Butterfly Disaster

The only things they left behind were their personal belongings. They speak volumes about what kind of people they were. What they liked. Who was close to them. What hobbies they had. A film without words. Footage of objects belonging to people who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of the island of Lampedusa in 2013 and 2015 - people whose lives were extinguished for good.

At the funeral of her grandmother, Yanlin, a young Chinese girl, learns that the deceased was a medium – and was possessed by a spirit named Gong. The film is Yanlin’s personal confessional – she never believed in the existence of miracles, but is now becoming interested in the world of spiritualism and finding out who Gong was in order to understand her grandmother better.

Urbanism versus social entropy – working with this contrast, the film attempts to create an extreme portrait of one city district and one era. This experimental video full of unsettling mental and visual noise uses editing techniques based on computer algorithms to create a suggestive demonstration of the decline of the modernist idea.

This film gives one of the many refugees who were unjustly imprisoned in detention centers located close to European borders a chance to tell his story. His horrifying experience is reflected in the static, well-composed, deep focus shots, which reveal traces of lingering suffering in the abandoned buildings.

The film’s creator, in the role of an earthling walking the streets of Paris, asks the eternal question: Are we alone in the universe? While attempting to find the truth and therefore quiet the constant musings, the filmmaker holds interviews with astrophysicist Nicolas Prantzos, science historian Florence Raulin Cerceau, and sociologist Pierre Lagrange.

The films confronts two different views of the execution of General Ion Antonescu, Romania’s leader during the Second World War. On one side is silent black-and-white footage of the execution as recorded in 1946 by cameraman Ovidiu Gologanl; on the other are scenes from a biographical film shot in 1994 by director Sergiu Nicolaescu.

A majestic mountain range rises over a Norwegian town engulfed in darkness. The stormy sea laps at its shores. A thick snow is falling. The town’s inhabitants, almost motionless in their existence, are like creatures in hibernation. The camera’s static shots resembling photographs are woven together into an experimental documentary on life in Skaland.

A personal documentary about writing two diaries and finding a lost childhood friend who once moved with her parents back to her native China. Static shots of the streets of a Chinese metropolis and its surrounding natural beauty alternate with retrospective scenes from the Argentine homeland, suggestively drawing the viewer into the girl's loneliness in an unfamiliar environment.

In a Moscow apartment, Andrei Tarkovsky’s sister and brother-in-law remember the famous filmmaker. A film-collage consisting of family photos, visual impressions, narrative scraps, and vague and confusing memories reveals neglected fragments from the life of the Russian artist against a background of ambient music.

An essay filmed against the backdrop of lyrical images of feather plucking or drawing with chalk presents the clerical orders of Islamic women and how they rein in their impure desires. As a subversive element of Islamic fundamentalism, the director recites a poem by Iranian feminist writer Forough Farrokhzad.

The director revises a TV report which a local TV station shot with him and his family on the Rosh hashanah holiday in 1974. In the footage which seemed as an expression of interest in the Jewish culture at the time it was created, the author discovers antisemitic and racist tendencies. The title refers to a zoo where domesticated and tame animals can be fed and petted by the visitors.

A film about one of the many forms of love, shot sensitively and without pathos. Daniela and Fouad met purely by chance. She is alone and he needs a residence permit. Over time, their pragmatically motivated relationship weaves the two protagonists into a fragile web of intimacy. But Fouad’s professions of love start to be a hindrance for Daniela.