It is Alice’s 27th birthday today. She lives in her old room in her parents’ apartment. Her mother coddles her like a little child. Her kid brother gets on her nerves. The only space for self-realisation and living out her sexual desires is in her imagination, if at all. For economic reasons, she and many other young people are denied the chance to live an independent life in their own four walls. So Alice has to endure the confinement.

On the night of her birthday, she goes pub-crawling with a buddy and dances, free at last for a few moments, at a party on the roof of a high-rise. Looking at the nocturnal city and sobering up after all the exuberance, though, her dilemma re-surfaces again: Where is her private space where body and soul can unfold unobserved? Haunting, colourful, with a fantastic soundtrack and full of eroticism, the film describes the depressing situation of a whole generation.

“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?

It’s Hungary in the early 1990s and Ákos, Petya and Laci, too, are young and need the money. The Iron Curtain has fallen, Europe lies at the friends’ feet, but train tickets to Stockholm, Paris, Berlin or Madrid are almost unaffordable for ordinary people. Far from losing courage, the three develop a clever method to enjoy the new freedom to travel: They forge the official tickets, still handwritten on carbon copy forms, bleaching the carbon ink out with sanitiser, ironing the paper smooth and dry, getting some stamps, researching the operating procedures of the national railway, studying timetables, prices and routes and filling in the boxes on the forms again. And off they go. But that is not the end of the story. A feeling of blind infatuation sets a business idea in motion. How about making these very special tickets available to others in need? One becomes ten, 150 soon become 1,000 – until a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities begins.
László Csáki’s scintillating gangster comedy is loaded with contemporary history. His excellent montage of drawn fiction, authentic film documents and memoirs broadens our view of the suspended years of social upheaval in his Hungarian homeland.

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.