“Are you with us or against us?” Nothing less lies in the air, unspoken. No nuances, no discussions, hardly any choice. Did the tired man expect such life decisions after work? Unlikely. He just wanted to chill out and watch mindless television when suddenly an alien world on the screen catches up with him in the comfort of his home: A cult-like community lives next door, their behaviour ape-like, their faith fanatical, determined to convert him. Their flat is decorated with forests and deserts. Anyone who tries to look behind the painted wallpaper, to separate scenery from reality, commits treason and deserves banishment or death. Plato’s Cave Analogy in a radicalised version for the 21st century.
Freedom and truth or stability and a sense of belonging? Is the price of accepting a distorted reality just to be allowed to live too high? And most of all: Is there an alternative worth living? The world outside, behind the window, remains vague, its threats only implied. In this parable about passivity, curiosity and free choice, Alexandre Sousa touches on the urgent questions of our time: questions of isolation, echo chambers and the impossibility for humans to stay unpolitical. Do we even have a chance to resist?

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?

It sprawls, cracks, bursts: The balcony of two flatmates is slowly but steadily overgrown by a red climbing plant with evil-looking tubers. And our flatmates? Sit in the middle, stoically smoking, ignoring the bursting windows behind them. There was a funny rain – but not water.
With this poignant and charged one-take idea and beautifully realistic character design, Stella Hood examines the dilemma of the eternal spectator: Here are two figures who register that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world but simply continue with their daily routines. Who neither get worked up nor wonder nor take action. And whose lethargy is hilarious, not least because it is an uncomfortable reminder of our own inaction. What global crisis could the two be ignoring so nonchalantly? Stella Hood leaves this open, even though the plants make climate change an obvious choice. In any case, a parcel delivery is expected. Have a look downstairs? Sure, “but not today.” “Nah, not today,” the other one replies. “Perhaps tomorrow, we’ll see.”

The Indonesian word “bendungan” can have various meanings. It is a term for very different structures that can contain, hold back, or block water, a dam for example, an embankment or shoreline stabilisations on rivers and oceans. For this experimental work, Jee Chan, a representative of an artistic practice between (dance) performance and expanded choreography, has talked to three persons who live near water in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Both countries are linked by the European colonisation of Southeast Asia and the ensuing crimes. Each of the incidents shared in this film reflects a different perspective on this period and its consequences, tells another story without seeking explicitly to “write history”.
Jee Chan addresses the question of how memory and knowledge become manifest not only in our memory but also in our socio-spatial environment, in waterscapes and the human body. Using choreographed gestures in tranquil long takes, oral history, and interventions in space, they make memory tangible as a multi-layered activity tied to its environment.

The old oak sways precariously. A grumpy badger has built his den in its roots. Surrounded by countless books, he spends his time reading and nothing can disturb his peace. But one day a caterpillar eats its way through his library. He angrily tries to drive away the intruder but fails. Perhaps the time has come to leave his den?

In 1885, two boys came across a large collection of Chumash Indian religious artefacts in a cave in California’s San Martin Mountains. Later named Bowers Cave, it is now located on a landfill site. Lee Lynch and Lee Anne Schmitt’s graceful, protean short braids together a panoply of different texts and images to unearth the different layers to this all-too American story and allow its wider implications to resonate: photos of museum exhibits given their Chumashan names in voice-over, historical quotes that move across views of contemporary industrial activity, Indigenous figures rendered as bright plastic toys, the mouth of the cave and the markings carved into its walls.

Lee Anne Schmitt’s first feature-length essay tours through California’s former company towns, which originally sprung up to house those working in the state’s primary industries and later slipped into dereliction or oblivion with the arrival of globalisation. Ghostly shots of decaying homes and dilapidated facilities rub up against vistas of verdant nature and open horizons, just as tales of prejudice and exploitation intermingle with thwarted utopian dreams. Augmenting her own ravishing 16mm footage with archive material, historical photographs and contemporary radio soundbites, Schmitt scours this hybrid landscape like a beachcomber for all the ideological traces it holds, whereby no story nor detail is too small to be excavated.

The capybara family live peacefully among the reed islands near a small farm when suddenly a shot rings out – hunting season is open. Alarmed and scared, they try to shelter in the chicken-coop, but the rooster is suspicious and drives the strange animals away. Still, the capybara child and the chicklet are curious about each other. Their friendship has unexpected consequences.

Made at the start of the pandemic, Lee Anne Schmitt’s most recent short contrasts the tranquillity of nature with a sense of underlying dread at the state of the world, even if the former is hardly immune from the latter. The lush leaves, lithe stems and blooms of all shapes and colours seen through frames both round and rectangular feel in perfect harmony with the gentle clang of the wind chimes, until Schmitt’s voice interrupts the calm to tell of how they decided to pack the car and leave. The recurring shot of a forest, with clouds slowly billowing forth in the gap between the trees. Fog or smoke? “Nothing’s where it’s supposed to be”.

When Marc confesses his love to his girlfriend Hélène, all she answers is “Later!” The timing of his confession could not be worse, as there is a whole other dimension to Hélène’s reply. Both belong to a group of activists who have just burned their mobile phones and tackled the ultimate important questions in the forest. Questions of fear, power, courage, loyalty, and doubts. Following this, they attack a rich and influential retired couple in their posh mansion, representing those guilty of the dilemma of this world in their eyes. The armed attack ends in a bloodbath. In the midst of the shootout, though, Hélène is struck with a strange kind of paralysis and soon afterwards sucked into the surrealistic maelstrom of a fatal second chance.
Canadian director and writer Félix Dufour-Laperrière says, he writes “with colours in mind, with transformations, dreamlike sequences, mental images that take shape on screen.” Hand-drawn templates unfold in a powerful symbolic 2D animation of flowing figures and silhouettes that neither shrinks from aggressively formulated messages nor from the exuberant magic of the format.

“Can we be moved by the disappearance of rhinos if we have never experienced the feeling of a butterfly walking on our hand?” Marcel Barelli asks not without pathos, but hitting the mark, in his animated manifesto. He is quoting Daniel Pauly’s Shifting Baseline Syndrome Theory: We humans always measure normality by our own experience and not by historical changes and therefore tend to accept environmental destruction. This is not the only allusion in Barelli’s compact three-minute-film: He references the “sixth extinction”, the current human-caused extinction of the species, and the hourglass symbol of the Extinction Rebellion movement. His film, however, which should definitely be understood as a call for active resistance, embeds these reflections artistically.
With his evaporating water animation on paper, Barelli has chosen a simple and consistent animation technique whose ephemeral character perfectly captures species extinction and oblivion. Archive material is added. Unlike the “Cinétracts” pamphlet films from 1968 that he admires, but just as forceful, he has chosen a contemporary, personal approach. He touchingly weaves his theses into his own biography: Family pictures point to a time when Barelli himself “played with dinosaurs and ate chicken”.

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.