Do computer-generated figures now look as “real” as “genuine” humans? For 26-year-old Lale, this question is not only exciting in theory, but in practice. She works as a model but would rather spare herself exhausting shoots by getting an avatar. But when she has taken the first steps towards “doubling” herself, she has second thoughts. What does it mean, in actual, legal and moral terms, to bring a virtual duplicate of oneself into the world?

Katharina Pethke accompanies her young protagonist on this process. The intellectual game turns into a test on the living subject, a weighing of possibilities and fears. What does it mean for our perception of the world (and for documentary film, too, of course) that the promise of reality of visual media has long since become a gradual one? In the age of omnipresent self-dramatization, deepfakes and extended reality, we are embarking on a journey to our joint (media) future. It’s no coincidence that it ends at a place that already inspired Plato’s ideas on reality and its shadows.

Grainy black and white images alternate with overexposed colour shots. Dreamy tracking shots through barren, rocky landscapes, flying with griffon vultures and storks, follow static shots by a flowing brook or near a grasshopper on a stone. Close-ups of grasses, insects, seemingly accidentally discovered stone sculptures, then a series of interior views of a slightly dilapidated villa in the country. Scenes of a baptism, at the end overlapping details of a campfire. One could describe countless such impressions, one wants to keep circling with the birds forever, roaming through the rocks, lingering in the community …
Ewelina Rosińska spent a few years travelling through Portugal with photographer Nuno Barroso and a 16mm camera, occasionally accompanied by artists and eco-activists, capturing landscapes, encounters and places. Composed with dreamlike certainty in a captivating and supple rhythm, her film is like a visual poem about the ambivalence of human presence in nature.