Twelve image tiles merge in a rhythmic dance that explores the intrinsic relationship between sound and image. The elements in the tiles, created by painting and scratching directly on the 16mm film strip, respond to the hand-drawn soundtrack and engage in a surprising and surreal dialogue. Their language cannot be understood, only felt.

When the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022, Artem Ryzhykov volunteered to join the Ukrainian army. Equipped with a machine gun and a camera, the filmmaker documents his life as a soldier. But soon it becomes obvious that imagination and reality are drifting apart. While at first exploding bombs shock him so much that he drops to the ground in the barricaded kitchen, and while burnt corpses of a defeated Russian military unit at the Irpin front line provide sensational images, euphoria and sensitivity gradually get lost on the battlefield. Ryzhykov slowly loses his observer’s perspective, the camera degenerates into a “toy” and is replaced by the weapon.
The war leaves traumatic marks. Ryzhykov is increasingly alienated from his own self and his private environment. The overwhelming emotional ballast is no longer easily catalysed, spaces for reflection shrink and the phone calls with his wife Irusya become colder and more tight-lipped. Co-director Juan Camilo Cruz has crafted a narrative strand of immediate power from more than one thousand hours of video material: an intimate insight into the life of a person who is trying to cope with all the chaos.

Once, Myrid Carten’s alcoholic mother Nuala disappears for two weeks. The daughter recognises her, curled-up in the middle of the Belfast pedestrian zone, by her shoes: the only street-drinker in high heels. She does not know what to do, keeps the camera rolling for a few minutes and leaves. How do you behave towards a mother who needs mothering herself? Carten tackles the question by making a film about it – as an intervention, exorcism, declaration of love, manifest of powerlessness.
Nuala is the centre of a complex, fragile family dynamic that revolves around the run-down family home where the camera obsessively crawls upside down along the walls again and again. The material is haunted in myriad other ways: scattered traces of past art projects, nerve-racking phone recordings and faded television images stand next to childhood memories on MiniDV cassettes that diffuse almost seamlessly into the present. At one point the mother’s voice even seems to take complete control of her daughter. Carten’s creative exuberance is enormously compelling, kept together by a fluid montage that lays bare the deeply sincere emotional core of the film.

Single frames from a direct animation appear on the screen in staggered repetition. The shapes painted, printed and scratched on 35mm material evolve, with minimal time lapses, from one edge of the frame to the other. A trace is left, telling of time itself and asking: When exactly is “now”? The past, present and future are spinning in the chaos of moments.

Using rhythmic, ecstatic music and fragments of folk songs, Yasmine Djedje-Fisher-Azoume takes us to the mythic ancestors, goddesses, and guardians of the Bété people on the Ivory Coast – the place where the director’s ancestors came from. In her film study, inspired by traditional wooden sculptures and masks, she transforms these into many-shaped female characters through coal drawings and copper reliefs. Spinning, multi-faced and all-seeing, dancing in fluffy garments, they perform rituals and unfold an infectious choreography. The whole film pulses to this rhythm, so it comes as no surprise when one figure literally releases a stream of creative energy.
This stream is so strong that it extends into the present day – to a modern temple where living goddesses rotate in the endless flow of existence. Unlike the lifelessly arranged displays in European museums, witnesses of colonial violence, Djedje-Fisher-Azoume collects a pantheon here of what she honours and deeply moves. A temple that exists only for those who know their own origins and treat them with respect to derive from them strength for the presence and the future. The whole film, from the tip of its roots to the buds, is pervaded by this power of mystical self-knowledge.

Winter on Canada’s Pacific coast – a difficult season for the animal keepers at the wildlife rescue centre in Comox, British Columbia: It is hunting season. Despite massive criticism by animal welfare organisations, hunters continue to use lead ammunition. This is particularly life-threatening for the BAEA – the official Alpha 4 code used in North and Central America for the bald eagle. Because these birds of prey feed on animal carcasses left behind. Their chances of surviving lead poisoning are slim. The treatment, too, is extremely stressful for the eagles. With great patience and loving care, the keepers try to save their charges from death.
In gentle images and with respect for the suffering birds, filmmaker Terra Long observes daily life at the station, contrasting it with shots of nature – only seemingly – untouched by humans. Ultimately, this refuge raises fundamental ethnic questions: How can precisely those humans care for wild animals while preserving their dignity and wildness? And: Is the elaborate treatment any use in view of the meagre chances of a change in hunting laws?

This visual symphony unfolds according to the principles of swarm behaviour. Digitally created clouds of dots organically flow into each other. Everything lives, breathes, is sensual and tactile, feels soft and harmonious. A warm, light sound carpet flows around the constantly moving landscape. An allusion to the cyclical nature of our life.

On a light blue sheet of paper, a grid emerges which is immediately overgrown by an organic dark surface. Grid and surface seem to enter a symbiotic relationship and, merged into a whole, to try out a new shared form. Geometrical possibilities between two-dimensionality and depth, control and instability are acted out.

Something pulls us into the deep. We plunge deeper and deeper into the centre of the image, into swelling liquids, through lakes of circling colours, through the cracks in the paper. A tactile film that brings us into contact with colour and material textures – irritatingly sensual and strangely familiar. The sound opens the horizon of interpretation: It is a journey across a female body.

Examples from a DIY book about Op Art patterns form the basis of this hypnotic film. The images seem to move by themselves in front of our eyes. Their flowing and shimmering is driven by colour changes and cross-fades until the boundaries between actual and imagined movement become blurred. It is not only the soundtrack and title that herald the mischievous spirit of this work.