Sprouts Film Festival: Aquatic Short Stories

On Friday 21 August, Framer Framed invites Sprouts Film Festival for a special evening of short films reflecting on the exhibition Wild Waters: Dams and Deltas After Modernity. Film screenings and conversations explore our relationship with water, aquatic histories and speculative fiction.

Since 2022, the interdisciplinary Sprouts Film Festival has focused on fictional ecocinema and socially critical debut films. In a world increasingly marked by climate extremes and inhumane conflicts, it can be tempting to look away. Instead, Sprouts sees cinema as a space for peaceful protest. The festival’s film selection reflects its belief that the power of imagination can inspire change and push us to rethink our relationship with the more-than-human world. Sprouts aims to provoke curiosity, inform, inspire resistance and nurture emerging talents.

The first part of the programme consists of screenings of short films Beneath Which Rivers Flow and Last Night I Dreamed It Was Raining Fish. Following the second screening, moderator and artistic director of Sprouts Thomas Streekstra will be joined (online) by director Shraddha Khanna for a Q&A.

The second part consists of screenings of the short films Acid City and Wild Summon. This will be followed by a conversation between moderator Thomas Streekstra and interdisciplinary artist and artistic researcher Erik Peters. Their work The World’s Green is Rotting Lime, is an ecopoetic audiovisual installation that speculates on future ecologies emerging from plastic pollution. The work follows the discovery of a new parasitic flower morphospecies that has evolved to adapt to the infiltrating amounts of microplastics found in the earth’s layers.

Programme

20:00 Doors open
20:30 First part

Beneath Which Rivers Flow by Ali Yahya
2025 | Iraq | 16’
In the tranquil marshlands of southern Iraq, young Ibrahim lovingly tends to his buffalo, but disruption looms on the horizon.

Last Night I Dreamed It Was Raining Fish by Shraddha Khanna
2025 | India | 17’
In Worli Koliwada, one of Mumbai’s oldest fishing villages, the seafaring Koli community strives to safeguard its harmonious relationship with the sea, even as the city steadily engulfs its surroundings.

21:30 Second part

Acid City by Jack Wedge & Will Freudenheim
2026 | USA | 12’
A self-sufficient island city rises from a vast acidic ocean beneath apocalyptic red skies. In this travelogue from the future, Acid City’s eclectic residents take life as it comes.

Wild Summon by Karni Arieli & Saul Freed
2023 | United Kingdom | 14’
A confrontational spin on the natural history documentary, depicting the dramatic life cycle of the wild salmon through the body of a woman.

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Info & Credits

Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; the City of Amsterdam; and the VriendenLoterij Fund.

Location

Framer Framed
Oranje-Vrijstaatkade 71
1093KS, Amsterdam