Perhaps the most brazen use of colour to disrupt tranquility – and one of the most singular works at the festival – was Jacques Perconte’s The Eighth Alps (2019), the live expanded cinema performance that acted as the closing night event. Perconte’s style is perhaps difficult to imagine unless you see it, but it essentially takes studies of landscapes, bodies and materials and distorts them digitally. In this film, images of the Alps degraded and distorted as Perconte improvised with his laptops at the front of the auditorium; the picture pixelated, streams of colour engulfed the screen like a crashed desktop, and as hawks hovered over the mountains they left staggered trails of glitches across the screen like computerised vapour trails.

With atonal digital audio turned up to 11, the effect was overwhelming. Perconte’s desire to highlight the push and pull between images of nature and the nature of images sounds like an academic endeavour but his work leaves you bodily reeling. Writing about Perconte’s work in 2018 for desistfilm, José Sarmiento Hinojosa referred to his style as digital alchemy, so it seems fitting that this electrifying, abstracted journey into the mountains raised the roof and brought down the curtains on this experiential edition of Alchemy.