8,500 kilometres lie between the Amazon and the Ardennes. In his home country of Brazil, Diego Quinderé de Carvalho only looks at the inaccessible and menacing forest from the outside. Its Belgian counter piece, however, is easy to explore. Here, everything is laid out by people, neatly ordered and reduced to the essentials. A geologist, a gold miner and an astronomer provide insights for a philosophical exploration of the origin of existence and the future of our planet.

“Boo” – the name is as unusual as the sound is special. The avant-garde composer Harry Partch invented instruments for micro-sounds and completely new musical experiences. The musician and instrument maker Thomas Meixner dedicated two years of his life, marked by family and health losses, to rebuilding 75 of these sound-generators for a concert tour. The film portrays a monomaniac who fiercely avoids social life but with great sensitivity makes material sing.

The cycle of domestic violence: tension, escalation, remorse, and then all over again. The woman in Izabela Plucińska’s film shares the fate of many sufferers: She can’t manage to break out. The metaphorical dumbbells she would have to lift to do it weigh 98 kilograms – like the man who does this to her. All she can do is dissolve, disappear and breathe silently into her individual parts. The animations keep erasing themselves, but painful marks are left behind.