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 gaze is firmly fixed on the horizon and distant tree lines, distinguishing natural from smoke clouds. Seasonal work for Portuguese women who observe the landscape from behind the glass panes of fire lookout towers, radio always in reach to report wildfires immediately upon discovery. While the boundary of the visible blurs in the grain of the analogue film stock, Dina, Adriana, Ana Paula, Helena, Luisa, Cristina, Dulce, Lídia, Inês, Fátima, Francisca and Vera emerge as agents of anticipation, modern-day seers whose gentle but persistent peering reaches beyond the burning world. Meanwhile, their male colleagues monitor the situation on computer screens. Poetical textures of waiting and wokeness. The female vision is sharpened and has expectations from the not yet visible future.

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.

“See you next year!” a Portuguese fire warden says as he dismantles his control equipment at the end of the season. Humans and nature in southern Europe may be used to forest fires, but that does not change the facts: The ever more massive conflagrations are caused by climate change. We have long been living in the age of fire.

In the Portuguese interior, a forest fire has just devastated a large area. Wounded nature is silent, not a single bird is heard, only the wind that makes the charred tree trunks rustle. But the vegetation recovers astonishingly fast. Where all life seemed to be gone, greenery soon sprouts from the ruined trees. The residents of the affected region are engaged in the reconstruction with great respect for their natural environment. Because plants, too, are sentient creatures. In quiet, almost melancholic, but also hopeful images, the film pays tribute to the strength of the trees and illustrates how essential it would be for humanity to learn to live in harmony with nature again.

For ten years, Belgian photographer and artist Léonard Pongo has been documenting the landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In his latest work, he enters into a sensual dialogue with them. The precise camera often focuses on light reflections that literally draw us into the moving images, while at the same time revealing the cinematographic apparatus behind them. In combination with the elaborate sound design and the restrained, beautiful music of “Bear Bones, Lay Low”, the solo project of the Belgium-based Venezuelan Ernesto González, the portrait of a landscape emerges which the captivating montage composition turns into a visual, auditive and meditative pleasure.
Nonetheless, “Tales from the Source” is not a traditional “nature film” but an aesthetic positioning inspired by Congolese traditions, art and philosophy which – as the artist himself emphasises – represents the Congolese landscape “as a source rather than a resource.” The result is best described as an experience rather than a representation.

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.

Unexpectedly, Marion Guillard captures the perfect shot: A flock of birds pirouette in the evening sky, the camera follows their graceful movements as if hypnotized, symbiotically. The road to this moment was long. Guillard shares her journey to the USA with us, which is not only marked by feelings of alienation from her family – the postcard motifs spread before her eyes also leave her cold. In a voiceover, she talks about her relationship to herself and her body, about an ideal of femininity she does not conform to, and disturbing encounters with men.
“We Had Fun Yesterday” follows Guillard’s stream of thought, both autobiographical exploration and reflection about the way we look at others: animals – wild or caged; nature - unspoiled or shaped by humans. The result is a surprising weave in which mental and digital images arise and crumble.