A new father takes his wife and daughter on a journey to his mother’s birthplace in Scotland. It is 1976 – the year in which NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 space probes land on the surface of Mars. They send images of an only vaguely explored area from a great distance, enabling a first look into the history of an alien planet. Like the NASA scientists, the small family are hoping that their journey will give them insights into the past, an understanding of the present situation and perhaps even the chance to anticipate the future.

Texts from the father’s travel diary, photos and video recordings are interwoven with visual and sound material from the NASA archives to form a multilayered narrative that navigates several decades of family history, cosmological questions and philosophical reflections. A filmic multiverse unfolds before us whose elementary particles oscillate between times and worlds, between reality and fiction.

The documentary video for the installation version of the short film “1976: Search for Life” takes us to Mars. There – between huge boulders and in the red light of our sibling planet – we find a small television set. With headphones and in an intimate atmosphere, Tess Martin shares a very personal memory of an important historical event with us.

Narrated by the incarnate ghost of a deceased real hair donor. In the post-war era, the export of real hair wigs contributed to Asia’s economic development, with Hong Kong as a major hub. In its heyday in the 1960s, “Asian real hair” was popular with wealthy U.S. women, but then the USA imposed an embargo on the product, now classified as “communist hair”. This is where the intricate and innovatively realised story begins: Starting with complex economical and sociopolitical contexts, it weaves a thread that runs through various historical and dreamlike staged levels.

Hong Kong was and is a space of in-between-ness – between East and West, between communism and capitalism. Perhaps that is why there are so many spooks in the city, one protagonist speculates. Just like the well-travelled ghost, an eternally wandering entity and contemporary witness of an imperial and colonialist past.

In the midst of a blue-violet tinted mountain range are the remains of a lonely pavilion. Accompanied by the music of Max Cooper, this setting becomes the stage of a dance performance – in which our hands play the leading roles. Intuitively we let the rhythm take them over, move them playfully, form graceful gestures. At this hypnotic place everything is possible for the dancers.

The rising sun reveals a gruesome crime. In the orange-red dawn, between the dunes and the rippling sea, a young woman is strangled to death. The victim’s neck is marked by the deep imprints of her murderer’s hands. The mother’s moving dirge – based on a poem by Percy Shelley – accompanies us as her daughter Ginevra is laid out and resurrects.

A device that can create the illusion of movement can be built by coupling the speed of a rotating disc to the recording frame rate of a camera. This so-called phonotrope is a contemporary version of the phenakistiscope. In her how-to video, Tess Martin explains how this technique works and how it was used in her film “Orbit.”

A macabre Italian children’s song tells the story of Mario, a soldier who returns from war and must learn that his girlfriend has left him for another man. Mario decides to kill her. The film picks up on the ambivalent mood of the song and reinforces its vibration in the space between blithe children’s game and brutal murder.

Twenty years ago, filmmaker Wiam Al-Zabari fled Baghdad with his family in the middle of the night. His father, a dissident former ambassador, had already escaped from Iraq and was waiting for them in the Netherlands. Since then, no one in the family has ever spoken about the events. What exactly happened was always a taboo. Now that Wiam has become a father himself, he realises that his past life is catching up with him and that more and more questions are arising, the biggest being: Why did they have to flee in the first place? Wiam wants to finally find out. For the first time, he breaks the silence and begins to research the past in dialogues with his parents and siblings. Above all he wants to prevent passing on these traumatic experiences to his son.

In this filmic family therapy, he addresses Nour, his little son, directly. Wiam promised himself and the boy this film to clear up the long-suppressed themes in a way that will allow Nour to feel firm ground under his feet when he is grown up. In doing so, Wiam is unsparingly honest with himself and his relatives and chooses a number of unusual artistic tricks. For example, he inserts himself as a director from offscreen, critically analysing his own position in the fabric of speaking and silence: an attempted inside view from the outside.

As we watch individual details and their interplay as a whole, presented on rotating discs, we get a spark of insight into the interactions of flora and fauna on earth and the elemental power of our central star, the sun. Temporality, rhythm and the functioning of film are hinted at. A look at the origins of life and the moving image.

How do you grow up on a planet that is being destroyed by humanity? This film looks for answers to this urgent question and introduces us to Bo and Luca. The close friends are enthusiastic climate activists, connected by their commitment. We follow the two teenagers for four years on their contradictory and surprising path to adulthood.

A kitchen table with several objects on it stands still. But time provides movement. A candle burns down rapidly, a photo draped on the table comes to life. It shows a young woman making a cup of tea. Old hands approach the table to touch the letter lying there. Life on the photo stands still.

Leaving home to live in a new country isn’t easy at all. Lyri moves to the Netherlands with her family and talks about her experiences. Given the choice, she would have preferred to stay in Israel. So many things are foreign and different now. What strikes her most, though, is that the children here learn to swim in their street clothes.

Without a working memory, the former sailor Jimmie is unmoored in time. Fragments of his former life and his younger self appear like islands on the horizon, glide by, disappear in the depths. The older Jimmie does not recognise himself and is frightened by the “strangers.” He gets lost in space and sinks into the empty background.

A diver encounters an injured whale. He decides to help the animal and gets a friendly look of thanks. For the space of a few seconds, the border between the two species seems permeable. The whale disappears in the depths of the ocean and leaves the diver wondering whether this was all just a projection of human hopes.

In 2002, the filmmaker moved into an apartment on the 15th floor of a Kyiv high-rise. She was twelve at the time. Today, from the safe distance of another country, she talks to people who remember the flat and the time spent together. Coming-of-Age, the love of cinema, a sense of community and the erotic charge of individual moments combine to create an image of missing home and intimacy. With every memory, we zoom a little out of the still image on screen: three windows facing southwest, a balcony facing southeast, a rooftop protected from view, a high-rise panorama. The warm and personal gaze at the sky and houses of Kyiv is mirrored in the cold attentiveness of international war reporting.

A dull underwater world filled with eerie creatures floods a bright white hospital corridor. This scenario sets the stage for a tale about an abused woman. After the rape, she finds herself not only confronted with the standardised examinations, her boyfriend’s horror and the alienation from herself: She has also lost her voice.