about us

exf f. is a festival dedicated to experimental and avant-garde film in all its diversity, both historical and contemporary. for four days, we would like to create a space in which various cinematic works in their specific medialities and materialities are brought into focus as an independent art form. films of this kind have a difficult time in regular cinema operations. they often “fall between stools” in a film landscape that focuses on feature films and documentaries as well as in the art world and there are few opportunities to experience them as part of an expanded, lively cinema culture. our program will include various analog formats, from super 8 to 16mm and 35mm, as well as digital productions and digital copies of restored films.

a big thanks to our sponsors, the HessenFilm und Medien GmbH, the Kulturamt of the City of Frankfurt, the AStA of the Goethe University Frankfurt, Instituto Cervantes Frankfurt as well as our cooperation partner the Filmkollektiv Frankfurt e. V., without whose support this festival would not be possible.

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martin klein, larissa krampert, björn schmitt

exf f. 2026:
“Each of his works is a departure from the previous one, in search of what has never been seen on screen.” Thus writes Francisco Algarín Navarro in his text on Robert Nelson. This sentence then could almost be used as a mission statement for what is at the core of each new edition of exf f.: an open and ongoing search for new forms of cinematographic expression, embracing radical heterogeneity in the place of artificially imposed homogeneity. Nelson himself perfectly embodied this free-rolling spirit of personal and artistic freedom, influenced by Beat literature, Funk Art and improvisational theatre; his films defy classification and canonization, moving between anarchic comedy, landscape and portrait films to anti-racist agitprop. Similar in their formal polyvalency are the works of Klaus Telscher, where „autobiographical references, everyday life, German history, American culture, kitsch and irony are brought together“ to constitute Telscher‘s unmistakable style. An active teacher and activist for experimental film, Telscher was forced to give up his artistic activity in the mid 90s. Our programme constitutes an all-analog homage to the filmmaker, who passed away in 2024. Utako Koguchi, shares Nelson‘s affinity for a deeply subjective expression of the self through cinema, though through very different means and to very different results. In the early 1990s Utako Koguchi became a key figure in the feminist movement and an important figure in queer film history. Koguchi‘s O-DE-KA-KE Diary 1 & 2 (1989/1993), where she wanders through Tokyo’s urban and natural landscapes is one of the key works of this moment in Japanese cinema history, and we are very glad to be able to present a two programs of her work. Shellie Fleming similarly began making films in the late 80s and early 90s. A polyvalent artist, Fleming‘s films are both „exquisitely crafted, delicately detailed, and intricately tactile“ as Arindam Sen writes, they are at once „intensely personal“, while also „amateur“. Visiting from Spain, Jorge Suárez Quiñones Rivas and Yonay Boix are part of a new generation of filmmakers working with analog film. Since 2021, Jorge Suárez Quiñones Rivas has been engaged in an ongoing project of taking „charge of another artist’s work“, as he puts it. That other artist is the endlessly polymorphic Marcel Broodthaers, and at exf f., Rivas will present the four films that compose his series Marcel ! in a special four-projector-performance. Yonay Boix shoots on Super 8, working with improvisation, technical mishaps and the surprises that life holds for each of us; his films are death metal and flicker fueled family diaries. Intricately crafted explorations of the cinema-machine and its constitutive components abound in the works of Karl Kels, Els van Riel, Mattijn Seip and Paul Sharits. An exploration of the perceptual instability between real and cinematic time is at the heart of the works of both Kels and van Riel. Kels, a student of Peter Kubelka at the Städelschule, would, in his early works, follow the „master‘s teaching“ through his utilization of montage as a means to rupture the time-space continuum, creating „a filmic dance of sorts“. In Flußpferde (Hippopotamuses), a rare example of an experimental film shot on 35mm, Kels, through the recording of minute-long shots, combined his interest for metric montage with a form of montage interior to the frame itself, exposing the „infinite realisable possibilities in the unstaged documentary reality–events“. Formed in analog film and photography, Brussels-based artist Els van Riel works as a projectionist, exhibition technician and collaborator on other artists‘ work. In her work, „16mm film serves as the central element through which she explores the medium‘s fundamental components: time, light, movement, and materiality.“ We are very happy to present the first retrospective dedicated to the works of Els van Riel in Germany, and to welcome her to Frankfurt am Main to present and discuss the two programs of her films. In the neighboring country, the Netherlands, Mattijn Seip, who started making films in the 60s, is one of the great unknown filmmakers of his generation. Utilizing animation techniques, extended camera- and shutter techniques and flicker effects, Seip constructs a new form of vision, introducing a „heightened sense of flickering spatial perplexity“. It is easy to see how Paul Sharits’ Declarative Mode, which we will screen as our closing night special, can be connected to the various concerns raised by the works of the aforementioned filmmakers. A master of the flicker film, the 16mm double projection nevertheless constituted a sort of turning point for Sharits, away from structuralism, and a return to narrative. The Cellule d’Intervention Metamkine follow in the footsteps of the experimentations forged by Sharits and others, of constituting a purely filmic space of experience. Unlike for the American filmmaker however, sound and music plays an essential component in their work. Formed in the 1990s, the collective of French filmmakers and musicians has been touring the world with their DIY film performances, creating a “fluid and spontaneous dialogue between 16mm projection and electroacoustic music”. We are very happy to welcome Metamkine to Frankfurt, to experience one of their spellbinding “jam-sessions” in person.