PEBBLES UNDERGROUND SUMMER 2025 AWARD WINNERS + WINTER 2025 AWARD WINNERS

PEBBLES UNDERGROUND film and video art (Canada)
SUMMER 2025 AWARD WINNERS + WINTER 2025 AWARD WINNERS

SUMMER 2025 AWARD WINNERS
From the 15th to the 31st of January 2026

The award-winning films of our Summer 2025 edition happen to exist at the intersection of the personal and the political, perhaps as a reflection of our turbulent times. Made across different places and practices, the films focus on playfulness, history, loss, desire, and resistance taking shape through the acts of caring, walking, dancing, waiting, and remembering. The artists assert their presence going against speed, rupture, and erasure.
Streamed and experienced together, the films ask direct questions: how to see when images no longer register, how to listen inside constant noise, and how to remain human amid catastrophe, nostalgia, and technological excess.
The program is marked by acts of sheer magic of play, and care but also refusal, and destruction, —burning images, drifting through physical and digital space, turning everyday environments into sound, and returning to the past through fragile archives.
The awards recognize formal risk alongside emotional precision and ethical force.

NO MATTER WHAT, I WANT TO BE NEXT TO YOU by Ezzam Rahman, Singapore (2024)
WALKING WITH GAZA by Samer Abdelnour, Costa Rica, Scotland, Palestine (2024)
THE SIGHT IS A WOUND / دیدن، زخم است by Parham Ghalamdar, Iran, UK (2025)
WHERE THE STONE WAITS FOR ME by Julius Hulshof, Iceland, Netherlands (2024)
(AN)DANZAS by Lia Arenas, Chile (2024)
THE BIG TISSUE by Scratch My Nose, Australia (2024)
FAN CAMS & LAURELS by Misael José Oquendo, USA (2024)
STONE PICKING, SPIRAL NEGATIVES by Cat Morris Jones, USA (2024)
ArcadiA by Mathieu Samaille, Canada (2024)
SOFT SEA / SUAVE MAR Sara N. Santos, Portugal (2025)
BOUND BY NOTHINGNESS / Το τίποτα που μας ενώνει by Konstantinos Merentitis, Greece (2025) TWENTIETH CENTURY FRESCO / WEÖRES SÁNDOR: XX. SZÁZADI FRESKÓ by Róbert Bordás, Hungary (2025)
THE DAY JOB: SECOND EXCERPT by Christian Nicolay, Canada (2023-ongoing)
I GOT THEM PEGGED – EPISODE 1: SOMETHING STRANGE ON THE LEASE by John Strelec, USA (2025)
GIULIETTA & GIULIETTA AND THE SPIRITS OF FELLINI / GIULIETTA & GIULIETTA E GLI
SPIRITI DI FELLINI by Jacopo Torriti, Italy (2023)
TEST123 by Toni Rodero, Norway, Netherlands (2024-2025)

Summer Winner 2025 Press Release

WINTER 2025 AWARD WINNERS
From the 1st of February to the 15th of February 2026

This screening showcases the award-winning short experimental films and video artworks from our Winter 2025 edition. Despite vastly different geographies and aesthetics, the artists share a commitment to cinema as a means of exploring personal, political and historical spaces.

A preoccupation with time as something elastic and contested recurs throughout the program. Personal memories of fathers, grandparents, childhoods, lost homes, and inner crises unfold alongside historical and political environments shaped by war, empire, colonization, patriarchy, incarceration, ecological disasters and technological acceleration. History persists in bodies, landscapes, language, labor, and everyday objects, resurfacing through gestures of care, resistance, humor, and refusal.

Surrealist film and performance, archival and found footage, animation, analog film processes, microscopic vision, and hybrid documentary strategies are not deployed as stylistic excess, but rather as ways of thinking through systems of power and perception. Several works interrogate infrastructures that claim to organize life, such as prisons, hospitals, schools, malls, galleries, and algorithms. These works reveal how these infrastructures shape subjectivity while inevitably producing cracks, leaks, and unexpected solidarities. Others turn toward non-human perspectives, ecological entanglements, and ritualized labor, challenging human-centered narratives of control and progress.

The artists encourage viewers to confront their own discomfort, acknowledge their involvement in existing systems, and envision alternative ways to interact with one another, memory, and the world.

Winter Winner 2025 Press Release

Pebbles Underground is an independent, constantly evolving film and video art initiative founded by artists from diverse backgrounds. Our online platform is dedicated to showcasing experimental cinema from around the world. In addition to our Summer and Winter screenings, we collaborate with VisualcontainerTV to present an additional screening featuring the award-winning works from these programs.
More info about Pebbles Underground can be found here: pebblesunderground.art