O-FEST International Festival of Experimental Art

About

About the Festival

O-FEST is an international festival of experimental art dedicated to practices at the intersection of cinema, video art, performance, new media, and expanded audiovisual forms.
The festival is conceived as a space beyond fixed boundaries, approaching experimentation as a key method for engaging with contemporary visual experience.

Today, the image increasingly tends toward completion, transparency, and predictability — whether in industrial formats or algorithmically generated visual systems. In this context, the festival focuses on practices that move beyond these logics.

At its core are works in which the image remains suspended: not yet fixed within a genre, not yet absorbed into market classification, still carrying the potential to shift from illustration to direct impact.

We are not interested in novelty for its own sake, but in what feels necessary — forms without which it becomes impossible to rethink perception and experience.

We do not select based on medium, budget, or screening history. Only one question matters: can the work produce an autonomous image and shift perception?

O-FEST approaches experimentation as a way of life and artistic practice — a means of redefining the boundaries between art and reality.

Concept 2026

The new does not always coincide with the present moment.
Some forms move ahead, others return and begin to act again.

“Necessary New” refers to those images and artistic gestures without which it becomes impossible to move forward.

They emerge across different points in time — today, yesterday, decades ago — and continue to resonate because they open new possibilities within the image. Such works may remain unseen, fall out of context, resist canonization — and yet retain their force.

The program is conceived as a meeting ground for these works — outside linear time and beyond rigid historical frameworks.

It unfolds as a search for what truly works today, what restores the image to its intensity.

Rules

O-FEST follows an open, minimally bureaucratic submission model. Each work is submitted once and considered by the curatorial team across all possible sections of the program.

The festival deliberately avoids dividing submissions into paid categories, based on the principle that a work should be evaluated as a complete artistic statement, not as a representative of a predefined format.

Works up to 45 minutes in length are accepted, including but not limited to:

— experimental cinema
— video art
— film essays
— hybrid and poetic documentary
— found footage and archival practices
— animation
— AI / generative works
— expanded cinema
— interdisciplinary audiovisual projects

Premiere Requirements

No premiere requirement