International Film Selection
Merging Bodies
- Onsite
- 7.21 (Mon) 14:00 Audio Visual Hall
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025: Tiger Short Award Winner Screening
Double Feature: Merging Bodies & Temo Re
©Adrian Paci
Director: Adrian PACI
2024 / Albania, Italy / 23min.
This short film was commissioned to commemorate the centenary of Gruppo Laminazione Sottile, an aluminum transformation plant headquartered in Naples, Italy. Told without words, it enters the factory with a delicate gaze to explore the relationship between the workers’ bodies and the factory environment. Focusing on gestures and materials that blur the boundaries between human and machine, the film celebrates the enduring value of labor. Through meticulous observation and perfectly composed framing, it captures visual details and frees them from a singular interpretation. Directed by Adrian Paci, a contemporary artist active in Italy and Albania, this work received the Tiger Short Award, the highest prize in the Tiger Short Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025.
Director: Adrian PACI
Born in Shkodër, Albania, in 1969. Adrian Paci is a contemporary artist based in Milan and Shkodër. After studying at the Akademia e Arteve in Tirana, he left Albania in 1997 amid political unrest. Rooted in personal experience, his work spans video, installation, painting, and photography. It explores themes of exile, identity, and displacement and contributes to global discussions on migration and belonging.
Message
Merging Bodies is a meditation on becoming. It reflects on how people and environments continuously shape and transform one another. The factory is presented as a space of regeneration, where materials and people alike take on new forms. What unfolds is not simply a depiction of labor. It is a poetic gesture, one that connects the industrial with the existential and the political with the deeply human.
