Dominating systems, their norms, values, and actors delimit order, normalcy, and interests. In so doing, they forcefully alienate those who transgress these boundaries. Through crystalizing directors’ feminist and queer gaze, the festival renders systemic violence and determinism visible. Its screen is a mirror of our feelings of anger and disgust in asking ── Whom are we afraid of and why? whom do we despise?  Mediation of these questions through animation, body-horror, glittercore, installation, photography, and musical, birth fictions that expose and subvert repressed societal fears, desires, and rage. In their footsteps, our transformations into vampires, werewolves, and cyborgs are both horrifying and liberating; the enlivening of forgotten goddesses, also, and femmes ── pronounced acts of resistance.

The festival as a process engenders the multiplicity of our entanglements and possible futures. In imagining, this year’s ‘From Rosa to Simone’ is dedicated to the sadness, questioning, discoveries, and joys of othering.