RHIZOMEMIND
A Lab for Mapping Digital Environmentalism(s)
WESTERN FILM & ART FESTIVAL
Emerging Visions of AI, Art, and Environment
2025 OFFICIAL SELECTIONS
Chihiro Yamanaka
Japan, 2025
5 min 10 secs
The east wind begins to blow, carrying warmth into the water. Landscapes merge without boundaries, and in time, the mountains drift into slumber.
Radheya Jang Jegatheva
Australia and UK, 2024
8 min 55 secs
A heartfelt story of unrequited love explored through a lonely seagull struggling to accept that his newfound object of affection is a human-operated drone with a limited battery life.
Daria Mantsereva
Russia, 2024
7 min 33 secs
Young man arrives at sea coast, as instructions in the mysterious letter told him to do. He was in search of his origins, but he discovers a strange new world of fish people. He has never seen anything like that, but why does it feel so familiar?
Mahdi Barqzadegan
Iran, 2024
12 min 18 secs
This film tries to show the relationship between art and artist.
Kuan Yu Lo
Taiwan, 2025
6 min 54 secs
This 6-minute short film depicts a fierce conflict among its protagonists, laced with an air of cunning and deceit. While themes of greed and ambition are clearly exposed, the story unfolds with a comedic twist, delivering a playful yet sharp commentary on human nature.
Kuntao Zhou
China, 2025
6 min 10 secs
The short film introduces a fantasy story full of bizarreness, where a lonely "bone hunter" accepts a test of human nature from the "snail man" during his journey of searching for bones.
Chandan Priyadarshi
India, 2025
24 min 50 secs
ThiJasmit Singh Arora, a Kolkata-based Sikh businessman-cum-enviromental activist, is on a quest to collect 200 crore gutlis (mango seeds) from the public in order to plant 20 crore trees. To achieve his goal, Jasmit has explore various avenues whether it's running a social media campaign or climbing the buildings of Bada Bazaar to collect gutlis from mango-papad makers.
Maryam Mari Samadi
Belgium, 2023
14 min 46 secs
A pregnant woman who lives and sells salt with her husband by Lake Urmia; is facing the risk of miscarriage because of the impact of salt storms caused by climate change and human factors. They plan to move to the city after selling their property, and until then, the woman tries to protect her fetus from the dangers of the environment.
Pedro Ramalhete
Portugal, 2025
71 min 31 secs
Love, cinema and naivety. They meet randomly in the street: João is unemployed, Clara is a cinema production assistant. They remember each other from film school. She invites him to come along in this film she's working on. Eternal Flame it's a melancholic comedy about the dynamics of a film crew and about finding your own place. A homage to the family of Portuguese cinema and to cinema itself, a film that reflects on a precarious generation, a generation defined by interiority and the self. You will see a Camera speak.
Emerging Vision: Student Showcase
One Crawls Over the Spider's Web
Dhananjay Nachar
Canada
8 min 30 secs
A wickedly stylish, pulp comedy about a sassy fly thief, Sam, whose attempt at robbery traps her with a hot stud, a widow's love triangle, and a murder, where she becomes a fly trapped in a spider's web.
Stylish, sharp, and laced with humor, the film blends crime, comedy and drama into a playful yet sinister ride that keeps audiences guessing until the end.
Roko's Ruin
Maximus Krywulak
Canada
16 min 17 secs
An aspiring documentary crew investigates a top secret men's mental health treatment facility that specializes in disorders related to AI. However, the secrets they uncover there are much darker than they could ever have imagined.
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Chrisa Theocharidou
Greece, 2025
20 min
A cinematic exploration of the many roles society assigns to women, told through iconic scenes from classic films with female protagonists. Stripped of dialogue and reimagined through dance and movement, these moments reveal the unspoken emotions and inner worlds behind each role.
Heide Cabral Rodriguez Braz
Brazil, 2025
6 min
Amidst blows and silences, a boxing ring reveals the hidden dance of virility—where body, cinema, and movement confront, merge, and reinvent themselves.
Mohammadhassan Asnaei
USA, 2025
5 min 43 secs
"The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must destroy a world." — Herman Hesse.
Set to a pulsating electronic score, the film reimagines the hidden journey of life’s beginnings as a cosmic odyssey of struggle, survival, and creation.
Alireza Morteza Hashemi
Iran, 2024
15 min
Two officers arrested a girl and a boy for being romantically involved without getting married. They convinced the officers to arrest two other people instead of them. They cooperated with the officers to find two other people while driving around, during which they started judging other people in the street.
Bruno Lasevicius
USA, 2024
4 min 36 secs
“Machine Talks” introduces an unconventional cast in a highly experimental talk show. Promoting short, incisive conversations about art, humans, and technology, pushing boundaries of traditional dialogue. Powered by Unreal Engine, AI-driven 3D characters take center stage to explore and deconstruct cutting-edge generative artworks. Virtual hosts interview contemporary human artists, investigating their creative processes and uncovering the inspiration behind their work. While the questions follow a script, replies from AI are only edited for clarity, offering a glimpse of their efforts in connecting with an audience By focusing on the artists, ‘Machine Talks’ intends to establish that computers aren’t creating art - humans are.
Bruno Lasevicius
Mexico, 2025
7 min 30 secs
Pharmakon is an experimental work produced through artificial intelligence, photogrammetry, and real-time digital processes. It explores a world where technology and the superstructure that governs it are both poison and cure. In the age of the simulacrum, the real dissolves, subjectivity fractures, and our desires no longer belong to us. A visual journey into the heart of a remedy that also makes us ill.
Bruno Lasevicius
Mexico, 2025
7 min 30 secs
Can the perfection of technological artifice compensate for the organic imperfection of lost love?
A woman attempts to replace her ex-boyfriend with an artificial clone, but the machine's excessive subservience confronts her with a need she had forgotten in her desire to magically alter her life: dialectic engagement, confrontation, debate.