Peter Mettler sets out to look for northern lights with photographer Andreas Züst and a small film crew. In order to be able to capture this miracle of nature on film in the first place, the team has built a special camera that has to withstand the extreme climate conditions. On location, they patiently surrender to the state of waiting. They are in the border region between the geographical north and the populated south. The formal structure of the film, on the other hand, shifts between trance-like essay and analytical research trip. And the filmmaker is left with the fundamental question of whether the experience of this spectacular natural phenomenon can be filmed at all.

Microplastics are everywhere: in the air, the soil, and the water. In this “surreal eco-fiction,” plastic and the environment live in peaceful coexistence. They invent a comforting world in which we merge with plastics to become hybrid creatures, endowed with a new identity and DNA. In the plastisphere we become the material that unites us all – if only it were finally allowed to re-shape us.

The red house dissolves and transforms into all kinds of other things. The house re-assembles, but bigger and wider than before. Quicker than the eye can see, all kinds of brightly coloured shapes appear on the screen. What was a clown a second ago suddenly becomes a wild mix of fantastic images and figures. And right in the middle, the red house keeps turning up.

A young woman attaches acoustic sensors to a tree, hammering nail after nail into the bark. Something stirs in the bowels of the earth, apparently attracted by the sound. This being, whatever it is, starts to search for its origin, gliding through tunnel systems, bizarre subterranean formations. Sometimes you see our world from below, people walking their daily paths. The soil lives! There is still a lot to discover.

For thirty years, Sofía Brockenshire’s father travelled the world as an official of the Canadian Immigration Service, his family always by his side. Diaries and other contemporary documents show the numerous relocations, the destinations in South Korea, India, in South and Central American countries. The result is a detailed mosaic of memories and audiovisual snippets that tries to take not only the civil servant’s perspective, but also that of his wife and children.

When asked where they originally came from, the Brockenshire kids answer cleverly: from the suitcases. Because they travel with them year after year, always prepared to have to leave a place they just moved to. The life of the family is determined by the Canadian authorities, they seem to have practically no say in the matter. Neil Brockenshire’s views on his professional career are ambivalent: full of gratitude and certain to have helped people, but also thoughtful and occasionally resentful. In her film, Sofía Brockenshire re-assembles what was scattered across the globe over the decades: photos, thoughts, desires. “The Dependents” is a personal portrait and something of a reflection about the existence as a professional expat in a world that has no borders for some and nothing but obstacles for others.

To enter the land behind the mirrors like Alice … A girl looks behind the mirror of her childhood for the first time, looking out cautiously, but also curiously, for the first harbingers of growing up. She steals away, detaching herself from her parents and siblings. Beside the small, protected family home, there now is a new, vast emotional space to explore.

Emanations of a nightmare. Drawings of fragile girls’ bodies from which the silhouettes of massive men emerge devouring each other. Obsessive images from the inner perspective of a nude dancer during her performance. Shreds of acoustic memories of sexual abuse. And always recurring: the rapist in a hat, the forever unerasable unreal reality.

Electromagnetic waves cannot be detected by our conventional sensorium, but are perceived as stressful by electro-sensitive persons, “like a substance pouring all over you”. Karl Lemieux and David Bryant translate this invisible, inaudible threat into decay damage to original 16mm film stock. Visual wounds, wrapped in subtle drone sounds.

Authentic and symbolic descendants of the Canadian Indigenous community lead us to a place where past and present intertwine. Two Indigenous men reveal their disturbing physical experiences with systemic racism. Their reports break taboos. And they implore us to carry the knowledge, grief and anger into the world like raging buffalos! Join up!

In 2019, the “Sustainabiliteens” from Vancouver mobilized more than 150,000 people to march against climate destruction. The film gives insights into the teenagers’ everyday life which is determined not only by school, friends and families, but also by the climate crisis and activism. Taking things into their own hands gives them strength: “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.”

Adam is 15, bullied by his schoolmates and ignored by the girl of his dreams. His grandmother, who has teased him all his life with nasty remarks about his appearance, uses her dying breath to bring home to him once more his supposed physical shortcomings. Even the prospect of the upcoming summer holidays hardly raises Adam’s spirits, because his father has organised several unpleasant holiday jobs for him to build his character. On top of everything else, the teasing and negative comments manifest in Adam in strange deformations of his body which provoke additional stress and ridicule.

Adam is different. He stays outside while the people around him go about their usual – their “normal” – activities. He watches his sister being cheated on by her boyfriend, must bear a neighbour’s fanatical lawn care accuracy and discovers that a resident of his street throws bags of dog faeces up into the branches of the alley trees. The more the daily madness around him becomes evident, the more Adam emerges as an empathetic and mature young adult. Contrary to all claims he, whom the others regard as a strange eccentric, is in control of his life.

A film that teaches us mindfulness. In his audiovisual diary, award-winning Swiss-Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler says farewell to his mother and father. But the film transcends his personal work of mourning. In an always dialogue-oriented search movement over the cycle of life, he reflects on this world and the next, on existence and time. It is an eternal circuit and flow – like the continuous passing of clouds and rivers.

Visually as well as intellectually, Peter Mettler draws upon personal conversations, philosophical and spiritual texts as well as his own film and sound archive. His approach is characterised by openness and humility towards life and nature. This attentive attitude characterises the director’s notion of “film-making” per se that has shaped all his works. “While the Green Grass Grows” comprises two parts of a larger epic diary project with the same title.