zhel

28/03/2025

I had the honor of judging some truly remarkable indie docs for the 2025 NYC Independent Film Festival earlier this year. I focused on works that push the boundaries of storytelling while staying grounded in the emotional resonance only cinema can deliver.

The 22nd edition of the festival runs June 1–7, 2025, at the Producer’s Club in Manhattan. Hope some of you get to catch the selection on the big screen!

16/03/2025

THE ATTRACTION OF MANOEUVRE (Zhel, 2013), part of One Minute Volume Seven (2013), curated by Kerry Baldry, is screening at CLOSE-UP, London, on 20th March at 8:15 PM.

Also, a little throwback—this film, along with five other shorts of mine, got archived at the BFI two years ago. So, if you're around, come check it out!

Kerry Baldry Close-Up Cinema

14/03/2025

Pleased to share that PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET has secured its place in the BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM selection at the 22nd IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival.
Appreciate the Selection Committee for taking a chance on it.

IN THE PALACE is an Oscar-qualifying festival, which makes this recognition all the more significant.

June 27-30, 2025. Palace of Culture, Pernik, Bulgaria. I’ll do my best to be there.
Featuring the remarkable Buddleia Maslen as ‘Beatrice,’ PUT ALL EGGS IN ONE BASKET exists within the shifting architecture of my modular project, TRUST NO THOUGHT OF MINE, which premiered November 26, 2024, at The Garden Cinema, Covent Garden, London.

And the beat goes on.

https://inthepalace.com/en/news/n/best-experimental-film-category-official-selection-2025-22nd-in-the-palace?fbclid=IwY2xjawJCvBtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbiAvQ9Kn_Mx3blHSpOm5YQoycekTdYWn8RzwUUzAnP7EE6NsL9Z6wqOrA_aem_5arKf9tHtc_3VBkQ0bi-hw


IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival

16/02/2025

10/02/2025

They’re coming. Again. HERE THEY COME (Zhel 2020) will hit the screen at Chester International Film Festival 2025, part of One Minute Volumes—curated by the legendary Kerry Baldry.

Some of these films have found a home at BFI in recent years. This one’s a must-watch.

23 March 2pm

Kerry Baldry

09/02/2025

A lot can be found in mum's flat.

28.5 years ago, a performance at the Art&Music Festival in P**a (the official poster), promoting the first album ‘Northern Eye, Southern Blood, Western Bullet, Eastern God.’

31/01/2025

In Dreams: Blue Velvet (Lynch 1986) as a Haunting Roy Orbison Biopic

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) plays like a fractured, nightmarish biopic of Roy Orbison distorting the singer’s life into a nightmarish vision of American innocence lost. The film features Orbison’s song ‘In Dreams’, which becomes an eerie motif for Frank Booth’s (Dennis Hopper) violent obsession, mirroring how Orbison’s music blurred romance and melancholy.

Like Orbison’s songs, the film navigates between light banality and darkness—Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey embodies the naive dreamer, much like Orbison’s crooning persona, while Frank’s depravity represents the hidden pain in his lyrics. These two are Orbison’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Lynch crafts a world where the glossy 1950s idealism that birthed Orbison’s music is dismantled, revealing something disturbing beneath the surface.

For that reason, Blue Velvet functions as an abstract biopic, revealing the sinister undercurrent beneath Orbison’s innocent melodies in a haunting dreamscape.

24/01/2025

'We Are The Golden Ones' (Zhel, Singles 2002-2022)..
We're the golden ones, we're from the forest.

> written and directed by Zhel
recorded in Dunsmure Studio, London, 2021
instruments and voices - Zhel
> mixing and production - Blackhill, P**a 2021

written and directed by Zhelrecorded in Dunsmure Studio, London, 2021instruments and voices - Zhelmixing and production - Blackhill, P**a 2021© All Rights R...

20/01/2025

Margaret Thatcher in 2002 was asked for her greatest achievement. She replied: "Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds."

Arnaud Bertrand ( on X) is right when he argues that this shift led the left to abandon economic and imperial challenges, instead focusing on cultural and identity issues as a diversion from systemic change.

'Voting essentially became a choice between the same product with different packaging, the illusion of choice.'

The tragic result of this shift is that the demonisation of genuine left figures (e.g., Corbyn, Mélenchon) has redirected legitimate anger into nihilistic movements. These movements, instead of solving fundamental issues, exploit grievances by scapegoating and fostering division.

Consequently, workers, feeling unsupported, have turned to right-wing populism, drawn to promises of protecting labour markets, from Brexit to Trump’s tariffs. Simplistic slogans like "common sense" or "two sexes" are now framed as groundbreaking ideas by Trump. This paradoxical failure of the sanitised left created the conditions for these trends.

To fight back, *the actual left* must refocus on the economic struggle: strengthen labour movements, focus on public goods and services, challenge corporate power and neoliberal orthodoxy, engage with grassroots movements *integrating identity issues into economic conditions rather than isolating them.*

17/01/2025

Molasses in January: David Lynch’s hands.

15/01/2025

Mark Zuckerberg: "Everyone is a photographer now."

Elon Musk: "You are the media now. Citizen journalism is so critically important."

Haha.

A common thread? They own the platforms where your photography, journalism, and creativity are showcased—for free. Meanwhile, they profit immensely from advertisers leveraging your content, influence politics, and consolidate unchecked power.

You know the truth:
You are the creator.
You are the photographer.
You are the media.

