The setting and cast of characters seem like the prelude to an unusual fairy-tale. An elderly man, a hermit living in a remote cabin, is visited by a young woman, almost a girl, who can understand and imitate the language of birds. Deep in the forest, Jean and Mana record and catalogue the calls of the different species day by day, night by night. But then they hear the voice of an unknown animal and set out to find it.

The focus is on birdcalls and their classification. But instead of making the meticulous analysis of sound events look like a quirky hobby, the film inspires us to listen closely. The two scientists’ unperturbed curiosity is catching, and as we watch, we are gradually infected not just with their enthusiasm for their object of research but also with their childlike desire to discover a secret.

The situation lasts only a few seconds, but it is meticulously reconstructed over 15 minutes. In a French city, a police command raids a neighbourhood at night and shoots a young man without checking whether he is armed or has committed a crime. One of dozens of surveillance cameras in the area records the incident. The time between two shots taken by this camera is 67 milliseconds: One image shows the bullet, the next does not. The directing and artist duo fleuryfontaine use this surveillance footage and combine it with images retroactively animated using the Blender graphics software to take an almost forensic look at the positions that each of us takes in today’s artificial and security-fixated environment and that determine our behaviour, our body and our relationship with the world and other people. With its elegant and austere structure, the film insistently questions the excesses of the use of violence and its legitimacy in the police and other public organs.