Luscious avocado plantations. Smoke rising on the horizon. Then echoes of explosions. In the “Envelope”, just before the border with Gaza, Yo, Tom, Yan, Piak and Lee work in Israeli fields. Like many other migrant workers, they were recruited from Thailand. They work for below-market wages, often seven days a week, up to 17 hours a day, to support their distant families. They are being observed by a robot snake that crawls through the fields looking for Hamas tunnels beneath the farmland. Bullet casings among the weeds, makeshift shelters in front of the barracks – a psychogeography of fear and vulnerability. Sometimes, in brief moments of leisure, the light-hearted games and the community of young men provide a distraction. On 7 October 2023, the underworld opens up and interrupts the film, which then shifts to the families of the victims. On the banks of the Mekong, the mythical snake god Naga guards the threshold between the living and the dead. An intangible, floating and empathic narrative about precarious labour movements through a military-agrarian complex.

Jan Künemund

Building bridges over and over again. That is what keeps Florian and Malene busy, because how could it be otherwise: After all, the two children live on opposite sides of a brook but want to play with each other all the time. But then the war comes – and Florian is no longer allowed to visit Malene, because she now lives in enemy country: the brook has become barbed wire. In her child-oriented cut-out adult film (and vice versa!), Anita Killi explores the different ways young and old perceive life, visually inspired by the Norwegian painter Theodor Kittelsen. The microcosms of the little ones are lovingly captured, from playing in the snow to rubbing their noses together, while Killi also directs her attention to the arbitrariness of most conflicts. “War never dies, it just sleeps from time to time”, Florian’s father says, and: It’s the adults who wake it up. But maybe the succeeding generations will come up with something new after all?

Marie Ketzscher