A hand-picked catalogue of independent features, monochrome shorts, and art-house obscurities currently curated for the Mono Film programme — every title approved for projection on our 35mm and 4K stages.
Each title passes through a three-person selection committee. We prioritise directors with a singular visual language, restoration projects from the silent and noir eras, and contemporary work shot on monochrome or experimental formats.
dir. Maren Holst
A forest ecologist returns to her abandoned childhood home in the Harz mountains and begins cataloguing the slow violence of rewilding land that was once strip-mined.
dir. Léa Carême
Twelve static portraits of municipal archivists across the Rhône valley, each describing a single object from the basement they cannot bring themselves to discard.
dir. Takeshi Mori
A retired harbour-master on the Inland Sea refuses to evacuate as the fishing village around him slowly empties; the final four months are observed in a single, unbroken autumn.
dir. Senna van der Linde
A hand-processed 16mm study of a Rotterdam drydock crane working in three-minute cycles, captured over fourteen consecutive tides and scored to field recordings of the harbour horn.
dir. Anna Visconti · restored by Cineteca di Bologna
Newly restored from the original negative, this neorealist ghost story follows a typist in post-war Milan who begins receiving anonymous letters describing the precise hour of her own death.
dir. Inés Pardo
A single locked-off shot inside a Buenos Aires service elevator, observed between midnight and dawn, in which six strangers and a cat descend and ascend without once breaking eye contact.
Mono Film is built on the belief that cinema is a craft, not a content vertical. Our selection committee meets monthly, works from a small dark room above the projection booth, and writes every rejection note by hand.
We look for directors who shoot the way a poet revises — frame by frame, with an unmistakable syntax. A film doesn't need a budget to belong; it needs a point of view that we cannot fake, summarise, or re-cut into a trailer.
When a film is shot on monochrome 16mm, we project it that way. When a director used digital grain to simulate a 1970s Eastman stock, we honour the intent. We do not colour-grade submissions or "improve" aspect ratios after the fact.
Half of our calendar is dedicated to restored prints and overlooked archives. We work directly with the Cinematheques of Bologna, Lausanne, and Busan to give second life to films that have been orphaned by streaming economics.
Long-form writing from our programmers, projectionists, and visiting filmmakers — published monthly alongside the screening calendar.
An argument from our head projectionist, Dimitri Vasiliev, on why the "neutral" DCI white point of 48 cd/m² is a kind of editorial choice — and why our screening room is calibrated to a slightly warmer 42 cd/m² tungsten reference.
Read the full essayWe accept open submissions year-round from independent features, shorts under forty minutes, and monochrome or experimental works at any stage of completion. Our committee responds to every submission within six weeks.
Submit to Mono Film