Stranger than Fiction: Out of Place, Out of Time

As our experiences of reality are shaped by what is considered possible and impossible, familiar and unfamiliar, such boundaries are renegotiated when major disruptions take place: loss, displacement, war, exile, revolutions, natural and biological disasters. These events reshuffle our relationship to territory, to time, to value, and to others. When the frameworks, concepts, and tools we use to define our reality become obsolete, where do we look to find ways to draw the maps of the transformations we are experiencing?

This question is the starting point of Stranger than Fiction, a screening series and research on the ways non-fictional images and sounds produce speculative fiction to relate experiences of time and space that are constantly unsettled by catastrophes and major transformations. Each screening of the program presents a different selection and combination of films that explore this gesture across various times and territories.

Stranger than Fiction: Out of Place, Out of Time is the fifth iteration of this program, focusing on films that navigate spaces marked by various forms of extractivist violence. The program opens with Lina Selander and Oscar Mangione’s The Eye is the First Circle (2023), in which a silent trembling gaze drifts onto details of the Stockholm botanical garden, reshaping a rigid conservatory of living plants into an intimate and sensory place, intrinsically linking together acts of seeing, recording, and transformation. In A Hundred-Headed Dragon (2025) by Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado, we enter mythical space where subsonic communication between banana trees becomes audible to reveal layers of exploitation imposed by colonial economies in the Canary Islands. We then move into Jorge Jácome’s Flores (2017), where the intoxicating strangeness of a hydrangea flower invasion in the Azores archipelago becomes the post-apocalyptic setting to histories of mass displacement and dispossession. Finally, in Tellurian Drama (2020), Riar Rizaldi transforms the ruins of a radio station in West Java built by the Dutch East Indies government into the site of a weird fiction that conjures the ghosts of the exploited workers and the indigenous ancestral powers they hold.

The four films in this program weave together documentary images, observational recordings, archival footage and speculative fiction elements to draw experiences of reality that seem strange, weird, or even impossible.

Programme:
The Eye Is the First Circle, Lina Selander & Oscar Mangione (Sweden, 2024), 7′, colour, silent.
A Hundred-Headed Dragon, Helena Girón & Samuel M. Delgado (Spain, 2025), 14′, colour, sound.
Flores, Jorge Jácome (Portugal, 2017), 26′, colour, sound.
Tellurian Drama, Riar Rizaldi (Indonesia, 2020), 26′, colour, sound.

Nour Ouayda is a filmmaker and film programmer. Her films experiment with various forms of fiction-making in cinema. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Mira Adoumier and part of the editorial committee of the Montreal-based online film journal Hors Champ. Between 2018 and 2023, she was partnerships coordinator and later deputy director at Metropolis Cinema Association in Beirut, where she managed and developed the Cinematheque Beirut project. She also teaches film programming in Beirut.

September Sessions was initiated in 2023 by art organisations Index and Mint with an ambition to celebrate the diversity of the Stockholm art scene and to create a platform for international curators, temporarily transforming the city with programs at new and unexpected places. The four-day festival presents exhibitions, performances, concerts, film screenings and social gatherings, this year hosted by the local organisations Accelerator, Beau Travail, Bonniers Konsthall, Filmform, IASPIS, Index, Konsthall C, Liljevalchs, MEGA Foundation and MDT. Alongside these events, the festival presents Houred Time at Mint, Antics and Cues, curated by anorak.