What happens after abuse? Six years after the crime, the director reconnects with her grandmother – not to talk about the act itself, which everyone is aware of. She finally wants to talk about how she felt afterwards: to break the silence, to name her shame and the grief at losing her whole Colombian family – and above all, to demand recognition of her suffering.
In her first film, Matilde-Luna Perotti deals with a personal trauma shared by many women in Latin America. The memory lurks everywhere: in old home videos, in text messages, in fabrics and clothes, in the scars on her own skin. These fragments come together to form a personal and at the same time collective portrait that makes a deeply buried trauma visible – and ultimately becomes an act of self-empowerment.

Winter on Canada’s Pacific coast – a difficult season for the animal keepers at the wildlife rescue centre in Comox, British Columbia: It is hunting season. Despite massive criticism by animal welfare organisations, hunters continue to use lead ammunition. This is particularly life-threatening for the BAEA – the official Alpha 4 code used in North and Central America for the bald eagle. Because these birds of prey feed on animal carcasses left behind. Their chances of surviving lead poisoning are slim. The treatment, too, is extremely stressful for the eagles. With great patience and loving care, the keepers try to save their charges from death.
In gentle images and with respect for the suffering birds, filmmaker Terra Long observes daily life at the station, contrasting it with shots of nature – only seemingly – untouched by humans. Ultimately, this refuge raises fundamental ethnic questions: How can precisely those humans care for wild animals while preserving their dignity and wildness? And: Is the elaborate treatment any use in view of the meagre chances of a change in hunting laws?

A mobile coffee truck becomes a cinema apparatus that seems to enable the recording of what is often overlooked and even more often overheard. David Shongo’s nocturnal portrait of Kinshasa in the aftermath of the M23 violent excesses of February 2025 in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo is an idiosyncratic and undercover exploration of a fragile city that has been exposed to a lot of historic and present traumatisation and continues to be marked by instability.
To raise the question of Kinshasa’s future, the Congolese artist and composer re-interprets film-historical concepts and adds new facets: With his practice of radical listening and questioning the limits of seeing, based on strong images, complex sound and inventive performative staging, he creates his own form of “fugitive cinema”.

The painted lady butterfly travels 9,000 miles over several generations. Each generation flies to the next place without knowing the starting or end point of their route. The Hakka people, whose name translates as “guest family”, share this fate of constant movement – their identity is not tied to a specific territory but to their ancestors. The director, Hakka herself, follows her family’s migration history from their roots in northern China to Canada and India. As she traces their footsteps, she encounters Hakka from all over the world who tell their own stories of departure, adaptation, and the preservation of a unique culture.
Archive material, personal reflections, and interviews with members of the global diaspora combine to create the polyphonic portrait of a community whose language, customs, and collective memory are threatened by extinction. The film asks how identity is formed when one’s home keeps shifting – and how roots can be put down at ever new places without losing sight of one’s origin.

Doing research in Swiss museums, Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige comes across objects in storage that were collected as evidence of the life of an Indigenous Adivasi community in her country. Even though Switzerland had no colonies, it benefited from the colonial system. Between 1883 and 1913, naturalists Fritz and Paul Sarasin organised expeditions to British Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies. They explored these areas – assisted by forced labourers – and brought exotic animals, plants and artefacts, as well as human skulls and skeletons to Basel: The result was one of the largest ethnological collections in German-speaking Europe – paradigmatic of colonial violence and Eurocentric scientific pretensions. Sri Lanka demanded their return as early as the 1970s, but Switzerland refused.
Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige travels along the Sarasins’ route and, together with Adivasi representatives, campaigns once again for restitution. An obstacle course through bureaucracy and rigid museum structures begins. The film consistently follows the interdisciplinary artist and co-author of the script as she creatively and investigatively negotiates ownership issues, shedding a highly uncomfortable light on the colonial entanglements and their still existing blind spots in the global North.

Helsinki by night. A car driving through rain-soaked streets, hardly a soul in sight. Jani Peltonen uses an old camera test to repurpose the Kaurismäki-like shots for an apocalyptic scenario: The radius of the drive roughly corresponds to the area that would be affected by the shockwave of a nuclear bomb explosion. In a way, Peltonen, who works with split screens in “Equal Dust”, breaks up and rearranges the space-time-continuum. Because the street images are overlaid by the narrative of the pan-European commando exercise “Able Archer 83”, with which NATO simulated a nuclear war in November 1983. An action that not only prompted the Soviet Union to station real warheads in East Germany – the Finnish music scene, too, processed the smouldering fear in hauntingly pathetic contributions to the Eurovision Song Contest. Singer Kojo, for example, warned against closing one’s eyes – and was promptly punished with zero points. “Equal Dust” is a journey back in time to the Cold War and anticipated end of the world, but no less a document of expressive hairdos and a hurtful song competition.

A granddaughter visits her grandmother in her house in the country, her grandmother is close to 100. We never see the granddaughter, as she is the one behind the camera, and we only see the grandmother fleetingly, moving through the shadowy interiors, gathering herbs from the vegetable patch to make tea, watching a mantis perch on her hand. But this is as much a portrait of her as it is of the space she inhabits, although we never see the whole of that either, just carefully selected fragments in compositions that play with focus and shade: knick-knacks and trinkets, photographs, textures, glimpses of sky through the window, ants, butterfly wings, resting pigeons, a wasp nestled in her palm, the fur of the last remaining dog.
Sounds ebb and flow through this hushed bestiary of the everyday, the voice of the grandmother talking in voice-over of family, spirits and canine reincarnation, the noises of the places in the photos, the television blaring in the background, the different layers of rippling silence that reassert themselves when everything else goes quiet. How do you capture a whole life in just 20 minutes? By listening to its echoes in space.

