Data / Ora
Date(s) - 16/03/2026 - 22/03/2026
9:00 am - 6:00 pm

Luogo
Università IULM

Categorie

• TUTTI GLI EVENTI

Press release

Milan Machinima Festival MMXXVI
Replay/Reload/Respawn
16–22 March 2026
IULM 6, IULM University
Via Carlo Bo 7, 20143 Milan, Italy

Milan Machinima Festival returns for its ninth edition from 16 to 22 March 2026 under the title Replay/Reload/Respawn. Presented onsite at IULM University in Milan from 16 to 20 March, with online screenings continuing through 22 March, MMF MMXXVI brings together artists, filmmakers, researchers, and critics working across machinima and adjacent moving-image practices shaped by game engines and virtual environments.

This year’s edition takes the videogame loop as both organising principle and critical problem. Replay, repetition, and revision operate here not simply as formal devices, but as ways of thinking through the conditions of contemporary image production. Across the programme, machinima appears not as a fixed genre but as a shifting field of artistic and critical activity, where cinematic, computational, and vernacular forms are put under pressure.

MMF MMXXVI presents thirty-two works from eighteen countries across ten curated programmes, screened onsite in Milan and online. The selection surveys current developments in machinima, game-engine cinema, and other moving-image practices produced within synthetic environments. Essay film, speculative fiction, documentary, formal experiment, digital performance, and politically engaged image-making all appear within the programme, though never as stable or self-contained categories. What matters here is their contact and interference: the formal and conceptual tensions that arise when inherited screen languages pass through virtual space.

The 2026 edition also carries a distinct historical resonance. This year marks thirty years since Miltos Manetas’s Miracle (1996), widely regarded as an early work in the history of game-based video art. MMF approaches that anniversary not as an occasion for simple commemoration, but as an opportunity to reconsider a history that remains partial, contested, and still in formation. Earlier experiments are placed alongside recent works that have expanded and transformed the formal, aesthetic, and political horizons of the field.

The selected works range in duration from two to eighty-six minutes. Some draw explicitly on traditions of experimental cinema; others borrow from installation, documentary, performance, internet vernacular, or essayistic montage. What connects them is less a common style than a shared sense of formal and conceptual pressure. Throughout the programme, the game engine is treated neither as a neutral support nor as a ready-made visual idiom. It appears instead as a technical, cultural, and ideological environment through which memory, fantasy, testimony, error, and conflict are mediated and made visible.

Italy leads the 2026 selection with eleven works, followed by the United States and Hong Kong with four each, Germany with three, and France and Austria with two each. China, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Palestine, Poland, Switzerland, Ukraine, Colombia, and Venezuela are represented through individual works and co-productions. Fifteen of the thirty-two selected works are world premieres, while thirteen are Italian premieres. The result is an international programme grounded in a strong local context, attentive both to emerging artists and to established practitioners working at the edge of digital cinema.

The festival’s ten programmes — Free Roam, Grand Theft Cinema, Game Engine Cinema, Video Game Geographies, Hard Core, Poor Connection, Emerging Talents, Temps Mort, Once More, With Feeling, and Another End of the World is Possible — trace a field defined less by consensus than by recurring disputes: movement and stasis, authorship and appropriation, immersion and distance, breakdown and recomposition. The Critics’ Choice Award extends the same premise by approaching machinima as a serious critical form with its own history, conventions, and demands, rather than as a marginal offshoot of either gaming culture or artists’ moving image.

With its 2026 edition, Milan Machinima Festival continues to provide a vital context for artists, filmmakers, scholars, critics, and audiences engaging game engines as contemporary image-making tools and as forms of cultural infrastructure. The question is no longer whether machinima possesses historical or aesthetic legitimacy. The sharper question is what these synthetic worlds now enable artists to register, distort, withhold, or make newly legible.

Contact:

Colleen Flaherty

Communications Manager

Milan Machinima estival 

milanmachinimafestival@gmail.com