Art Film Program Albania

Holy Animal, a special art film program in Tirana & Qeparo, Albania
8 & 11 September, 2026

We are never only human.

Holy Animal gathers artists Adele Dipasquale, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács and Smári Róbertsson, Kolbeinn Hugi , Philip Ullman, Muxingye Chen, Xiaoyao Ma, who treat the boundary between woman and animal, human and creature, body and simulation, not as a wall to defend but as a membrane to breathe through. Across six works, femininity, animality, and the digital are shown to be old collaborators, bound together by transformation, by longing, by the refusal to stay in one skin.

Holy Animal proposes that holiness, if it survives anywhere, survives in the parts of us that never fully agreed to become only human, the voice that breaks into a howl, the body that remembers it once had four feet, the love that would follow a bear to the edge of the world. In an era saturated with simulation, these eight artists suggest that the animal was never the thing cyberspace replaced. It may be the thing cyberspace is quietly trying to become again.

Featuring

Harpy (2020), 5'30" — Adele Dipasquale
Do It | Pan (2023), 5'15" — Muxingye Chen
East of the Moon and West of the Sun (2023), 4'36" — Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, and Smári Róbertsson
Preoperational Model (2024), 13' — Philip Ullman (trailer )
BEASTQUEST (2025), 29' — Kolbeinn Hugi (trailer)
During Daytime We Stay Afloat (2021), 45' — Xiaoyao Ma

Two screenings in Albania, September 2026.

A film program curated by Wumen Ghua & Madé van Krimpen
Hosted by Blerta Kambo and HaAi Nature

Screenings
📍 Tirana — 8 September, 19:30
Vila 31 x Art Explora
Once the former home of president Enver Hoxha (1908–1985), now Albania's most influential artist residency center, a public art centre built to hold neutral spaces for rewriting new, plural histories.

📍 Qeparo — 11 September, 19:30
Qeparo holds two parts in one place: a half-abandoned 18th-century stone settlement with its 1796 church and Ali Pasha castle ruins above, and a living beach village below, centuries of presence on the Riviera. Ruin, sea, and light, all within walking distance.
With a music act by Kreshnik (duyaka/Kasheme ~ Zurich)

With support from the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sports within the PubliX program by HaAi Nature. In Tirana the event is supported by Vila 31 Art Explora and Open Air.

The Film Program

Harpy, 5’,30”, 2020, Adele Dipasquale
Adele Dipasquale's Harpy takes Anne Carson's essay on the gendered history of sound as its provocation, the film plays around with the trope that classically associates women with an irrational and uncontrolled outflow of sounds, more similar to the monstrous than the human, the opposite of rational, self-controlled, moderate in speaking Man. Employing unpleasant sounds, high- pitched shrieks, and guttural groans, the video explores stages between femininity and animality. The film starts with a woman who is losing her voice, but this loss provokes other physical mutations. The camera’s point of view goes down in the woods, suggesting the perspective of a critter that is moving four-footed. The disappearing voice will eventually come back as animals’ cries.

East of the Moon and West of the Sun, 4’36”, 2023 Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukacs and Smari Robertsson
Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, working with Smári Róbertsson, take up a different inheritance, the Nordic fairy tale of East of the Sun, West of the Moon, in which a woman's devotion breaks the curse on a prince turned white bear, and the two fates, human and animal, become impossible to separate. Filmed during a residency at Hybrida, a former iron-industry wasteland reclaimed by wild wolves, the artists transform Frank Sinatra's honeyed 1940s ballad of the same title into something rawer: a desperate, growling plea for love, sung through the body of a white wolf. Spinning in place, caught between the natural and the virtual, this wolfman is less a hybrid than a reminder that the two were never fully apart.

BEASTQUEST, 29’, 2025, Kolbeinn Hugi
That same porousness carries into cyberspace in Kolbeinn Hugi's BeastQuest, where a digital creature enters the ecological simulation GAIANET to configure a server for something called the Animal Internet. Equal parts science fiction and techno-shamanic delirium, the work imagines nature and network not as opposites but as interdependent systems, the forest and the server both requiring maintenance, both capable of hosting spirits.

Preoperational Model, 2024, 13', Philip Ullman
Philip Ullman extends this line of inquiry into the valley of feeling. “Sophie and Jessica are anthropomorphic beings that wander through different worlds, searching for themselves and for one another. Their bizarre and battered appearances are modelled with so much detail you can almost touch them. As in What Dying Feels Like (IFFR 2022), Philip Ullman captures the human condition in its smallest details. The terrifying, but endearing result leaves an impression that we’d perhaps rather forget, but at the same time also poignantly asks what causes us to feel this way. – Loes van Keulen

Do It | Pan, 5’15”, 2023, Muxingye Chen
The tit le, Pan (盘), carries multiple meanings. Literally, it refers to the shallow vessel used to hold food, water, or ritual offerings, a humble object deeply embedded in everyday life and cultural memory. In the Sichuan dialect, however, pan also means "to explore," "to work something through," or "to figure something out by doing." The title therefore suggests bot h a container of memory and an ongoing process of examining and negotiating identity.

During daytime we stay afloat, 45’, 2021, XiaoYao Ma
The program closes with XiaoYao Ma's during daytime we stay afloat, a meditative descent into a limitless meta-space that mirrors the natural world back to us at its most unguarded. It offers something more like rest: an invitation to float, to stay present, to let the inner animal, the inner child, simply be, without needing to prove it was ever separate from us.