EX-Now 1 International Competition

Mounds Above the Earth Jiayi Chen | China | 2025 | 7min 39sec Mounds Above the Earth contemplates ecological cycles, perception, and environmental transformation, anchored in the rare emergence of two periodical cicada broods surfacing simultaneously for the first time in more than two centuries. The film follows the flicker of red—echoing the cicadas’ developing eyes, the blood moon, and a personal journey of vision correction. Hiding Places Magdalena Bermudez | USA | 2025 | 12min Women pretend to be rocks. Military operations masquerade as art education. One woman deserts to pursue a more radical act of unselfing. The Recce Daniel Mann | United Kingdom | 2026 | 15min 7sec Drawing on a location test filmed in Uganda and an email exchange with the location scout, The Recce captures cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with colonial imaginaries, x-x-binding the fiction of filmmaking