An oily liquid oozes across the frame. Wafting windows in the black mass draw the eye to the levels below. Everything is in motion. Hypnotic music enhances the viscosity of the soft body until we believe that we see a “Liquid Light Show” from the 1960s. But these are the dark revenants of psychedelic hippie visuals that put us into a black trance.

A creative person suffering from writer’s block is sitting in an artists’ residence. Outside, construction workers are busy, inside, nothing happens – until the landline rings. A supposed Microsoft employee wants to access her allegedly broken computer. She begins to talk – about heartbreak, emptiness, procrastination. The scammer listens and – without realising it – is ensnared by a scam baiter.
“Cold Call” is the tale of an unexpectedly real, almost comforting conversation between these two strangers – and of how easy it is to become part of the structures one believes to be questioning: digital vigilantism, racism, global inequality. Stefanie Schroeder explores a phenomenon that reveals its multiple layers only at second glance. One of these layers is scamming, an attempted fraud based on deception and manipulation that is often committed not out of free will but by slave-like “employees” of small businesses scattered across the globe. Scam baiting turns out to be similarly ambivalent, a counter movement on the internet pretending to be a protective power that seeks to stop fraudulent activities by personal exposure and humiliation, quite often through racist stereotypes. Schroeder approaches this melange with minimalism and humour, masterfully unfolding the complexity of this subject in the process.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Tehran and other major cities seem far away from the place where Sara lives. But in her rural community in northwestern Iran, the protagonist of this film advocates the same feminist values in a practical, everyday way. Again and again, we are reminded by the images that her father once taught her to ride a motorbike – to the disapproval of the whole village. A small favour with big consequences: For Sara, it paved a way outside patriarchal marriage. Mobile on two wheels, she works as a midwife and has delivered many girls for whom she now wants to fight: At the start of the film and in middle age, Sara decides to be the first woman in the history of her community to run for the local council. A step which earns her enthusiastic support on the one hand; on the other, she must endure open hostilities and an interrogation by the moral enforcers of the Islamic Republic. In “Cutting Through Rocks”, Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni capture these power structures and their individual impact as precisely as the gestures of solidarity and self-determination.