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?

This new feature by American filmmaking legend Jem Cohen is like a strange cousin to his classic “Museum Hours,” another essay film given structure by fiction that swaps art for science and one time-honoured gallery in Vienna for a range of different institutions. Karl is an ageing Austrian astronomer and museum consultant. His wife Eleanor is a physicist based in the US, just like his young friend and colleague Sarah, a specialist in citizen science who is cautiously starting a new relationship. The three of them converse and hold forth on their respective specialities to mesmerisingly informative effect, but also keep returning to and interrogating the feelings that intertwine with their disciplines: politics and climate change, the uncertain future, solitude and intimacy – academic work as a pursuit for the melancholy.
Cohen’s camerawork shows them in frame, but also accompanies their voice-overs with his typical blissful digressions, wandering through museum corridors and exhibition spaces, fixing his gaze on heavenly bodies and scientific instruments, capturing city streets, oceans and landscapes, exploring and collecting with a curiosity equally studious and felt: tiny fragments, massive discoveries, stars at an infinite remove. Grasping the hugeness of the world might seem impossible, but it’s just about disentangling all the perspective: the big, the little and the far.

We are travelling back in time to the early 19th century on the south coast of England. This is where Mary Anning lives, a 12-year-old girl who is inquisitive, persistent and fascinated by fossils. She spends every free minute at the beach to look for the fossilised remains of long extinct animal species in the strata of her hometown’s coastal cliffs. Her father, too, is an enthusiast and earns a little extra for his family by selling fossils. When he disappears after the collapse of a cliff, Mary’s life is shaken. All that her father leaves behind is a mysterious drawing whose meaning Mary only gradually makes out. She is determined to uncover the secret together with unexpected allies. An entertaining and warm-hearted biopic about one of the first female palaeontologists.

About two percent of the water on our planet covers its surface in frozen form. That is more than double the volume found in rivers, lakes and the atmosphere, the bulk of our fresh water. Global warming threatens to shift this ratio dramatically. In his latest work, Nikolaus Geyrhalter finds opulent images of a world of ice and snow, conjuring up a lively idea of the impending great melt.
From 2021 to 2025, he visited snow-covered landscapes in Japan’s north-western province of Niigata, the Swiss Aletsch Glacier, and a village in the East Tyrolean mountains. In the Inuvik region in Canada, he learns that the streets are only passable during the frost period and family celebrations can only be held then. He observes how precisely constructed snow walls attract hundreds of onlookers in Japanese Toyama, how the French ski resort of Val d’Isère tries to save itself with snow cannons while ski lifts are dismantled in Austrian Dachstein. Whether it is the Vatnajökull Glacier in Iceland, which now also melts in winter, or the German research station Neumayer III on the Ekström Ice Shelf in Antarctica – Geyrhalter meets people whose lives are shaped by the forces of nature everywhere. And they all sense that they might be the last generation to live with the beauty of ice and snow.

This film grows somewhere between “forever” and “no longer”, between infinity and constraint, between absoluteness and concreteness. Everything is set in a square format, the original or pixel shape. But this square seems to be like a mirror facing another mirror, a self-referential optical illusion of infinity – with more than a grain of salt. We experience the humorous negotiation of an eternal issue of dispute among visual artists: Can a mathematically calculated vector line, scalable ad infinitum, inspire the same feelings in the beholder as a finite, imperfectly drawn line of pixels? Is the former not the visual equivalent of the neo-liberal illusion of infinite growth – shiny, but sickening? Could the mysterious pixelated moth resolve this eternal dispute? It guards the “Vectorial Superlooper” to ensure that this marvellous invention does not fall into the wrong hands.
Jon Frickey spans an arc from our absurd, finite existence to the technological inventions that shape our sense of style, our taste, and thus our life. His film is a tongue-in-cheek declaration of love to the technology and aesthetics of the past 60 years: to pixel art, video games, television series, vector monitors – and, of course, to pixels and vectors themselves.

When we consider the relationship between the real world and its representation on maps, we cannot help but notice that people tend to overestimate their shaping influence. Just because a phenomenon is represented in a very simplified form in cartography, its complexity in the real world does not diminish. And just because we erase a river, for example, from the map, even contain it and build over it in the real world, it has not disappeared. It has just become invisible.
Anna-Maria Dutoit roams the urban landscape of Montreal in search of the water veins that were once a feature of this area. Centuries of settlement and urbanization have polluted, buried, and shifted them underground. Only circling seagulls and manhole covers remind us of what lies below. Guided by some of the oldest maps of Montreal, “Vanished Past” follows the forgotten rivers of the megalopolis and explores – accompanied by a sometimes burbling, sometimes splashing soundtrack – the unique aquatic universes that unfold in its hideaways. A cursory glance may find that the element of water no longer seems to play a role in the concrete urban landscape. At least until heavy rain pours down, flooding the streets – and reminding the city of its supposedly vanished past.