The two main characters of this film seem made for each other. They literally fit together, merge into each other, melt into a colourful, psychedelic, swirling whole. They function together, until one of them disconnects. The madness of this riot of colours turns into a dark nightmare when the one left behind re-absorbs the other by force. Against her will, the renegade must now be sewn to her partner. The once flourishing relationship degenerates into an irritating visual and audio chaos of aggressively twitching drawings and shattered sounds. Impaled on a gnarly tree, the couple’s bodies decay. As they are dying away, darkness turns into light and fresh blossoms open on the pale bones.

Inspired by the estate of a Romanian photographer in which 5,000 glass plate negatives from the 1930s to the 1950s survived undiscovered for a long time, a touching love story evolves. In 1939, Anna Florea meets the young soldier Jean Mihail in her home village in Bukovina. A moonshine kiss seals their affection. But all too soon, Jean is ordered to the frontline. His passionate letters keep the connection alive. But when Anna must flee the site, the contact breaks off.
Their great love is fragile, damaged by war and time – just like the old studio and everyday photographs this animated documentary uses to illustrate optimism and impending loss. Anna Florea herself narrates the film: in retrospect, at the age of 91. Her warm and gentle voice reanimates the memories seemingly stored in these pictures. Those “frozen” on the photographic plates begin to move, are made to glow in oil-on-glass overpaintings, blossom and take us with them into the past.

The inhabitants of a village witness an unusual event. The religious figures that surround them come alive and leave their accustomed places. The statues step down from shrines and niches, from altars and pedestals. They turn their backs on the village. Nobody knows where they are heading and why they are departing.

Most of the people are frozen in religious adoration, but some of them overpower a statue of the Virgin Mary and smash it on the ground. The fragments of the broken statue, however, live on, and are still heading away. A young girl – born boneless and unable to move without help – manages to make contact with one of the departing statues.

Dreamy animated images in detailed henna painting and atmospheric watercolours dominate a young Spanish artist’s moving journey of discovery. In a small bookshop in India, Inés comes across the feminist-utopian science fiction story “Sultana’s Dream.” It is about the terrible revenge on men, the bookseller explains. In the slim volume she wrote in 1905, Rokeya Hossain describes the fantasy realm of Ladyland – a land in which women are self-determined and live in peace, in which they run all government affairs and all forms of education are open to them. And the men? Their place in Ladyland, the bookseller continues, is where they belong: locked up at home.

Fascinated by the literary “painting” of this place and its inventor, Inés sets out in the footsteps of the writer and teacher Hossain, who championed education and equal rights for Indian girls and women as early as the beginning of the 20th century. The trip takes the Spaniard across contemporary India. Her companions are the dreams of Ladyland – and the utterly different realities of the lives of the women she meets on her journey.