The account of a journey through an imaginary city, filmed along China’s new trade routes. Like the fictionalized Marco Polo from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, the traveller in this film talks of worlds that resemble familiar places but follow their own, sometimes seemingly incredible rules. The observations condense into a meditation about the nature of cities and the transformation of the concept of globalization.

The foreign visitor’s voice sounds muffled, as if it were coming out of the cave whose interior views open the film. Time and again, the eye returns there – but the fluorescent rock faces soon turn into the sparkle of distant galaxies, the narrow confines of the cave indistinguishable from the vastness of space. It is a symbol of the decoupling of sign and meaning, of “real” and “false”, of sensual impressions and their positive geographical allocation that pervades the film: Daft Punk perform in front of a Chinese shopping mall; the Eiffel Tower stands first in a housing estate, then, folded up to a fraction of its size, in view of Big Ben and Tower Bridge.

Riots and protests at an Indian film school, told in letters written by student L to her lover K, in which she reflects on what’s happening around her. While government forces gradually push back the rebellion, L realizes that she will never receive an answer because K belongs to a higher caste. The anonymous lines are wistful echoes of a love tragedy in times of the resurgence of a nationalistic class society.

Director Payal Kapadia steeps the visual material, compiled from a variety of sources and testifying to long, draining nights of protest, but also to great determination and a youthful exuberance, almost consistently in grainy black and white. Even mobile phone or surveillance camera footage are thus aesthetically related to 16mm student films from past decades. But against this contrast the immediate, unfinished nature of what is shown becomes all the more apparent, referencing the complex dialogue between a fragile memory and a tumultuous present that goes on in the film. A present in which questions of artistic representation, but also of personal responsibility, must be renegotiated.

Perth has broken off contact with Poon. What’s left are images showing the two men’s sex life. Perth was Poon’s twenty years younger cinematographer. His images, as impressive as they are intimate, contain the beginning and end of a relationship which Thunska Pansittivorakul confronts again for “Avalon”. A painful look back that raises existential questions and is immediately affecting.

“In Thailand, sex is considered shameful, sinful, disgusting, and not to be spoken of in public. Sex is a personal and private mystery, revealed only to those who engage in it together”, Thunska Pansittivorakul comments his film in which he liberally subverts precisely this taboo. It shows not only two men who meet and unite in explicit poses – Adolf Hitler and King Rama VII, too, show up at a Berlin airport, the tender serenade of a Thai prince (said to be an expression of his unrequited love for a foreign princess) enters into a dialogue with the exuberant electronic compositions of the Thai musician Space360. And time and again the planes denoting distance and leave-taking fly by on the horizon. “You used to like my cock more. Don’t you remember?”