Friday Schedule
Friday, November 14
Location
7:00pm – 9:00pm | Opening Night Ceremony at Cinema Village
Join us on the first night of the festival to kick off VAEFF 2025 at the iconic Cinema Village!
The opening night ceremony will take place on Friday, November 22nd from 7pm – 9pm at Cinema Village. We hope you’ll join us for the event to take photos, meet the artists, and watch trailers as a sneak peek into what’s in store for the rest of the festival! Enjoy wine and cheese as you mingle and celebrate the beginning of VAEFF 2025.
9:00pm – 11:00pm | Screening + Artist Q&A
This year’s program delves into the complexities of desire, sex, transformation, and self-perception. Through a mix of intimate portraits, surreal encounters, and reflections on gender, culture, and the body, the films explore how beauty, pleasure, and shame shape our understanding of identity in a world defined by visibility and image.
Saturday Schedule
Saturday, November 15
Location
2:00pm – 4:00pm | Screening + Artist Q&A
The “On The Edge” program presents films that confront social, psychological, and emotional limits — exploring exhaustion, desire, confinement, and transformation. From the blur of urban life and artistic paralysis to surreal meditations on freedom, identity, and mortality, these works capture the fragile space between illusion and reality, where endurance becomes an act of survival.
4:30pm – 6:30pm | Screening + Artist Q&A
Between Fashion and Music
“What lies between fashion and music? A vast spectrum of works that value style and aesthetic, whether visual or auditory. Now in its ninth edition, this program has become a role and opportunity that I truly cherish. It allows me to share with you my perspective on some of the most influential recent video works in fashion and music. Mind you, this isn’t intended as a ‘Best of Music and Fashion Films 2025’, but rather a reflection of my current curatorial voice across these worlds. ” – Niccolo Montanari
Niccolo Montanari has been a VAEFF Guest Curator since 2016. He is the founder of Curation Hour, a platform that amplifies the voices of filmmakers through curated screenings with partner festivals, online features, and network building.
7:00pm – 9:00pm | Screening + Artist Q&A
The City, Loneliness, and Forbidden Desire
Set to the pulse of urban life, this program brings together dark comedies, music videos, and experimental narratives that explore isolation, connection, and longing. Moving through restless nights, subway rides, blurred memories, and fleeting encounters, the films capture an ongoing search for meaning, craving, and desire—flowing between the city’s crowded streets and the quiet intimacy of its interior apartments.
Sunday Schedule
Sunday, November 16
Location
2:00pm – 4:00pm | Screening + Artist Q&A
Through movement, memory, and art, Fragmented World traces the fractures of a planet in crisis — from the haunting glow of an unsanctioned industrial landscape to the lingering echoes of displacement, oppression, and decay. These films explore how identity, body, and spirit endure amid destruction, transforming trauma into acts of creation. Blending poetry, performance, and visual experimentation, the program captures a world splintered by conflict yet bound by a shared, unyielding will to heal.
4:30pm – 6:30pm | Screening + Artist Q&A
The Color, Movement, & Space program highlights conceptually and stylistically innovative films across music, dance, animation, and fashion. From memories of an earthquake to abstract studies of adaptation and digital myth, they blur the boundaries between painting, performance, and sound to reimagine how motion shapes perception and emotion.
7:00pm – 9:00pm | Screening + Artist Q&A
Something is Wrong. Very wrong!
The “Something is wrong… very wrong” program represents our struggle to perceive the eerie, unstable and seemingly unpredictable state of our present world.