The hairdressing salon “Saïda” is a space where people speak openly, laugh and argue. The subject rarely is hair. In the run-up to the presidential elections in Tunisia the shop turns into a political arena where the women – young or old, conservative or with a modern outlook – indulge in discussions about the pros and cons of the candidates. Their clever and witty statements reflect a young democracy with all its rifts and fault lines.

Testimony versus “prosthetic memory”: The director dubs the sound recordings of her grandmother, collected over a period of ten years, in which the old lady recaps her encounter with a tornado as a child, in front of a green screen. While the details of her memories change through repeated narration over time, the found footage from feature and disaster films, weather reports and landscape images suggests a mediatised participation in the events.

Marta Pajek (digitally) created a complex, atmospheric universe – with minimalist means and yet rich in detail. References to contemporary history meet visions of an intuited, dystopian future. We are made aware of (our own) transience in subtle, but almost brutal ways. Ageing bodies, ageing ideas. In the end, the grande dame of Polish cinema, actor Anna Polony, sings: “… when will we ever learn?”

A young woman attaches acoustic sensors to a tree, hammering nail after nail into the bark. Something stirs in the bowels of the earth, apparently attracted by the sound. This being, whatever it is, starts to search for its origin, gliding through tunnel systems, bizarre subterranean formations. Sometimes you see our world from below, people walking their daily paths. The soil lives! There is still a lot to discover.