Nuno has turned twelve and started to become interested in tales of terror. When his father Sergio, the director, suggests they leave Madrid for the summer to stay in a recently shuttered hotel in Lisbon, he jumps at the chance. Devoid of any guests and gradually falling into disrepair, it feels like the perfectly spooky setting for his budding imagination, a new iteration of The Overlook Hotel from “The Shining”.
As Nuno roams the dark corridors, hides behind the fluttering curtains and watches creepy clips on his mobile phone, Sergio reflects in voice-over on what fear means and his own experiences with it: the documentary about a Portuguese serial killer he started making but never finished, the ghosts of cinema past that haunt film archives, the scary historical attempts to categorise criminals according to the shape of their skulls, that one startling encounter on the streets of São Paulo with his estranged dad back when he was a child. Wandering in winningly droll fashion between a meta-horror film, a deliberately meandering essay and a poignant drama of fathers and sons, “A Scary Movie” is a deliciously uncategorisable blend of fiction and documentary which asserts that dread is always part of the everyday. Is there anything scarier than family?

“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?

This experimental animation shows the enigmatic shapes and colours of cultured crystals. Their production, once an indispensable basic process of material science and research, has lost its scientific usefulness today. But the beauty of the resulting objects has no expiry date. Enlarged, sorted and arranged, the crystals become art.

Iridescent waves, geometrical gardens and spiral-shaped sand dunes can be found in the microscopic structure of a crystal which this film brings to the screen in extreme enlargement. It portrays the shapes that connect the minuscule and the gigantic across all dimensions, showing us the material of our world – and its intrinsic beauty.

Only light lifts the outlines of the world from darkness. In cyanotype, light-sensitive material is used to make white drawings materialize on a blue background. Tata Managadze challenges the light-sensitivity of our mind. She uses reflections and mirrors to expose the sensitive, gossamer-thin material of association in ways that make ephemeral memories and emotions visible. The poem at the beginning tells us how soothing and at the same time brutal her protagonist – light – can be. Like children in a playground, we are seduced by and forever searching for the dance of lights. Flower patterns on the dishes in the sink begin to spin when our eyelids grow heavy and sleep is approaching. Everything moves. In the transitory state between waking and dreaming, a different kind of life stirs in the prefabricated building estate: The stars of the restaurant leap from the sign and scratch traces into the wall. Or are these scars that must still heal? Perhaps scars from the Soviet era?
Again and again, well-known fragments are re-assembled. This non-narrative animated documentary takes us on a spiral of remembrance to an untraceable origin, building a bridge to our childhood ability to find magic in the most mundane things.

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.

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.