On April 4, 2025, thirty-eight minutes before noon, the Korean Constitutional Court removed President Yoon Suk Yeol from office. Black-and-white footage cut into vertical patterns and rotating targets captures the moment the verdict was announced and the vibrant atmosphere in the streets of the capital city of Seoul. The image, stretched in time into geometric structures, is accompanied by a noise track of collective emotion.

A self-reflective monologue accompanying images of loneliness draws us into an inner world composed of fragments of dreams, memories, and unfinished books, telling a fragmented story of loss, longing, and desire.“I can sometimes hear my house breathing through my mouldy walls. I try to look at the sky and the trees. And they look back at me with contempt.”

Kawaguchi's Aether follows on from his earlier film Air (1992), in which he enlarged 8 mm film material, breaking down the image to the level of individual grains and transforming it into a painting. Now he replicates the experiment through a different medium: a digital camera captures a girl walking away in slow motion, and artificial intelligence transforms the enlarged image, finding patterns in the visual noise and thousands of faces in the blurred image. The immortalization of a single happy moment is transformed into a meditation on digital visuality. “When the deterioration progresses and the loss of information exceeds a certain threshold, an image ‘imagined’ by the AI ​​appears. […] This new ‘noise’ can be said to be closer to an ‘illusion’ in the visual recognition process within the brain. However, in the sense that images are essentially ‘imitations’ of reality, this can be said to be the very nature of images.” — author's commentary

The amnion – the fetal membrane protecting the embryo – becomes a metaphor in the film for an intimate space where pain can be shared and a path to healing sought. This sensitive portrait of three women whose lives have been marked by sudden separation is carried from the outset by a meditative soundtrack that shapes an environment in which personal experience becomes expressible. Ritual gestures – traditional costumes, cooking together, hugging – create a protective shell that allows pain not only to be expressed and shared, but also transformed.“True healing simply means opening yourself up to the truth of your life.” — from the film’s accompanying material

When director and ethnologist Hana Nováková encountered an elk, it changed her life. And she wasn't the first. For centuries, people across continents and cultures have been fascinated by this ancient totem animal, one of the largest mammals in the northern hemisphere. Whereas in the past they wanted to conquer it, today they tend to listen to it. The director's cinematic odyssey is the result of several years of searching for the secrets of the moose. It leads from Czech forests through a Russian domestication station to the territory of the indigenous peoples of Canada. A collage of stories told from personal, spiritual, and scientific perspectives shows the moose as a guide between worlds, a symbol of balance and renewal, and a possible answer to the question of how we can heal our relationship with nature.“Filming animals across the planet is an extraordinarily epic undertaking—all the more so when it involves a ‘process film,’ i.e., the unfolding observation of events whose outcome we often cannot predict, even though we know for certain that they were triggered by the filming itself.” — Hana NovákováSource: Dok.revue

Super 8 footage of hunting and other pastimes from Peruvian archives sinks into absorbing visual whirlpools that absorb both the bodies depicted and the viewers' gaze. This tribute to the legendary Our Trip to Africa (Unsere Afrikareise, 1961–1966) by Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Kubelka, from which this film takes its soundtrack, was created as one of the “variations on intimacy” – a collective project of the MUTA International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation in Lima. “The film explores the lingering spectres of colonialism and the eerie contradictions of tourism, echoing Kubelka’s radical montage techniques while probing the politics of vision and presence.” — Péter Lichter

A collage of detailed shots of organic textures, tangles of fibres, and swarms of light vibrates with the mystery of life in all its complexity, fragility, and unknowability. Inspired by research into the rhythm of firefly flickering, which is invisible to the human eye, this computer-animated film straddles the line between scientific mockumentary and essayistic horror, suggesting that one form of existence may gradually give way to another. “Something unknown lies beyond the human perception of light.”

Noam Shuster-Eliassi, an Israeli stand-up comedian with mixed roots, has become both a beloved and hated celebrity. She and her Palestinian friend Ranin were raised in the “friendship village” of Neve Shalom (Oasis of Peace) and presented to the world as an example of possible peaceful coexistence. The settlement has been visited by Hillary Clinton, Jane Fonda, and the Dalai Lama. But that's not enough for Noam—as an adult, she decides to make a real impact and fight for peace. Despite the power of politically incorrect humor, music, and social media, however, she finds that she is unable to eradicate her own country's dehumanizing war machine or the global view of genocide in Gaza.“The name of my show was born as a joke. As a way of coping with reality. I wanted to poke fun at the approaches to peacebuilding in the Middle East. It's more like a feel-good industry than lived reality. Many years after being nothing more than a childish advertisement for peaceful coexistence, I said enough is enough!”

The third walking film, commissioned by the Venice Biennale contemporary art exhibition, transforms both the human figure and kitchen appliances into an art installation. The sound of rice cooking, which accompanies the footsteps of a monk in a red hood, is a ghostly reminiscence of the breath of the director's dying mother, bringing together the physicality of the living and the dead.

The Distant Early Warning Line (DEWLine), an extensive chain of radar stations built by the US and Canada during the Cold War, was intended to detect a possible nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. The video is based on digitized 8 mm films from 1956, which capture the movement of massive military equipment into the pristine Arctic landscape of the Aleutian Islands and the everyday life of workers operating in Inuit areas. Algorithmic interventions in the rewritten images create phantoms of the landscape, people, and military installations. Traces of temporary human presence are gradually overlaid with abstract layers of technological vision.“Lavatelli transforms the 8 mm footage to shift between human perspectives and the inscrutable point of view of technology, presenting an apocalyptic vision as though the worst has already happened. The abstracted, melting, flickering textures evoke radioactive poisoning and atomic destruction. Human figures emerge and vanish, consumed by forces far beyond human control.” — from the accompanying material to the film

A deferred desire that warms but does not burn permeates the slow pace of this tender confession in 16 mm format. A poetic dialogue in two languages, recited by a single voice, forms another layer of the image. Inspired by Marguerite Duras' novella The Malady of Death, the film transforms thoughts of the sun, the body, love, and finitude into the rhythmic concealment and revelation of a landscape in which details appear only thanks to the flickering of solarization—a technique that involves a brief flash of light during film development.“A big dark opening admits the sound of the sea – always the same black rectangle, never any lighter. But the sound of the sea does vary in volume.” — Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death

The exposed bowels of the earth in a former limestone quarry near Maastricht reveal layers of rock dating back 66 million years, when this part of the planet was covered by a tropical sea inhabited by mosasaurs. The slow rotating movement of the camera, simulating a wide field of view, is accompanied by a smooth transformation of the colour spectrum—from black and white to muted grey-green tones to sharp neon colours—which conveys to the audience a vision different from that of humans. The images were captured by a multispectral camera during three time intervals of the day; the panoramic time-lapse photographs were then combined into a false-colour composition consisting of two near-infrared layers and one ultraviolet. “Most people know false colour photography from NASA/ESA satellite imagery. It is normally used to detect forest fires, deforestation or floods or monitor crop health and earth’s carbon cycle from spacecraft. Colours are assigned to different wavelengths that human eyes cannot normally see, invoking a sort of extraterrestrial, alien viewpoint.” — Michiel van Bakel