In an appeal to a lost friend, a first-person narrator raves about their shared future after the friend returns: fancy cars, big guns and submissive women. The fantasy soars like a bird over the Sierra, a digitally modulated landscape whose holes and glitches show that there is something basically wrong here. Game over, the playfulness turns deadly serious, the friend is in the hands of drug cartel killers. Fictional but close to reality, the film associatively assembles pop-cultural audio, video and gaming material from the internet to describe the intoxicated fascination with a perversely fetishised, violence-glorifying winner mentality. This idolisation comes up against a dead end on a web portal showing real video recordings of bestial brutality. Disarmingly clear and incredibly poignant, Oscar Asán analyses how ruthlessly a cartel divides the people of Culiacán into murderers and murder victims.

André Eckardt

What do someone’s possessions tell us about them? Sometimes the entire story of a life. That’s at least how it is for Marcel Barelli, who inherited everything in the house of his beloved Nonna after her passing. Barelli combines stop motion animation and his own video material to create a highly personal description of a person: among other things, we see knitting and sewing stuff, before the grandmother is already stuffing a sock in the very next image; she didn’t like throwing things away and always mended everything. But the objects also reveal the gaps: didn’t she love children? Where did all the toys end up? Barelli is aware of the overwhelmingly emotional power of memory which objects can unleash. Yet he also finds comfort and strength in them at the same time, such as when he finds his grandmother’s blood donor certificate, which doesn’t just reveal something about her everyday life, but also about her values. Values which are worth connecting with.

Marie Ketzscher