Bright neon colours are reflected in the faces of young people in a nocturnal park. The rhythms of electronic music can be heard from a distance. In the darkness big trees can be discerned whose branches grow high into the sky and which stand there as if they were guarding the young people lying in the grass. After a while they dance... and talk... a lot. Sometimes you feel like you’re in one of those French black and white films from the 1960s where people also talk incessantly. French is also spoken in this work by the Canadian director Jean-François Lesage – the main subjects are nothingness, and love. We hear a young man’s poetic off screen comment: “Love exists anyway.” The digital generation obviously has a lot to think and talk about concerning relationships and romantic dramas. The neon lights show them the way through a nocturnal nature, into the uncertain future of adulthood. Watching this is a sensuous experience.

Zaza Rusadze

In old fairytales the children get lost in the forest, today people get lost in the depths of the Internet. A young woman, Sandra from Montreal, begins an online relationship with the Syrian blogger Amina. The digital flirt becomes a romance, erotic fantasies are inspired and exchanged. When the Syria insurgency breaks out in 2011, Sandra encourages Amina to report on her daily life. The international media lap it up in a knee-jerk reaction: “A Girl from Damascus” reporting from the chaos of the war, a tender female voice in the midst of ever more confusing frontlines, and “gay” to boot. Then Amina is kidnapped. What fits into the media’s preconceptions and leads to an international search operation becomes Sandra’s private mission – and obsession. But suddenly the trail goes cold … Canadian filmmaker Sophie Deraspe helps Sandra deconstruct the case which turns out to be a highly complicated mix of hype and hysteria. She confronts her material in a complex and fluid narrative that captures the superimpositions of reality and fiction, media reality and projection, desire and revolution, leading the audience into a labyrinth at whose exit an almost trivial but all too human insight is waiting for us. Cornelia Klauß