We don’t see where they are at first, we just hear one of the two men speaking in voice-over, in Hebrew, the Israeli who can’t sleep while his Palestinian boyfriend tosses and turns beside him in bed, plagued by nightmares, everything is more heightened by night. As the speaker makes clear, they’re at home in Paris, their dog nestled between them. But his account only touches on that in passing, it’s more about trying to make sense of the political situation back home: a war, an ongoing catastrophe so terrible it’s impossible to truly describe. Maybe any such attempt is futile, but what else can one do?
The speaker’s turn of phrase is formidable, his words spiral and turn around on themselves, talking of horrors, protests, discrimination, but also of family, intimacy, the memory of joy. The images fold back on themselves as well, shuttling through the dark apartment but also leaving it for the world outside, metro stations, indeterminate landscapes, streets in snow. They also work with the contrast between light and dark, although darkness mostly dominates, too. Yet there is still talk of waking up in the morning, of new dawns, however intangible or impossible to reach, and the images of the bed by daylight and the man waking up in it carry infinite tenderness. What else is left to hold on to than that?

It’s hard to make out which images are from the past and which are from now, just like when the director looks into the mirror in the house of her great-grandparents and sees different generations of the maternal line reflected in it at the very same time, the same women who used to make figurines in clay and sing songs to the guitar-like vihuela. The house is in the forest, in the mountains: gnarled trunks, rushing water, verdant leaves and shimmering blooms captured on celluloid that blends colour and texture into one ravishing whole. But this natural paradise is no longer what it once was, as wildfires have scorched away the ancient oaks and the undergrowth around them.
When the man on horseback drags a wooden cross behind him through the now-barren terrain, it’s as if he’s mourning the very landscape itself. The monocultural pines set by the government are no replacement, just more fodder for the timber industry, waiting to be fed into the vast chipper whose spray of wooden fragments submerge the director’s naked body in shards and splinters. “Green Desert” is a hugely personal essay film full of beauty, anger and regret, linking the history of a family to the wider traditions that shaped their lives and the changes wrought on a specific region of Chile to a broader environmental malaise.

In the beginning, humans seem so very far away, the only sign of them the twinkling lights of Montreal on the horizon across the water. Deslauriers Island is home to one of largest colonies of ring-billed gulls in the world, and initially it feels like a realm for them alone: a whole legion of elegant white birds gathered together on the grass, flapping, crouching, calling, mating, the camera right in their midst, right down at their level, seeing as they do. But this non-human utopia is evoked in order to be progressively undermined, as markers are placed in the ground, traps set and specimens captured. Some will be released with leg rings or daubed-on markings, but others won’t be so lucky.
The sky over the landfill site is thick with beating wings and when the beaks screech as one, the sound is deafening. No wonder the voice on the radio says they’re losing control, although that hardly justifies the solution they find. Birds hunt birds in the wild, but there’s something particularly savage about seeing it be guided by human hand. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ring-billed gull was nearly hunted to extinction, but their life circle continues unabated here – who can blame nature for finding a way? Yet the stakes are different now, and the old laws no longer apply. Will the meek still inherit the earth?

The boundaries between dream, memory, cinema, and different parts of the self dissolve to ravishing effect in this latest short by Los Angeles-based Chinese artist Zhuoyun Chen. Moving woozily between diary, autofiction and free association, “It Must Be Because I Decided to Leave” is awash with half-remembered exchanges, infectiously surreal images and the narrator’s desire to make sense of things, which never quite happens. Oneiric motifs of all kinds abound: Rocks are clasped by hands or merge with faces, screens appear in windowpanes or headlights, a gleaming red sports car spins in the California desert, a shadowy figure walks into a cave, and a dog rises up from a pool in reverse, its scrabbling limbs rendered in elegant superimpositions. The narrator shuttles through thoughts of desire, family and dislocation and refers to any number of “yous” and “Is”, although they could easily be one and the same. If “we all have landscapes inside”, this is a journey through them.

The landscape presented by Randa Maroufi in the final part of her trilogy about Moroccan cities seems unreal. This is Jerada, where a coal mine once attracted numerous workers to the region. And even though the mine closed in 2001, mining is still going on – secretly and under dangerous conditions. Maroufi interweaves Super8 images of the miners and their families with 3D scans of the area. But the most impressive parts are her re-stagings of the processes and threats featuring the workers of Jerada themselves: In long shots, taken both above and below ground, hard work becomes visible: physical, persistent, carried out with the simplest of tools. Hands with shovels fill coal sacks and load them onto a converted motorbike, a few metres below men crawl through narrow shafts that can collapse any moment. In conjunction with a sophisticated sound backdrop, “L’mina” evokes an almost surreal place. At the same time, documentary images remind us that this mining area is not a walk-in diorama but reality. As Maroufi emphatically puts it in her dedication at the end: “For those who live in the shadows to enlighten us.”