Can a state of emergency become normality? Is everyday life possible despite the apocalypse? Bohdan would reply with a “yes” and a calm smile. He lives in Nikopol, Ukraine, on the former Kakhovka Reservoir, which dried up rapidly after the Russian army destroyed the dam in 2023. Like most of Nikopol’s inhabitants, Bohdan has adapted to the constant bomb alarms and nearly daily bombardments – an unbelievable mental achievement which Anastasiia Bonadyha also captures using sound design and music, transforming it in the process: a music box plays a Viennese waltz, the howling sirens turn into the drawn-out tone of a shofar horn. Bohdan’s serenity and optimism are deeply rooted in his faith. As he puts it, he’s not scared of death, he will come to God anyway. Living and enduring, as long as possible: shot on a Super 8 camera, Bonadyha’s film is a moving time capsule, a moment of hope amid the impositions of the ongoing war.

Marie Ketzscher

Cara terra, dear Earth! This sensual cinematic love letter is directed to the Earth, to the fields of the Arvaia Cooperative close to Bologna to be more precise. There, they sow, harvest, water and tend to the plants with dedication and without the use of large-scale industrial machinery. People here are just fleeting presences: Emma Harris places the visual focus entirely on the flora, from the soil to the buds, from wide shots of the horizon to the overlapping branches and leaves which become just more abstract structures to joyfully lose oneself in. Her loving, precise gaze is also captured in textual form: delivered by two voices, the love letter is not just a huge thank you to the Earth, but also the expression of a desire that humans don’t work against, but rather with nature in the future. It’s entirely in line with these ethical, agroecological considerations that “Errabonda” was made by way of analogue processes low in harmful substances.

Marie Ketzscher

Since the Kosovo War over 25 years ago, Mitrovica has been a city divided along ethnic lines. The north is primarily inhabited by Serbs, the south is Albanian. Everywhere in the city, there are impressive, yet dreary ruins with blossoming cherry trees before them: the war and the division it caused are at once omnipresent and invisible. In his poetic experimental film, Marko Grba Singh captures this paradox in static shots. With no dialogue, but featuring two wonderful poems by Latif Berisha and Aida Šečić Nezirević, the film conveys the experience of saying goodbye to one’s own mother and painful, enduring loss in general – with trilingual subtitles reflecting the geographical divide: Serbian at the top, Albanian at the bottom, and English in between. Right in the middle of it all, left alone with the historical and urban heritage of their mothers and fathers, are two young people who seem lost, standing alone in the landscape. It makes no difference in which part of the city one might now place them.

Marie Ketzscher