Eastern Neighbours Film Festival: her* hands and his shape & Bibi Seshanbe

In collaboration with Eastern Neighbours Film Festival, De Balie presents Between Film and Art, the festival’s travelling programme for experimental cinema and artist-driven film. Across two Saturdays, we screen four acclaimed films from and in relation to broader Eastern Europe. Today: her* hands and his shape and Bibi Seshanbe, two films in which cinema becomes ritual – followed by a conversation with Sílvia das Fadas and Masha Godovannaya, moderated by the curator Temra Pavlović.

her* hands and his shape , Sílvia das Fadas and Masha Godovannaya
Live cinema performance, 15 min, 2017

Cinema doesn’t only reflect the world – it acts within it. Artist-filmmakers Sílvia das Fadas and Masha Godovannaya perform an expanded cinema séance: a live dual 16mm projection, invoking an ancestral lineage of women in political filmmaking.

An incantation becomes a refrain in this double projection of sequences from films by women who made films politically, or gave their presence to films politically. Their doubles appear recaptured through Krasnogorsk-3 and Bolex lens and intertwined with landscapes and objects that once haunted the filmmakers. It’s all in her* hands shaping his form, her* labor questioning his authority.

Bibi Seshanbe, Saodat Ismailova52 min, Uzbekistan/Germany, 2022

Saodat Ismailova, mythopoetic storyteller extraordinaire from the first post-Soviet generation of Uzbek filmmakers, paints a multidimensional tableau that layers ancient, mythological, and contemporary time – connected through the living ritual. Cinema is a bridge through the work of memory and imagination.

Bibi Seshanbe (“The Lady of Tuesday”) is a blessing ritual in Central Asia venerating an ancient female goddess and protector of women. Syncretic in origin, with Zoroastrian, animist, and Muslim influences, the ritual centers on a tale that parallels the story of Cinderella.

The film weaves together a reenactment of this tale, ethnographic documentation of the ritual as it is still practiced today in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and the story of a modern-day “fairy godmother,” Bibi Sora Oripova, a burn surgeon from Samarkand who founded a shelter, fighting for the lives and rights of women who have survived domestic violence.

About ENFF: Between Film and Art

Eastern Neighbours Film Festival (ENFF) brings today’s outstanding cinema from broader Eastern Europe to audiences in the Netherlands in a vibrant festival setting. Running since 2006, each November over five days in The Hague and throughout the year with On Tour screenings in major Dutch cities The 18th edition takes place November 4–8, 2026 at Filmhuis Den Haag.

Between Film and Art is the festival’s section for experimental and artist-driven film: works whose material and conceptual forces question our relationship to the world and the act of watching itself. The programme appears annually at the festival and travels through nomadic screenings, curated by Temra Pavlović.