A mobile coffee truck becomes a cinema apparatus that seems to enable the recording of what is often overlooked and even more often overheard. David Shongo’s nocturnal portrait of Kinshasa in the aftermath of the M23 violent excesses of February 2025 in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo is an idiosyncratic and undercover exploration of a fragile city that has been exposed to a lot of historic and present traumatisation and continues to be marked by instability.
To raise the question of Kinshasa’s future, the Congolese artist and composer re-interprets film-historical concepts and adds new facets: With his practice of radical listening and questioning the limits of seeing, based on strong images, complex sound and inventive performative staging, he creates his own form of “fugitive cinema”.

The dazzling sun hangs in the sky, but while it slowly sinks, a cacophony of unknown voices and sounds spreads across the horizon. “The darkness is coming like a smoke that expands,” the director comments in voice-over, and takes us deeper into the night, on the path risked by many migrants from Central America: on foot, through dangerous landscapes, with an uncertain outcome.
In her immersive short film, Violeta Mora brings this path to life. A shaky handheld camera follows heavy footsteps, we hear the fugitives’ breath and the sounds of animals. The flash-streaked blackness is full of scraps of desperate conversations and calls for help, while the sense of threat keeps mounting. A film that does not seek to explain but allows us to feel tangibly and directly what it means to cross a border – in hopes of a better life.

Two pieces of news change director Caroline Guimbal’s life at Christmas: Her mother Natalie has cancer and she herself is pregnant. She follows Natalie over a period of two years, entering into a dialogue that extends across several levels. On the one hand, Guimbal films her mother in close, delicate shots, listens to her memories, documents her close connection with nature and the gradual decline caused by the disease. Another conversation is conducted offscreen, a conversation with herself that recounts experienced brutality and abuse: It is about all the men who beat up and exploited her mother and who have also left their mark on the daughter’s childhood and adolescent memories, not least on the recurring pattern of her own relationships.
“The Red Moon Eclipse” is a bitterly sensitive portrait that examines the conditions and simultaneity of events. Like a blood moon, which describes a total eclipse of the sun where sun, moon and earth are aligned, Caroline Guimbal draws lines: between mother and mother, daughter and mother, past and present. What is left at the end is the question of love – true love and love that only pretends to be true and usually causes pain.