FRACTO. Interview with Giuseppe Boccassini

If you live in Berlin and are interested in experimental cinema, you probably have already heard of FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter, which opened on Wednesday, May 27th 2026 at ACUD and runs until May 31st. With a selection of 93 films, this ninth edition unfolds across five curated programs: Spacing Time, Souvenirs, Living Skin, Sensuous Light, and Grayscale, with a central focus dedicated to Cécile Fontaine, Peter Todd and Moucle Blackout. Experimental cinema, as founder Giuseppe Boccassini tells me, is close to poetry in that its role is to “evoke” and not to explain, which is mirrored in the titles of the above mentioned curated sections. “The program is already there once the films have been selected, my role is to catch it” he says, comparing curation to the process of film editing in which fragments are assembled until hidden relations begin to appear.

FRACTO from fracture. A whole broken into pieces. Or what time does to matter: the unity of a corpse disintegrating underground into disattached bones. Images decaying, memories surviving in bits. Fracture can also be an immediate experience as lived through spoken language, when one feels interrupted by a lack of vocabulary that could accurately match one’s thought and feeling. When cinema is approached as an experiment, it attempts to go where these words can’t, exploring its own language that goes against the narrative continuity historically associated with commercial cinema, itself deeply shaped by the linearity of the novel and written language. Yet fragmentation today has also become the dominant condition of media consumption itself. Contemporary spectators move through discontinuous streams of images in short-form videos and algorithmic feeds. The fractured image is no longer confined to the avant-garde. Does this contemporary fragmentation produce a new openness toward experimental cinema? I spoke with Giuseppe Boccassini, who is in charge of FRACTO’s program.

Giuseppe Boccassini : Social networks are too broad and contradictory to be described from a single perspective. What is true, however, is that younger generations are increasingly used to fragmented attention spans and shorter forms: many people today struggle to engage with a two-hour film. In that sense, there is already a perceptual shift toward fragmentation. But I’m not convinced this necessarily produces a break with cinematic continuity. In many cases, what appears as fragmentation is actually embedded in systems that still operate through continuity. Algorithms, for instance, are designed to constantly reproduce and extend a coherent flow: by feeding users similar content, they maintain a logic of repetition and replacement that ultimately reinforces a continuous main thread rather than disrupting it. TikTok or other fast-paced platforms can certainly host intellectual or formally inventive content, but they can also function as pure consumption.

Clara Thym: Experimental cinema sometimes suffers from being perceived as reserved for an elite. Was that reputation created by institutions that don’t really welcome it?

G.B: It’s a rumor that experimental films are for elites. I actually think the opposite. If you’re familiar with Tom Gunning and his books about early cinema: cinema was not narrative at all in the beginning. It was a shocking experience. He called it the “cinema of attractions”, something closer to amusement parks or roller coasters. At some point the industry began to use narrative because narrative could function as a hook for the audience – through psychological embodiment and identification with characters. But film itself is not necessarily connected to storytelling. It’s more an experience, and like all experiences, it’s also perceptual. I think experimental cinema became associated with bourgeois when it began to be placed inside museums and framed as purely intellectual. But the experience itself is actually very direct. It doesn’t require an intellectual background because it mainly operates through perception and feeling. Travelling is a good example: on one hand it can belong to an elite because it’s expensive, but fundamentally travelling is just an experience – it’s not necessarily connected to the cost of a trip.

C.T: My next question was actually going to be: what would you say to someone intimidated by experimental cinema? But I think you already answered it. 

G.B: Once I went to a Cézanne exhibition and when I saw so many people attracted to the paintings, I asked myself why. And I think it’s not necessarily because they have an intellectual background, but because they are drawn to color and light. Cinema, because of storytelling and the industry around it, became a very sophisticated machine with actors, writers, and so many people involved. But sometimes I feel it’s actually more difficult to engage with TV shows and complicated plots. Experimental cinema, at least as I see it, is very connected to early cinema and to spectacle.

C.T: You said earlier building a program is similar to film editing. What do you have in mind when building the curated sections?

G.B: I build the program during the selection process itself. The program gradually takes shape on its own, and I try to grasp that shape as it emerges. In a way, the program adjusts itself organically. I make connections between ideas that the films share – not necessarily conceptual connections, but repetitions, leitmotifs: animals, memories, these larger recurring themes rather than something overly specific. Even when a film is very singular, I try to identify something more universal within it that also appears in other works. This year, for example, we have a section called Grey Scale, which brings together films that play with gradations and tonal scales, both perceptually and conceptually. In experimental cinema, it is often difficult to explain meaning directly, because the experience is less about meaning than about perception itself. For me, this is the only way to build a program: by focusing on the more general resonances between films rather than plunging too deeply into their intimacy.

C.T: You have three special guests for this edition: Cécile Fontaine, Peter Todd and Moucle Blackout. Could you tell me something about this choice?

G.B: Cécile Fontaine works with found footage, and I have always felt very attached to that practice. I had wanted to collaborate with her for a long time. Peter Todd is someone I admire because his work is very simple and deeply connected to everyday life. There is no sound or music in his films; they are both simple and sophisticated at the same time. His cinema is very delicate, without pushing aesthetics too far – when watching his films, you almost feel as though you are touching the objects on screen. Moucle Blackout’s films were recently restored. We have a long-standing collaboration with Sixpack Film, the distribution company in Vienna, and they suggested presenting Moucle Blackout’s work. We were very impressed by it.