Category: Best Experimental Film – 2025 WSXA Barcelona

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: The Evolution of Human Motivations: An AI-Illustrated Odyssey

Director’s Name: John Voorhees Wylie

Writer’s Name: John Voorhees Wylie

Producer: Jane Bondar

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming : United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes 35 seconds

Film Description:

The film portrays symptoms of severe mental illness as “emotional fossils,” uncovering layers of inner human experience shaped throughout our evolutionary past. This concept adds empathetic depth to our understanding of evolution and human nature, humanizing these still stigmatized conditions.

Anchored in scientific plausibility, this pioneering narrative intricately stitches together paleoanthropological findings and facts, all in accordance with evolutionary theory, into a unified and inclusive story. It convincingly connects past events to present phenomena, presenting a coherent view of humanity’s evolution that enlightens and unites.

(HONORABLE MENTION)

Original Film Title: GREEN SCREAM

Director’s Name: Nádia Duvall AKA EVA MAE

Writer’s Name: EMILY HAM AKA NÁDIA DUVALL

Producer: STUDIO CÁVRICA MULTILÉPTICA

Country of Origin: Portugal

Country of Filming : Portugal

Language: Portuguese

Runtime: 42 minutes

Film Description:

GREEN SCREAM is an experimental documentary film about the art and process of artist Nádia Duvall. It begins with a fictional story about a centipede who dreamed of transforming into a snake, but then turned into a woman with a thousand faces. In a troubled context, identity creates fractures, often leading to a fragmentation where reality and fiction mix, not knowing where one begins and the other ends. Immersed in a narrative, the artist reveals her multiple personalities in a kind of whirling gaze. One of her personalities is Eva Mae, who seems to be the director of the film. All credits are also personalities of Duvall. Some scenarios was filmed inside her doll house.

(WINNER)

Original Film Title: ERSTE HILFE – VERSUCHSREIHE 1

Director’s Name: Myriam Thyes, Maria Anna Dewes

Writer’s Name: Myriam Thyes, Maria Anna Dewes

Producer: Myriam Thyes, Maria Anna Dewes

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming : Germany

Language: No Dialogue

Runtime: 8 minutes 34 seconds

Film Description:

Care and violence, acknowledgement and reprehension, to give or withdraw support: the video finds performative, sculptural, bizarre and poetic images for this range of diverse gestures and actions. They line up like a series of tests reflecting interpersonal relationships and current social conditions. One person adjusts, confirms or distracts the attitude of another person; actions are helpful or destructive, gentle or authoritarian, determined, hesitant, clumsy, tender, encroaching …

(FINALIST)

Original Film Title: I Am Here

Director’s Name: Gina Lori Riley

Writer’s Name: Gina Lori Riley

Producer: Gina Lori Riley

Country of Origin: Canada

Country of Filming : Canada

Language: English

Runtime: 35 minutes

Film Description:

I Am Here is a narrative, non linear, poetic film with integration and montage of material from a theatre stage production, digital images, video projections, sound and special effects, music, and movement.

An androgenous masked character, He-She, examines how the body tells our life story. He-She presents socio-political and cultural views of aging, old age, and the erasure of age on the body and shifts us beyond considering ourselves as victims of time, to examining and fostering a view of a full life, well lived.