Europe’s biggest military base is situated on the outskirts of Lisbon. Soldiers following fictitious scenarios train for a future war, the neighbours hear the impact of the guns at night, a boy plays the piano. Soldiers and amateur astronomers watch through the night on their missions, ornithologists lie in wait for the mating calls of rare birds, snipers for enemies and targets. Beekeepers look after their bees, a shepherd helps a ewe giving birth: Arcadian-looking landscapes with deer and grazing sheep in the morning mist meet a modern field of Mars (“campo de marte”), as military training grounds were called in ancient Rome.

This film doesn’t hurry its observations, listening to the tales of the people as well as to the sound of the piano composition “Battle in the Stars”, inspired by the war games. It listens to the sheep, the birds, and the bees. This generates a simultaneousness – and equality – of violence, nature, people, the historic and future layers, the material and the transcendental.

Frederik Lang

Over 36 years, an unmarried surgeon filmed and dissected insects in his Brussels apartment. 600 reels of wonderful, obsessively precise recordings and increasingly confused commentary paint a strange psychological profile. During his research on Dr. Veroft, Antoine Fontaine comes across a species of man whose social behaviour is conspicuously focused on six-legged creatures and who share their habitat with audibly scurrying chitin carapaces and Darth Vader figurines.

André Eckardt

A lonely, sometimes misty, sometimes sunny mountain region, chants from the church of a dying village, a single man. He restlessly walks through his house, the village, the forest – but doesn’t reveal his secret. Observations from a seemingly insular, rural area in the south of Europe with no less insular people, shaped by their environment. And are the orange trees really blooming outside?

Frederik Lang