Wed, june 3
20:00 – 21:35
Het Documentaire Paviljoen: De Spiegel
Pavilion Shorts: Deep Soup Special
Description
This month’s Pavilion Shorts is a special edition curated by Amsterdam-based designers and post-humanist artists Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters, featuring their film Deep Soup alongside a selection of short films by pioneering and influential experimental filmmakers.
At the centre of the programme is Deep Soup, a participatory sci-fi short film that imagines an alternative form of intelligence shaped by matter, movement, and gravity. Following its premiere at IDFA 2025, the work returns to the big screen as the starting point for an evening focused on the creative influences behind Maurer and Wouters’ practice.
The four selected classics connect to Deep Soup through a shared fascination with the mysterious and the non-material, the non-human gaze, the body rendered as object, the beauty found in destruction, and the power of rhythm and music in shaping narrative.
At the centre of the programme is Deep Soup, a participatory sci-fi short film that imagines an alternative form of intelligence shaped by matter, movement, and gravity. Following its premiere at IDFA 2025, the work returns to the big screen as the starting point for an evening focused on the creative influences behind Maurer and Wouters’ practice.
The four selected classics connect to Deep Soup through a shared fascination with the mysterious and the non-material, the non-human gaze, the body rendered as object, the beauty found in destruction, and the power of rhythm and music in shaping narrative.
Composition
Deep Soup
This film, made with video contributions from users around the world, shows the emergence of a physical intelligence in a kind of primordial soup, fed with images of friction and gravity in our physical reality.
Blight
John Smith followed the demolition of his East London neighborhood and the construction of a freeway. The forward momentum of this montage artwork is driven by Jocelyn Pook’s score, incorporating fragments of interviews with residents.
The Perfect Human
In his influential short film, Jørgen Leth directs our gaze toward the “perfect” human. Navigating between a pseudo-anthropological study and a mock-commercial, the film presents a model specimen of the modern Dane in the late 1960s.
Meshes of the Afternoon
Maya Deren’s groundbreaking experimental short film follows a woman (played by the director) through a menacing, circular dream world in which she repeatedly enters the same house.
Daybreak Express
The morning subway races in the direction of New York, set to Duke Ellington’s music. Owing to the combination of jazz rhythms and shots of sun-drenched skyscrapers this short film could be considered a precursor of the video clip.