“Are you with us or against us?” Nothing less lies in the air, unspoken. No nuances, no discussions, hardly any choice. Did the tired man expect such life decisions after work? Unlikely. He just wanted to chill out and watch mindless television when suddenly an alien world on the screen catches up with him in the comfort of his home: A cult-like community lives next door, their behaviour ape-like, their faith fanatical, determined to convert him. Their flat is decorated with forests and deserts. Anyone who tries to look behind the painted wallpaper, to separate scenery from reality, commits treason and deserves banishment or death. Plato’s Cave Analogy in a radicalised version for the 21st century.
Freedom and truth or stability and a sense of belonging? Is the price of accepting a distorted reality just to be allowed to live too high? And most of all: Is there an alternative worth living? The world outside, behind the window, remains vague, its threats only implied. In this parable about passivity, curiosity and free choice, Alexandre Sousa touches on the urgent questions of our time: questions of isolation, echo chambers and the impossibility for humans to stay unpolitical. Do we even have a chance to resist?

Empty and dense. Organic and geometrical. Mirrored and asymmetrical. These are only some of the parameters playfully transformed into an abstract cinematic study by Réka Bucsi: a doubting line from which a second and a third consisting of sculptures looped around themselves soon spring. Bucsi continues her exploration: Which movements are reminiscent of legs, which of wings? Or is all this just a figment of our imagination?

A meteorite covered in green growth lands on a planet inhabited by strange creatures and sparks light, colour, fertility, and intimacy. Plants begin to glow, animals find mates or become one in different ways. A tale in three chapters about longing, love and solitude, unfolding in wondrously surreal snapshots.

Cutout animation in limbo: crafted meticulously and in great detail, but at the same time as if dabbed from the unconscious. In Csanád Baksa-Soós’s work, butterflies land on ladies’ shoes and fly away with them, a river of headlines flows through a city, a violet, swirling solar eclipse makes glowing knives shoot out of the earth to the sky, stone lips disgorge a ball of light. The images do not follow a fixed order – each of them opens a new world, takes a deep breath, moves on. Leitmotifs appear and disappear. What’s left are enchanting colours and textures which extend even to the soundtrack: The scratching of a maltreated cello, nocturnal saxophone sounds from the barely soundproofed neighbouring flat, eery clarinet etudes in an echoing rehearsal room nestle congenially against the images.

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.

The film opens with the obvious: The problem of the AI’s lack of physicality – it cannot play ping pong with director Tianji Yu. But would it be conceivable for Yu to arrange to play ping pong with a former friend and playmate who now votes for Trump? Do his political otherness and physical absence make this friend as immaterial as the AI? Is this absence insurmountable – both the AI’s and the friend’s?
A ping pong conversation evolves during which the director’s deep memories and honest reflections turn the superficial and banal AI into an actual surrogate partner. A partner that enables a slow rapprochement to the lost friendship and triggers reflections about humans as political beings. The artificiality of the AI is unpeeled layer by layer. Yu visually stimulates us to penetrate to the core of things through the poetically captivating layers of the visual design as we start with documentary footage alienated by a distorting mirror and transition to a moving painting of simple, semi-realistic 3D animations that unfold as if behind a brushstroke filter.

47 animated sketches of a surreal world: a fur collar made of a living wolf; a sawn-off tree that soars to the sky like a balloon; a cat that grows by purring and finally begins to stroke her owner. Réka Bucsi weaves an unpredictable web of fantasies that question human relationships with nature, animals and the cosmos and reduce them to absurdity.