So why aren’t you the owner? Why aren’t you benefiting from the value you create?

Let's start raising awareness for change. Social media must be forced to decentralise, shifting power away from platform moguls and putting it back in the hands of the creators and communities that sustain them.

Repeat this and make it your mantra:
I CREATE. I CONTRIBUTE. I DESERVE TO OWN.

photo: David Bowie (Blackstar, 2016)

15/01/2025

Many people expect contemporary art—including music—to offer guidance for life or at least solutions to certain life problems.

While art undeniably has a restorative power, this is only true if we approach it without prejudice, willing to let go of our preconceived knowledge—or at least avoid blindly applying it to our artistic experiences.

The kind of art that has always interested me speaks its own language and exists as a world unto itself.

- screenshot from Trust No Thought Of Mine (2024)

11/01/2025

OK, peeps. I want to share something I’ve been digging into over the last few months—it’s about music and health. No pseudo-science, no mumbo-jumbo, just solid science.

Turns out, engaging with music can actually boost your immune system by raising immunoglobulin A (IgA), a protein that helps protect against infections. Kreutz et al. (2004) found that singing in a choir not only significantly increased IgA levels but also made people feel great. Beck et al. (2000) showed that singers experienced a whopping 240% IgA boost during performances. And Levitin and Chanda (2013) reviewed 400 studies confirming that music strengthens immunity and lowers stress hormones.

So yeah, listening to or performing music isn’t just good for your soul— as you heard it before, it may actually help you beat some bugs -- backed by science. Not too shabby, right? Now go play some music, sing along, or better yet, hit up a gig.

07/01/2025

The ocean of Solaris pulses like a living memory, holding secrets as old as time and as tender as love itself. The station orbits like a haunted house, where dreams become flesh and the past refuses to stay buried. Here, love and grief entwine in an eternal dance, as the ocean whispers truths too profound for words, leaving all who encounter it forever transformed.

‘Solaris’ (Tarkovsky 1972)
Watch it here [Eng subs]:

The Solaris mission has established a base on a planet that appears to host some kind of intelligence, but the details are hazy and very secret. After the my...

02/01/2025

Pasolini said this 50 years ago, and yet it feels more relevant than ever.

It is a sad sight to see my hometown of P**a succumbing to the barbarism of consumerism, dressed up as the so-called "new reality." This phrase, spoken with an air of finality and almost mythological certainty, is not progress—it is a reshaping of our very way of life. Some are aware of it, but most aren’t.

Let us not deceive ourselves: technological advances do not always lead to better lives or fairer societies. You cannot simply "go with the flow" in times of industrialisation or rapid transformation. We need to guide this m**o and not be guided by it.

One day, future generations will judge us. They will ask how we allowed ourselves to fall under the spell of charlatans. The answer will be painfully clear: a bloated and blind bureaucracy, driven by greed of big money linked internationally, opened the door for their rise. And what did we gain? A new phone to bury our heads in, while our world continues to sink into quicksand—a crisis that can and must be addressed.

We need to return to what truly matters. We must rediscover the meaning of being human and use technology to support it. We are not here merely to signal our existence to countless advertisers or chase hollow promises of “progress”. The fight for our humanity starts now.

Have a great 2025.

22/12/2024

Frank's Christmas (2013)

Composed, Remodelled & Directed by Zhel
Lyrics by Toby Venables (“Frank Sinatra” and “Buy God”)
Voice and Music by Zhel
- London, December 2013

In Frank's Christmas, the familiar holiday spirit is reimagined through a lens of struggle, redemption, and rebirth.

Toby Venables

https://www.facebook.com/zhel.nethttp://www.zhel.netComposed, remodelled and directedby ZhelLyrics by Toby Venables"Frank Sinatra" and "Buy God"Voice by Zhel...

19/12/2024

As the year comes to a close, I’m thrilled to reflect on the journey of my short film, You Can't See The Hill Behind the Hill—part of the TRUST NO THOUGHT OF MINE project (2024). The film has nearly completed its festival run, travelling to a diverse range of festivals: New York City Independent Film Festival, Paradise Film Festival, Covent Garden Film Festival, Tokyo ShortFest, Berlin Shorts, Los Angeles Short Film Festival, Stockholm City Festival, Los Angeles Movie & Music Video Festival, Sweden Film Festival, Dubai Independent Film Festival, and the Snow Leopard Film Festival (WLIFF).

This short has been an essential part of the TRUST NO THOUGHT OF MINE series, representing the project internationally before its official premiere last month at The Covent Garden Cinema in London.

Synopsis: YOU CAN'T SEE THE HILL BEHIND THE HILL
In a world drowning in distractions, one man’s search for answers leads him into the wilderness—but is nature his escape or just another illusion? Layers of story unfold: a bus driver abandons his route, a woman recounts his journey in a café, and we see him in the forest—only to realise we’re watching this unfold as a video clicked on by others. What’s real, and what’s constructed?

Written and directed by: Zhel (Zeljko Vukicevic)
Cast: Violetta Bajtsi, Emily Handberg

17/12/2024

https://youtu.be/8qvS5uQ2wFU

This video is a personal collection of moments and reflections filmed raw between 2008 and 2016, using a variety of cameras, both old and new. It wasn't meant to be published, but there you go.

This video is a personal collection of moments and reflections filmed between 2009 and 2016, using a variety of cameras, both old and new. It wasn't meant to...