Overcoming Borders in Europe and Beyond
Image Courtesy of the Archive of the Slovenian Tourist Board
This year’s Euroculture Intensive Programme delves into the multifaceted nature of borders —both tangible and intangible—and their impact on identity, culture, and society. It examines how boundaries define inclusion and exclusion, shape personal and collective identities, and influence social dynamics. The reader also explores the duality of borders as barriers and gateways, prompting discussions on separation, protection, discovery, and openness.
This Intensive Programme is positioned well in Udine, both for the city’s own rich history with borders and bordering, but also because of its its proximity to the Borderless European Capital of Culture 2025.
The neighboring cities of Nova Gorica and Gorizia, once divided by a border, have come together under the "GO! 2025" project to celebrate a borderless European culture. This collaboration emphasizes unity and shared heritage, transforming former checkpoints into cultural venues and hosting over 600 events, including music, dance, and art festivals. Their joint efforts symbolize the breaking down of barriers and the promotion of cross-cultural understanding.
IP2025 - Week Schedule
You can add this calendar to your own by pressing the button in the bottom left!
Note that you can also click individual events to see more details!
Workshops - IP2025
Workshop 1 - “ Framing borders”
Tutors: Megi Natchkebia & Lucie Neyret
Framing Borders is a workshop project that invites students to reflect on how language, culture, and personal experiences shape their understanding of certain words—and how those words can represent symbolic borders. Through photography, students explore and express these individual interpretations, opening a space for dialogue and shared reflection. The final outcome is a collaborative exhibition that highlights the diversity of meaning and perception, portraying the invisible "borders" of different minds while also offering a powerful way to overcome them through visual storytelling and mutual understanding.
Workshop 2 - “ Filming the Divide: Stories of Separation and Belonging”
Tutors: Hortense Hervieux & Mahsa Zamanpour
This workshop invites students to explore the multifaceted concept of borders through the medium of fictional filmmaking. Students will be asked to develop a story that engages with the idea of borders—whether they be spatial, political, cultural, or personal—and bring it to life through a short fiction film. To spark the creative process, each team will be assigned an artwork that evokes the theme of borders. These pieces will serve as both a foundation for group discussion and a source of inspiration, encouraging students to reflect on how the concept of “bordering” resonates in their own lives and in the world around them. From there, teams will dive into the creative and collaborative process of filmmaking—a hands-on experience that brings together writing, visual storytelling, acting, shooting, and editing. Along the way, students will also have the option to engage with the city around them, using its spaces, rhythms, and contrasts as inspiration—or even as part of their story.
Workshop 3 - “Institutions and Social Media: Understanding Short-Form Video (Video Capture, Interviews, Video Editing)”
Tutors: Julien Sonntag & Mohammed Dahouki
This workshop explores how institutions can effectively use short videos to engage audiences on social media. It includes hands-on training in video capture techniques, conducting impactful interviews, and editing dynamic content tailored for short formats such as Instagram Reels, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts.
By the end of the workshop, participants will produce a short-form video on the theme of borders whether geographical, cultural, social, or symbolic applying the skills they have acquired while reflecting on a meaningful and cross-cutting issue.
Film Night - EuroCinema
What does it mean to leave a place behind?
To cross a border not just on a map, but in your heart?
We’ve all crossed borders, some visible, others felt more quietly.
Not just between countries, but between ways of thinking, living, and belonging. In choosing to be here, in this moment, we’ve already moved geographically, intellectually, emotionally.
In the coming week, under the theme Overcoming Borders in Europe and Beyond, we will unpack ideas, challenge assumptions, and step into unfamiliar perspectives. But we offer something different, a pause. A space to reflect not through theory, but through story.
This storytelling lets you take an active part in the exhibition THERSHOLDS, where you are invited to explore the liminal spaces surrounding borders. As well as the screening of the movie Migration. Migration tells the tale of a family of birds who reluctantly dares to leave the comfort of the known. It’s lighthearted and animated, but like many journeys, it carries a deeper weight. It speaks the courage of movement, the uncertainty of new ground, and the quiet hope that drives us forward.
