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 news is real? … Everyone decides for themselves.” These disillusioned lines from Veneta Androva’s fictionalised 3D animated documentary about targeted disinformation campaigns resonate. They are spoken by a share4pay user – a real-life Bulgarian platform where you can make “News Sites” sprout like mushrooms with a few clicks in order to earn money with social shares. Their content: alleged gender ideology and racist migration narratives. Androva uses the documentary form to reduce the authenticity suggested by these news sites to absurdity; her pixelated interview partners speak with AI-generated voices, a mushroom creature recites real clickbait headlines (“Romania Shows How to Treat the Gender Plague From the West”), complete with language model analysis. The effect is as eery as the message: the circulation of fake news remains unchecked; containment is virtually impossible.

Marie Ketzscher

There’s a marvellous view of Sokhumi from the roof – and it’s also possible to see the beautiful girl moving into the house across the way with her dog. In Mamuka Tkeshelashvili’s wistful, poetic stop-motion short film, the 13-year-old protagonist is enjoying a carefree summer on the football pitch and at the beach, above all when the girl is also there. But these days of innocence are soon over once he sees her fleeing pell-mell and planes shooting over the city. Mamuka Tkeshelashvili’s puppet and cutout animation remembers the 1993 Sokhumi massacre, in which Abkhazian separatists murdered up to an estimated 7000 Georgian civilians. Yet Tkeshelashvili only hints at the violence, concentrating primarily on the positive memories of the place and the feelings of longing from exile – the girl’s red hair flying in the wind or the beautiful, lovingly fashioned miniature buildings that tell of Sokhumi’s former charm.

Marie Ketzscher