CIRCULO ROTO PRESENTS: GLASS, CONCRETE AND STONE

3 July 2025

Círculo Roto is a quarterly film night highlighting works by independent makers. This edition brings together short films in which space and setting become active narrative agents.

Glass, Concrete and Stone borrows its title from the David Byrne song to probe the dissonance between architecture as physical fact and as emotional territory – the difference between a house and a home.

To extract a narrative from a space is impossible without implicating the space itself. This program comprises short films which shift the focus toward the textures of built environments, those that shape, absorb, and refract our experiences, ultimately arriving at the drama of reframing the chamber: Works that let architecture remember, speak, and rupture.

...Glass and concrete and stone

It is just a house, not a home

Skin that covers me from head to toe

Except a couple tiny holes and openings

Where the city’s blowin’ in and out

And this is what it’s all about, delightfully

Everything’s possible when you’re an animal

Not inconceivable, how things can change, I know...

Tempestade, Colin Oord
When the storm takes over, a girl is being strangely affected by the house lights, which seem to
have a will on their own, causing her to shift into different identities.

GOYA – Roman Ermolaev
Goya is a memory (re) collection story. In a dream like , cinematic style video, the journey of an anonymous character is unrevealing in parallel with the attempt of finding the genesis of the journey itself. This work chronicles the passage of the hero in search of the equilibrium ones usually striving for after the great loss. By relocating yourself from one landscape to another, heading towards the destination your gaze lead you into, one is not only reaching a point of desire but renouncing the foundation of the despair. The hopelessness which was engendered by the loss, by the death of clear guidance. The empty landscape turned into the matrix of a desolated road one still has to cross. The character steps into the ground wearing the foreign legs, carrying her through the sterile black and white locations. The ritual of walk in her case works as a mystical reverence towards the abandoned land. The land not carrying any meaning apart of the cry coming from the tree she is looking for.

Roman Ermolaev graduated from the VAV department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2017 with Honourable mention. In the same year he received the EYE Research Lab Award for the best audiovisual work at the EYE Filmmuseum. In January 2018 he received the Young Art Support Amsterdam Award and his graduation project Holy Land as well as his previous work Le Macaour (presented at MUBI) became part of the EYE Filmmuseum collection.In 2018 he was among the young artists presented at SBK Sprouts Young Talents. His work has been exhibited in various galleries, institutions and film festivals in the Netherlands and abroad, and his films have been screened at various film festivals including IFF ROTTER- DAM.In 2020 he was nominated by EYE Film museum and awarded by the 3 Package Deal AFK Foundation. In 2022 his film GOYA won in the short film category of the Buma Music in Media Awards.In 2018-2019 he taught visual arts at Gerrit Rietveld Academie.Since 2021 he has been teaching a film history course at CVA Amsterdam.

JOE_Teaneck-NJ_2024 – Tibor Dieters
In 2017, Joe waits for a delayed bus. An old couple joins him. They’ve seen something terrible, and try—urgently and desperately—to make Joe understand. Years later, the meaning of their message finally breaks through. Part of an ongoing, five-part video series, ‘JOE_Teaneck-NJ_2024’ explores how a brief encounter plants the seeds for an irreparable fracture with the familiar world.

Tibor Dieters is an Amsterdam based artist whose work explores alienation, radicalization, and collective myth-making. His installations, photography, and digital projects explore how fringe online communities exert unprecedented influence over cultural and political identity.

Stuck – Elliot Bloom
Stuck explores how individuals become trapped in relationships, unable to evolve or reshape the dynamics to meet their personal needs. it examines the internal struggles and external pressures that hinder meaningful change in romantic, familial, and platonic connections. through subtle interactions and growing tension, the film highlights the complexity of human relationships and the difficulty of breaking free from unhealthy patterns.

Elliot is driven by the power of moving-image to create real social change. He works across cinema culture and film production, curating platforms and events while making his own films, to foster a more actively engaged audience.

Floris Koopman is a photographer and filmmaker who is inspired by the interplay of truth and perspective, Floris Henricus Koopman creates to make the viewer consider their current state of mind.

Hazy Earth – Anastasija Pirozenko & Femke Janssen
“Hazy Earth” is a poetic exploration of the last remaining urban voids in Amsterdam—terrain vague—unclaimed and overlooked spaces on the fringes of the city. Similar to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the film romanticizes and mystifies these non-spaces as alternatives to a rationalized, centralized, and goal-oriented society. Through a dreamlike journey, “Hazy Earth” uncovers hidden microcosms, unheard stories, and enigmatic urban rituals embedded within these seemingly unattractive and abandoned zones.

Femke Janssen is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Amsterdam. With a background in theatre direction, where she specialized in documentary performance, she later transitioned to the visual arts through studies at art school. Her practice spans painting, ink drawing, tapestry, sculpture, and video. Femke’s work reflects a deep fascination with life in the ever-changing city of Amsterdam. Through a process of deconstruction and analysis, she explores the impact of urban renewal on its inhabitants, capturing the tensions and rhythms of contemporary city life. Anastasija Pirozenko is an audio-visual artist and filmmaker from Lithuania, currently based in Amsterdam. She holds a BA in Photography and Media Arts from the Vilnius Academy of Arts and an MA in Film from the Netherlands Film Academy.

A Place in the Middle – Delfin Lev & Fio de Lange
What happens when monumentality is no longer untouchable? A Place in the Middle explores Amsterdam’s churches as sites of kinetic negotiation- where the weight of history meets the urgency of the present in response to the city’s vanishing third spaces.

Delfin Lev is a Turkish interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. She creates narratives that bridge film, research, and audio-visual landscapes. Fascinated by spatial and object-centered habits, she draws from existing patterns to reflect on connection, intimacy, and hierarchies of power.

Fio de Lange is a Dutch-Iranian filmmaker and visual artist based in Amsterdam. Her work draws on personal and social memory, exploring how language and images shape perception and emotion.

Eudora – Michael Bucuzzo
Eudora explores the family home through the eyes of a returning spirit: my grandfather. By navigating the lens through spaces and belongings of personal history, the camera becomes an attenuator for past memories encased in a domestic tomb. As a ghost story devoid of characters, Eudora uses the lens as a resurrective force to examine the ambiguity of memory and reality, and its further degradation through the act of recollecting.

Michael Bucuzzo is an Amsterdam-based filmmaker and sound designer. Using experience borne out of the US commercial film industry, he explores the emotional architecture of media. Through a play of sonic textures, illusory set design and archival media, his work often constructs atmospheric dream worlds. Michael’s films and performances have been included in festivals such as European Media Art Festival (Germany), Onion City Experimental Film Festival (United States), Antimatter Media Art (Canada), and International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Netherlands). Michael is also a graduate of the Master of Film artistic research program at the Netherlands Film Academy.

Adisyon Serra – Duran Paralı
At the end of the meal, two bourgeois fathers quarrel over the bill. “When I was a child, I remember a movie that formed in my mind based on the arguments my father often had with his friend Ahmet over who would pay the bill after meals with family and friends. Over the years, I discovered that this behavior is a unique approach specific to Turkish society and thought it should be highlighted.”

Born in Istanbul, Duran studied Media and Visual Arts at Koç University before receiving a French government scholarship to study documentary filmmaking at La Femis in Paris. Known for his passion for exploring diverse themes, Duran’s short documentary “THIS BRUTAL WORLD” delves into the social impacts of brutalist architecture in Paris. Inspired by the feminist art movement, his music video “IT’S JUST” won the “Best Music Video” award at the Cannes Short Film Festival. His latest short film, ‘Ferret,’ was selected for the official competition at the prestigious Cameraimage festival in Poland.