THE TIME OF THE MOON

What happens to us in moments of rupture? When the ground begins to shake beneath our feet, politically and ecologically, what changes in the ways we perceive, how we gather, how we listen, and how we make sense of our present? Across histories and geographies, times of environmental and social instability have often coincided with a renewed sensitivity to forces that exceed the individual: spirits, landscapes, ancestors. Forms of knowing that sometimes appear marginal, from ritual to prayer, to ecstatic vision, return to command our attention. We seek intensity, the sublime, a different kind of connection.

The 2026 edition of 8Albe continues the investigation that began with Tramonti, the 2025 edition, which concerned itself with beginnings and ends of the world. This year, the festival gathers films that propose altered registers of experience as a way of making sense of the present time. The works bring together ecological breakdown and spiritual intensity as intertwined conditions of living in a world that is changing faster than our languages can describe it. The spiritual appears as direct experience, not as ideology: something lived through bodies, movements, transformations, landscapes and collective gestures. Continuing an exploration of geomythology, the films also interrogate the deep interconnectedness between myth, storytelling and environmental change.

As a physical, metaphysical and symbolic force, the moon re-appears to us powerfully in these moments. It proposes cyclical over linear time, moving tides and bodies. To turn to the moon, in this sense, is not to withdraw from the world, but to search for new coordinates when familiar frameworks no longer hold. In this collection of films, psychedelia, mysticism, ecstasy and metamorphosis become modes of attention: ways of lingering with contemporary instability, of inhabiting a world that is fragile, volatile, and profoundly animate. They suggest that if those certainties that held us in place are now falling apart, it may be because they were holding on too tight to begin with, leaving very little space for the murmuring rest. New communities form, or reform, around ecstasy and ritual, both on and off-screen.
The fourth edition will open with a performance by Nicole L’Huillier.