The venue opens at 8:00 AM.  

Get ready for CICLOPE Festival 2026. We encourage you to arrive at HKW with enough time to collect your Festival badge from the Registration desk.

Arriving between 9:00 AM and 9:45 AM? Whilst we’ll do our best to get you through speedily, please expect a wait of approximately 20 minutes to collect your badge, as this is our peak arrival window.

An all-day dedicated co-working space is available at HKW.

Stay online while you’re OOO at the Festival; you’ll find the Home of Work on the lower ground floor of the venue.

View the work shortlisted for this year’s CICLOPE Awards, ahead of the 2026 Winners being announced at the Awards Ceremony on Thursday evening.

Categories screened in Session I today: CICLOPE Ideas – Film

Join CICLOPE Founder & CEO, Francisco Condorelli, in kicking off this year’s CICLOPE Festival at the Home of Craft.

Lauren Greenfield has built an unprecedented longitudinal record of how commercial media shapes culture, youth, gender, and, increasingly, democracy itself. Her award-winning docuseries Social Studies, whose immersive exhibition is open from September at Fotografiska Berlin, turns to the same machinery’s youngest targets, exposing what the engagement-at-all-costs economy is doing to the next generation.

Drawing on new work from Dove’s Beauty Machine to Kids + AI for LEGO to the terrifying data propelling her new museum installations, she will make the case that in this time of distraction and consumer distrust, there is an opportunity to establish trust with audiences through meaningful stories that connect, inform, and move people instead of feeding the machine.

The traditional lines between brands, agencies and production companies are becoming increasingly difficult to define. Bringing together perspectives from the brand, agency and production sides, this conversation looks at how the creative partnership is being redrawn. 

Rather than announcing the death of any one model, the session asks a more useful question: as the boundaries blur, what makes each partner genuinely valuable — and what will it take to remain indispensable in the years ahead? Speakers TBA.

Enjoy all-day complimentary barista coffee from the coffee carts at HKW.

Filter coffee, tea and soft drinks are available in the cafe area, while bottled water and sodas are available from the fridges located around the venue.

C:FUTURE is CICLOPE’s initiative dedicated to the next generation of the creative industry. Rather than discussing the future of young talent, it puts young talent at the centre of the conversation.

Taking place across all three days of the Festival, each session features a different group of emerging talent from different disciplines. But every conversation follows the same three themes: Expectations. Reality. Hope.

By repeating the framework with different voices, C:FUTURE reveals where a new generation shares common ground, where perspectives diverge, and what the industry can learn from both.

Your Way Out of the System is one of those rare projects where every creative decision works in service of a single, deceptively simple idea. Bringing that idea to life meant building an entirely new world: architecture, movement, costumes, characters and visual language… every creative decision had to feel like part of the same universe.

In this case study, the team behind the campaign retraces the journey from the original strategic thought to the final frame. Ultimately, this is a conversation about creative decision-making: how do you give different disciplines enough freedom to make an idea better without slowly losing the idea that brought everyone together in the first place?

Over the years, Squarespace has worked with some of the most celebrated feature directors in the world: Yorgos Lanthimos, Martin Scorsese, Spike Jonze, Damien Chazelle, Edgar Wright and Jonathan Glazer. Some of the best times. Some of the hardest.

When you bring a feature film director into the world of brand storytelling, you’re not just hiring extraordinary talent; you’re inviting in a strong creative point of view. Join David Lee, Squarespace’s Chief Brand & Creative Officer, Rebecca Skinner, Managing Director & Executive Producer of Superprime Films, and Eric Stern, Partner & Managing Director of Anonymous Content, as they unpack the realities of working with feature directors — sharing the tensions, hesitations and hard-earned lessons they’ve picked up along the way.

See our handy list of places to eat and drink in the area here.

View the work shortlisted for this year’s CICLOPE Awards, ahead of the 2026 Winners being announced at the Awards Ceremony on Thursday evening.

Categories screened in Session II today: CICLOPE Ideas – For Good

Straight Circle, a film by Oscar Hudson, magna studios

Two enemy soldiers stationed on a remote border in a vast, featureless desert descend into a state of profound disorientation after they forget which side of the border is which. As they grapple with their identities, loyalties, and the absurdity of their situation, their isolation slowly gives way to an unfathomable nightmare that will blur the line between friend and foe.

16:45 – 17:10 – Director Q&A: Join the film’s director Oscar Hudson (magna studios), for a Q&A following the screening.

Netflix’s Discover Your Future, directed by Show Yanagisawa, brought together multiple iconic worlds, each with its own creative and technical challenges. For the team behind the film, the question was never simply practical or VFX, but what should be real, what should be created digitally — and how the two could work together to make the impossible feel seamless.

Joined by Orlee Tatarka (Wieden+Kennedy), Executive Producer Suzanne Hargrove (PRETTYBIRD), Production Designer Dan Betteridge and Creative Director Ryan Knowles (Electric Theatre Collective) this session unpacks some of the film’s biggest challenges and the decisions behind them.

Every brand wants to connect with culture. But culture is not an aesthetic or something that can be added once an idea has already been written. Taj Critchlow, Founder and Exec Producer of Fela, will examine what makes some work feel as though it was created from within a culture rather than observed from the outside.

This session will explore how cultural currency gives work a depth and authenticity that cannot simply be researched or replicated, and why diverse rosters and production teams are not just about visible representation, but about bringing different perspectives into the creative process and making better, more relevant and effective work.

Enjoy all-day complimentary barista coffee from the coffee carts at HKW.

Filter coffee, tea and soft drinks are available in the cafe area, while bottled water and sodas are available from the fridges located around the venue.

Born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised in the mountains of Nepal, Camille Summers-Valli is an acclaimed French-Australian multidisciplinary filmmaker, photographer, and visual artist. Known for her playful yet thought-provoking approach, Camille’s work envelopes the senses and organically inspires audiences to feel something deeper.

Camille has worked and collaborated with a wide range of brands and artists throughout the world, including The New York Times, Nike, Adidas, Chanel, Burberry, Hermes, Haim, Gucci, Coach, METTE, Vogue, Dom Perignon, Jean Paul Gaultier, On, and the United Nations.

Since Tor Myhren was a child, movies, music videos and ads had an outsized influence on his creativity.

So as we prepare for the radical changes in the world of film that lie ahead, this is instead a look back at the films that have most inspired him. And a celebration of the tremendous impact the filmmakers and visual storytellers in our industry continue to have on the Apple brand and marketing.