Organizer Information:

Projet Betula is an independent, non-profit platform supporting international contemporary art with a focus on migration, nomadism, and resilience. We provide space for artists uprooted by war, displacement, or forced relocation to share their stories and engage in global conversations.

Through exhibitions, screenings, performances, and educational initiatives, we aim to create environments for reflection, creation, and dialogue — highlighting both the struggles and strength of those adapting to new, often hostile conditions, and amplifying voices shaped by displacement and migration.

Title & Description:

Screening series: Speak Volumes

Projet Betula is excited to announce the first Open Call for the 2025 edition of our Screening Series. This year’s theme Speak Volumes invites artists and filmmakers to submit experimental films, videos, and moving image works that explore concepts of memory and haunting — both personal and collective.

In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon proposes that ghosts are not imaginary but real traces of what was meant to be erased. Haunting in this context serves as a medium through which historical trauma, social injustice, and personal loss continue to manifest, expressed through gestures, language, dreams, and embodied memory.

We approach memory not as a chronology or fixed archive, but as a force that moves through the everyday. It does not always arrive through narrative or logic. At times it appears as interruption — a gap, a silence, a return. It becomes a space where the personal and political, the intimate and structural, the internal and historical intersect. These aspects cannot be separated from one another.

Speak Volumes is an invitation to reflect on these returns. We are interested in works where the past does not unfold as a reconstruction but rather breaks through — where visual language addresses what resists narrative: the fragment, the glitch, the pause, the repetition, the slip.

We are not seeking resolution. Instead, we are looking for attentiveness — to what slips through the margins of official history but continues to shape how we see, feel, and speak. Speak Volumes is a space for works where the past insists on being heard

Category:

Experimental films, videos, and moving image works

Key Dates:

  • Submission period: July 15 — August 10, 2025
  • Announcing open call results: August 17, 2025
  • Event date: September 13, 2025

Application Fee: No

Location: Out of the Blue cinema, Paris, France

Awards & Benefits:

Selected works will be showcased in a public screening at Out of the Blue cinema in Paris in September 2025.

How to Apply:

Applications must be submitted by completing the Entry Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfdXOPryCFcXuKSV_aPWk_sqi4Z2Gykt5j2xP NKthBWrY63qg/viewform

Contact Information:

Screening