The 9th edition of Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF 2025) presents the first Asian retrospective of Italian experimental filmmaker Giuseppe Boccassini. Active between Germany and Italy, Boccassini has served as Artistic Director of the FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter in Berlin since its foundation in 2017. His practice is research-driven, focusing on the re-assembly and re-create of found footage, archival materials, and experimental cinema. Moving along the liminal zones between the ruins of film history and the thresholds of perception, Boccassini uses found footage and archival images as a medium to probe the tensions between memory, the body, and vision. In his films, the image is not merely a tool for representation, but also a means of interrogating its own mode of existence — how it is picked up, fragmented, and re-ignited. This retrospective is presented in three parts, tracing his major works from 2013 to the present.
Giuseppe Boccassini
Giuseppe Boccassini is a filmmaker based between Berlin and Italy. After graduating in Film Theory at DAMS, University of Bologna, and completing a diploma in Film Directing at NUCT Cinecittà in Rome, he developed a research-based practice focused on found footage, archival materials, and experimental cinema.
His recent works explore the historical and formal dimensions of film noir and melodrama — noir in Ragtag (2022) and melodrama in Desire (2025). Since 2017, he has been the director of FRACTO – Experimental Film Encounter, a Berlin-based festival dedicated to experimental cinema. His research extends to industrial cinema, explored in Blast Furnace (2024), where archival imagery emerges as an immediate presence — closer to living nature than to a technological device. He is currently developing Phantom Ride, a film-based project combining early Antarctic expedition footage with the aesthetics of early cinema.
His films have screened at Venice International Film Festival, FID Marseille, Ji.hlava IDFF, Jerusalem IFF, Torino Film Festival, IndieLisboa, Image Forum Tokyo, and the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, where Ragtag was presented in conversation with film theorist Tom Gunning. His work is distributed by Light Cone (Paris) and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (New York).
The Tension to the Invisible
Giuseppe Boccassini’s cinema inhabits an unstable zone where memory and vision converge — where forgotten gestures and fractured desires are reactivated through the montage of found footage. His films do not unfold along a temporal line but breathe through layers and flickers, forming an organic rhythm. They do not seek to tell stories but to map the emotional landscape that remains after narration has collapsed, embodying what Aby Warburg called the Pathosformel — those residual emotions that persist across epochs. Bodies appear in tension and dissolve in flashes; the image becomes both pure and perilous: revealing and withdrawing, summoning memory while producing forgetting. When frames are layered, repeated, and abstracted until the body disappears, what remains is a pulse of energy and form. This dematerialized mode of seeing leads him away from the violence of spectacle toward a darker ethics of perception. Running through his work is a persistent question: how does the
image survive within its own history? His films revolve around the fragility of perception and the shadows of history — when narrative disappears, in what form can human emotion endure? Time and again, we are invited into the ruins of representation, to witness the ceaseless entanglement between the visible and the invisible.
From Lezuo (2013) to Debris (2017), Boccassini redefines the mythic journey and the destiny of matter: from departure to drift, from shipwreck to rebirth. The image becomes the flesh of memory, while the grain, erosion, and folds of film stock form the material traces of time. In Orbit (2016) and Temple of Truth (2018), this perception of time expands toward a cosmic dimension — passing through scientific fantasy and optical hallucination, where the cries of history intersect with dreams, and our vision enters a collapsing space-time: a monument of technology, yet also a tomb of vision. From The Saved Night (2019) to Blast Furnace (2024), his cinema gradually condenses into a silent energetics. If the earlier works engage with the physical life of the image, this phase turns toward the ontology of existence itself — the image as a vibration between life and death, light and darkness, drifting like dust along the threshold of visibility. In his recent films, Ragtag (2022) and
Desire (2025), his archival aesthetics reach a height of cultural archaeology. The former weaves together hundreds of postwar film-noir fragments into a visual portrait of fear, desire, and spiritual crisis; the latter returns to the ruins of melodrama to ask how emotion is performed, inherited, and forgotten. He does not reconstruct genre, but allows images to fold back upon themselves — letting the forms of the past ignite once again in the present.
Boccassini’s practice maintains a latent intertextuality with painting and literature. Its darkness and tension owe something to German Expressionism, while its fractured rhythms recall the cut-up experiments of William Burroughs, a gesture of resistance against the control of time and narrative. Yet these external aesthetics ultimately dissolve into a purely cinematic language in which the act of re-viewing becomes a form of writing. The screen, in his hands, is both microscope and mirror, revealing how collective memory is continuously rewritten through the image.
To watch Boccassini’s films is to trace that invisible line between image and time — to feel how repetition and difference slowly slide toward revelation. His cinema does not rebuild the past but interrogates the very mechanisms of remembrance. Between light and darkness, between noise and silence, he resists nostalgia through nostalgic means: making everything old new again, turning the fragments of the past into the substance of present perception. He transforms our history of looking into an unstable organism whose parts interpenetrate, mutate, and cling together in a state of suspended motion. The deepest gesture of the archive may not be to display, but to return — to see again, and to reaffirm the act of seeing itself. (DING Dawei)
With special thanks to Giuseppe Boccassini, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, German Films and AG Kurzfilm – German Short Film Association for their generous support.
ASTRO-1
Lezuo
Giuseppe Boccassini
2013｜0:17:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere
The Tin Hat
Giuseppe Boccassini
2014｜0:15:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere
Orbit
Giuseppe Boccassini
2016｜0:15:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere
Debris
Giuseppe Boccassini
2017｜0:11:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere
BeComeBeCalm
Giuseppe Boccassini
2018｜0:01:45｜UK, Germany｜English｜World Premiere
Temple of Truth
Giuseppe Boccassini
2018｜0:15:00｜US, Italy, Germany｜ No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere
ASTRO-2
The Saved Night｜La Notte Salva
Giuseppe Boccassini
2019｜0:12:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere
Lunar Studies
Giuseppe Boccassini
2020｜0:38:00｜Germany, Italy｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere
As in a Land, a Vagary
Giuseppe Boccassini
2021｜0:15:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere
blast furnace
Giuseppe Boccassini
2024｜0:06:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜World Premiere
ASTRO-3
ragtag
Giuseppe Boccassini
2022｜1:24:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜English