Film Program 2025 – In the Making: Perform | Exhaust

Film Program MoCA-Skopje 2025

In the Making: Perform | Exhaust

Curator: Sofia Grigoriadou

Wednesday, 10/12/2025, 18.30 – 20:30

Cinema Theater of the Museum of Contemporary Art  

The film program explores aspects of creative production that often remain unseen. It brings together works in different formats (short fiction film, artist video and documentary film) to open up questions related to creativity, gender, resilience, burnout, (human and non-human) interdependency, aspiration and (in)visibility.

Program

THE RABBIT IS DEAD

Hanis Bagashov · Bulgaria, N. Macedonia · 2025 · 20 min.

In this witty and satirical portrait, Eva, a young director, tries to develop her first film project  while balancing her personal life – all narrated by the fictional character in her film.

Cast: Sara Klimoska, Felix Maritaud, Noura Al Kadri (Voice). Editor: Kasiyana Angelova. Cinematographer: Kosara Ivanova. Sound: Darko Spasovski, Marko Rikaloski.

Hanis Bagashov (born in 1999) graduated in film directing from NATFA – Sofia. He is a two time participant of Berlinale Talents, as well as Sarajevo Talents and the IDFA Academy. His  photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje in 2017. As an  actor, he appears in When the Day Had No Name by Teona Strugar Mitevska, Sisterhood by  Dina Duma, and When They Bloom by Gvozden Ilić. He is a programmer of the student competition at the Manaki Brothers ICF

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HOST OR PARASITE: BOILING BODY

Elena Čemerska and Ivana Mirčevska · 2023-2024 · N. Macedonia · 8 min.

Host or Parasite: Boiling Body explores the intertwining between the Earth’s warming and human burnout, both driven by the ongoing labor dynamics imposed by market forces. At a time when planetary depletion aligns with the draining of vitality caused by neoliberal capitalism, we look into the consequences of bodily exhaustion. Overwhelmed by the constant demand to maximize bodily capacities, where do we look for zones to blow off some steam? Recognizing the body as a repository of diverse capacities that can never be fully subjugated, how does it resist these dynamics? Host or Parasite: Boiling Body delves into an auto-fictional world where our bodies, along with the cave Vrelo near Skopje, become a stage for practicing relations of hospitality, hostility, conviviality, and unequal exchanges. By refusing to perform according to pre-given norms and orientations- idiosyncratic movements, murmured messages, low-frequency hums, and melting surfaces create a path away from the rigid, individualistic, anthropocentric axis, towards a vibrant interdependency. The video is part of an installation by the same name.

Sound: Jovan Bliznakovski. 3D animation: Maja Cibreva.

Elena Čemerska is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher investigating memory and the role of the body’s lived experience in reconstructing fragmented history. Through painting, moving images, installation, and collaborations, she explores personal and collective transformative capacities. She is a recipient of the Prince Claus Seed Award (2021) and the DENES Award for Young Visual Artists. Elena is currently producing her first feature documentary, “Ruins.”

Ivana Mirčevska (1992, Skopje) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who works with moving images, sculpture, text, sound, and installation. Her practice is based on researching the materiality of images and their technological mutation, including haptic perception and intercorporeality as processes of image-making, sensory research, and collaboration. In her works, bodies, images, surfaces, landscapes, and unreadable “others” collaborate through a prism of care, precariousness, and agency, providing intimate resistance to androcentric and anthropocentric visual perspectives. Mirčevska is the recipient of the Prince Claus Seed Award (2024), the WHW Akademija Fellowship (2023), and the DENES Award for young visual artist in North Macedonia (2022).

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SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE 

Christiana Perschon · 2018 · Austria · 90 min.

She Is the Other Gaze presents a series of interviews with five female visual artists: Renate Bertlmann, Linda Christanell, Lore Heuermann, Karin Mack, Margot Pilz. Most of these artists started their careers in the 1970s, in Vienna, and the film explores the relation between their practice and feminism. As we see them working in their studios, performing in front of the camera or commenting on some of their pieces, they recall the difficulties, constraints and resistances encountered at the beginning of their paths. She is the other gaze has a unified tone (minimalist, drenched in white, without music), while building each segment as a particular collaboration between the artist and the filmmaker, in an intergenerational dialogue whose traces are visible on screen. Equally, each one of the artists featured has a unique approach, a specific artistic vision, but their trajectories have all been informed, in one way or another, by women´s issues: the fight against patriarchal structures, the lack of visibility, an intimate relation to the objects of everyday domesticity, the difficulties in negotiating family life and artistic ambitions. (Viennale 2018, Cristina Álvarez López).

Christiana Perschon: Born in 1978 in Baden near Vienna. Artist and director. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and worked for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), the Austrian Audiovisual Archive, as well as a curator for the Austrian Film Museum. Her films won numerous prizes and were shown at international festivals (Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Visions du Réel, Festival International de Cinéma Nyon). Sie ist der andere Blick (She is the other gaze, 2018) is her first feature film.