AI video · Experimental cinema · 2023—2026
The image after the image.
Artificial intelligence, surveillance and cinema as an extension of a digital practice begun in the 1990s.
Massimo Scognamiglio works with AI video as he does with painting, photography and performance: not to exhibit the tool, but to question the body, identity, memory and control. His recent filmography moves across documentary, experimental short film and web/new media.
Filmography verified on the artist’s FilmFreeway profile: 13 directing credits, alongside work as producer and writer.
FilmFreeway — Massimo Scognamiglio ↗13 films · 2023—2026
Selected filmography
- 01FilmFreeway entry ↗
The F**ing Midwest
A short documentary of dreams and nightmares.
- 02FilmFreeway entry ↗
Three Films After Midnight
Three Films After Midnight brings together three short films as if they were three dreams shot during the same night, after midnight, when Paris stops being a real city and becomes a cinematic fever. In Paris with Love, Paris appears in grainy black and white, almost like 16mm film: two figures move through streets, rooms, cafés, and corridors as if searching for a love that was already over before it even began. Reality breaks into small cuts: a glance, a sentence, a cigarette, a door that leads nowhere. Love is not told as a feeling, but as a visual ghost. In Dancing in the Paris Rain, the city opens itself to the rain: wet boulevards, reflected lights, strangers who seem to recognize each other without ever having met. A dance begins almost by accident, then becomes an obsession, then a ritual. This short is more romantic, but also more unstable: the rain washes everything, but erases nothing. The characters dance as if movement were the only way not to disappear. In La nouvelle nouvelle vague est finie, the dream explodes into color: a fake 1950s summer, sunburnt, pop, absurd, full of poses, broken sentences, and cinema talking about itself. Here, the Nouvelle Vague is not simply celebrated: it is sabotaged, loved, betrayed. The characters understand that there is no longer such a thing as pure cinema, pure love, or pure Paris. Everything is remix, artifice, memory, artificial intelligence, nostalgia, and future in the same frame. Together, the three films become a single journey: from the black and white of lost love, to the rain of desire, to the hallucinatory color of the end of romantic cinema. It is a trilogy about Paris after Paris, love after love, and the Nouvelle Vague after the Nouvelle Vague. Three temperatures of the same night. Three films that seem different, but are really telling one thing: after midnight, every image is still looking for someone to love.
- 03FilmFreeway entry ↗
American Musical
In a desolate America of quiet suburbs and abandoned dreams, everyday streets become silent stages where fear and longing collide. Above the empty houses, a lone figure in jeans and a faded camouflage parka appears on a rooftop, not as a soldier but as a ghostly witness of decline. His presence — half myth, half threat — looms over a fractured community, where ordinary lives continue in stillness, unaware of the weight pressing down from above. A portrait of isolation and unease, the film transforms the suburban landscape into a frozen tableau of suspense, echoing the style of Gregory Crewdson and Norman Rockwell. It stands as an unflinching portrait of contemporary America, exposing its fractures, anxieties, and quiet despair beneath the surface of ordinary life. At its core lies the allegory of regicide — not only a symbolic slaying of authority, tradition, and the founding myths of the nation, but also a distinctly American topos, one that too often mutates into lived reality through the blind violence of a world caught between transformation and stagnation.
- 04FilmFreeway entry ↗
Anatomy of My Dreams: Tribute to Jean Cocteau
- 05FilmFreeway entry ↗
Coreography of Random Ideas
Abstract film.
- 06FilmFreeway entry ↗
My Memorial of The Madhouse Circus
A journey into madness and human fragility, condensing the themes of suffering existence into just a few minutes—shifting from painful to ironic—culminating in an unexpected ending that transcends fiction, blending into photographic and painterly reportage from an insider’s perspective. Officially selected for the Punk Film Festival, Berlin, October 20, 2025.
- 07FilmFreeway entry ↗
The Dying
- 08FilmFreeway entry ↗
The Lost Tape
- 09FilmFreeway entry ↗
Under the Lawn
- 10FilmFreeway entry ↗
The Beginning of AI: The Little Girl and the Wolves
- 11FilmFreeway entry ↗
The Beginning of AI: Under Observation
- 12FilmFreeway entry ↗
The Beginning of AI: 100 Kisses
- 13FilmFreeway entry ↗
The Beginning of AI: The Elephant in the Room