MOND, the new collaborative film from director Stefano Canavese and experimental duo Forster (Mitchell Keaney and Davide Luciani), arrives as a work defined by abrasion. It thrives on rupture rather than resolution – a spliced-together collision of over-clocked editing, splintered rhythms and analogue-digital interference that feels less like a music video and more like a system pushed deliberately towards malfunction. Rooted in Berlin’s underground, the film borrows the city’s appetite for off-grid experimentation but refuses its clichés, instead embracing an aesthetic of volatility.
Visually, MOND positions itself within a familiar lineage of sensory overload, nodding toward the hyper-kinetic body-mod chaos of Chris Cunningham’s video for Squarepusher’s Come On My Selector and the dreadnought-grey ferocity of Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy, while sonically brushing up against the algorithmic turbulence that haunted Autechre’s early work. Yet where those touchpoints feel meticulously engineered, MOND deliberately courts collapse. Shot through a warped fisheye lens that erases any hope of a stable vantage point, its momentum is jittery, feral and barely contained – a feverish spasm of fragments, staccato glitches and visual aftershocks that appears to disintegrate even as it unfolds.
The project began with a fleeting moment: Luciani’s fractured live drum patterns during a solo performance at now-defunct Neukölln experimental club Loophole. Canavese’s immediate visual response to the performance set the tone for the collaboration. Introduced to Forster soon after, he adopted their track MOND – a piece originally embedded within the Demeter EP on Stray Signals.
Dancer Mavi Bortolotti became the film’s first structural anchor, translating the music’s broken impulses into motion that feels less choreographed than convulsive. Her presence, responsive and volatile, sets up a feedback loop between performer and camera – an arrangement in which neither seems fully in control. The analogue CRT manipulations of Kimo Slice further erode any clean edges, saturating the film in corrupted textures, while cinematographer Artem Zamashnoy helps wrestle these disparate experiments into something resembling a cinematic language rather than pure detonation.
Canavese frames the work as an excavation of long-held obsessions: dystopian futurism, techno-glitches, and the shadow of The Matrix, combined with the tactical paranoia of Metal Gear Solid. These references are not worn as nostalgia but as the residue of formative digital mythologies, resurfacing as the director continues to carve out a practice in Berlin after leaving Turin. “Those obsessions embedded themselves in my subconscious and keep returning whenever I create,” he reflects – a sentiment MOND makes plainly visible.
The film’s production manifested through weeks of hands-on tinkering: hacked lenses, restless monitor experiments, improvised late-night shoots and a month of punishing post-production. The result carries the unmistakable texture of work made without resources but with absolute insistence – a reminder that constraint can be a catalyst for aesthetic definition rather than an obstacle to it.
For Forster, the connection runs equally deep. The track itself was born from what Keaney describes as “raw and unstructured” sessions – less a composed work than an impulsive exchange of signals at a time when the duo were still unearthing their identity. The film reframes that instability, revealing an implicit narrative neither musician fully recognised at the time. “It was like the seemingly absent structures Davide and I were making were actually forming a complete narrative,” Keaney notes. “As if Stefano was already fluent in the sonic language Forster was evolving into.”
FILM CREDITS
Directed & Edited by Stefano Canavese
Music by Forster
Starring Mavi Bortolotti
Cinematography by Artem Zamashnoy
CRT TV Art by Kimo Slice
Costume Design by Rommel Berlin
Location provided by 1—06 Berlin
Production Assistance by Francisco Gabriel Scena
