the starting point for a larger body of research and work that uses reanimation as a framework to explore agency, embodiment, and survival addressing the women historically killed, through fictional or symbolic means.