Director: Maria Zaikina
Running time: 24mins
The peril a lot of experimental films face, is that they are often designed for exhibition spaces – ones where people may be wandering in or out, without perhaps paying that much attention, and probably without seeing things from the start. In this case, they tend to be long, cyclical – and tend not to vary too much from a certain central set of images. That can make it difficult for generalist film festivals to programme them outside a specialised, cordoned off selection.
With that being said, one of my favourite experiences from Indy Film Library’s 2026 festival, was unleashing Napoli – Amsterdam on an unexpecting audience as part of a comedy short film programme. Alongside a selection of ‘normal’ films (conventional narratives and documentaries), the 10-minute experimental short cycles around two low-resolution computer landscapes, with characters repeating a certain limited range of actions before returning to their starting point.
I had worried that 10 minutes of that would lead to some backlash; but just as the film looked to cross a line, and groans turned to shouts from the audience as digital automaton threatened another reset – the screen cut to black, and the credits rolled to riotous cheers and laughter.
At 24 minutes, Untitled walk is sadly a little too long to get away with in the same way. Centred entirely on black and white photographs of sand on a German beach, the only notable shift of any kind comes from the sound design. This gradually shifts from organic seaside atmosphere – the rush of the waves, the occasional call of seagulls, the laughter of frolicking families – to an ominous electronic ambience, cold and cavernous by design.
Amid the images of countless pits and moats, crumbling castles and sand sculptures – all doomed to be consumed by the sea, if they survive being trampled by the crowds first – the shift in audio-tone speaks to a certain futility of existence, or depending on your point of view, the beauty of it. Like the joyful sounds of splashing holidaymakers, their artful or industrious reshaping of the sand will soon be wiped from this plane of existence; and yet, even in that knowledge, they find the time and energy to do it anyway. Whether that is wonderful and life affirming, or a grim reflection on the approaching void, is up to you.
The problem is, outside of an exhibition setting, or a specialist experimental festival where the audience are in for the long-haul, Maria Zaikina’s film is simply too long. From my perspective as a programmer, as much fun as an audience here in Amsterdam might have with a film which seemingly reinforces one of the Dutch’s strange stereotypes of Germans (that they are weirdly obsessed with digging holes at the beach), from a more sincere angle, there will be little to hold their attention span for this long.
Making this kind of point about the fleeting nature of existence could be realised in half the time – or with a little more visual variation to help carry a general audience along. Every picture is from a top-down, dead-centre angle – and my approximation would be there are more than 170 photographs like this, of ill-defined pits, broken sand structures, or simple scuffed surfaces – which become increasingly frustrating to view. Maybe at least once or twice, there could be a contextual shot showing where these structures are in relation to the sea, to people, or to each other. Indeed, a climactic shot of a beach covered in holes while the tide rolls in could put a fantastic cap on this experience.
As things stand, however, with so little variation or intrigue, Untitled walk feels like it is without end. And a monument to human impermanence which still feels like it is going on forever is perhaps a little counterintuitive.
This is not to say I didn’t enjoy Untitled walk at all. As I have said many times before with experimental films of this kind, it provides a still, meditative space, without caring to pander to the modern world’s insistence on action at all costs – and offers us a place where we can sit with our own thoughts for a while. I would happily show it as part of IFL’s Experimental Showcase in September for that reason. But as part of a more general festival event, it’s in need of a re-cut.