In this family of birds, we might just see a reflection of ourselves navigating unfamiliar skies, bound not just by where we’re from, but by what we’re trying to reach. This isn’t just a movie night. It’s a gentle reminder of the movement we’re all part of. The shared silences, the hesitant first steps, the borderlines we’ve learned to question and cross.
Let’s take this moment to breathe, to laugh, to reflect.
Welcome to EuroCinema.
THRESHOLDS: An Immersive Meditation on Borders
Conceptualized by EuroCinema
Thresholds examines the liminal spaces where boundaries blur and exist as sites of potential transformation. The exhibition unfolds across darkened galleries where projected light and physical interventions create dialogues between presence and absence.
The central installation presents dual projections of human formations extending from shoreline into sea—bodies arranged in linear progression that simultaneously divide and connect land and water. These human chains, displayed on perpendicular walls, offer parallel yet distinct perspectives of the same conceptual border, inviting visitors to consider how our positioning shapes our understanding of thresholds. It creates an illusion of claustrophobia as the walls and the chaos envelopes you all at once.
Throughout the space, interventions interrupt the gallery floor: a lone plant stands illuminated and isolated at the same time; a suspended microphone casting precise shadows. These elements exist both as autonomous objects and as fragments of a larger conceptual framework, questioning whether separation creates new identity or preserves connection to origin.
Light functions as both medium and metaphor—filtered, directed, and contained. The exhibition leverages darkness as negative space, allowing illuminated segments to emerge as islands of contemplation where borders become visible precisely because they separate distinct conditions.
Thresholds does not illustrate borders but manifests them spatially, transforming visitors from observers into participants who must navigate physical and conceptual boundaries, their movements making visible the act of crossing, hesitating, and dwelling at edges where definition occurs.
We invite you to pause, unlearn and reflect.
EuroCinema Movie Suggestions
In addition to streaming Migration we have curated a list of four additional movie suggestions for you to check out. These movies all relate to different issues regarding borders, as well as catering to a variety of genres and expressions. .We hope you will find something you enjoy!
Human flow (2017) by Ai Weiwei
This is a cinematic, heartbreaking, and powerful exploration of the global migration crisis. Following the situation from different countries, showcasing the harrowing journey refugees go through. While highlighting the individual perspectives through interviews and storytelling.
Genre: Documentary.
Kneecap (2024) by Rich Peppiatt
The movie is set in Belfast, Northern Irland, and explores issues of minority language and marginalization. It follows the rap group, Kneecap, while they attempt to lead a movement to save their native language.
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Music, Biopic.
Teli and Toli (2016) by Aleksandr Amirov
Telling the story of two villages high in the mountains of North Caucasus, a border is forced between the Georgian Teli and Ossetian Toli. Following how a border forced by the government affects the people who have been living together for centuries in peace and harmony.
Genre: Comedy, Romance.
The Beasts (2022) by Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Following a couple who has moved from France to a rural part of the Spanish countryside to fulfill their dreams of having a farm. The dream soon turns sour, and the movie explores what happens when the tension between the newcomers and the locals leads to an alarming development of violence and hatred.
Genre: Conspiracy Thriller, Psychological Drama.
Career Day
Schedule
09:30 - 09:40: Word of welcome in each of the four rooms by the respective moderators (ahead of the first session)
09:40 - 10:25: First round of Panels (10 minutes for each of the four panelists + 10 minute Q & A at the end)
10:25 - 10:30: Break for students to move from one room to another
10:30 - 10:40: Word of welcome in each of the four rooms by the respective moderators (ahead of the second session)
10:40 - 11:25: Second round of Panels (10 minutes for each of the four panelists + 10 minute Q & A at the end)
11:30 - 12:00: Coffee Break and break for students to move from one room to another
12:00 - 12:10: Word of welcome in each of the four rooms by the respective moderators (ahead of the third and last session)
12:10 - 12:55: Third round of Panels (10 minutes for each of the four panelists + 10 minute Q & A at the end)
12:55 - 13:00: End of the Career Day programme