Kyustendil, a city in the Bulgarian mountains, was hit hard by Covid. The local hospital is probably a reasonably representative microcosm of how the medical staff dealt with the worst consequences of the pandemic. Ten years after his debut “Sofia’s Last Ambulance” (DOK Leipzig 2012), Ilian Metev returns with another film about a national health system that opposes the virus with gallows humour and individual commitment.

Metev himself was stuck in London during the shooting, monitoring from afar as co-director Teneva and her colleague Chertov collected the material and edited it alone. The focus is on the hospital staff. And if there is one main protagonist among the countless members of the cast, it’s Dr. Popov. Warm-hearted and always ready with a quip, we even often see him without a mask – the other employees are usually hidden behind protective gear. They all share a tough sense of humour to get them through the days and nights. The logistical challenges of such a film project also crop up: The people with the cameras are frequently mentioned and addressed. In this emergency community of patients, doctors and film crew they seem to be always ready to joke. But death, up in the intensive care unit, is very close.

A collage in black and white, positive and negative, with dancing lyrics, skipping thoughts and ambling sounds. Inspired by the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, this experimental homage celebrates three poets and their passion for sound recording devices: Thomas Pynchon (thought recorder), William S. Burroughs (tape recorder) and Rainer Maria Rilke (phonograph).

Liem belongs to the ethnic minority of the Sedang and lives in a remote region of Vietnam. The observing camera succinctly sketches a daily routine that’s marked more by surviving than by living. With his friends, he prepares for an expedition into the jungle, where the young men want to take time out, continue the tradition of their ancestors, become hunters and gatherers. The more twisting their paths, the deeper the film seems to enter into a different sphere.

We get to know Liem doing everyday activities. Carrying the baby in a sling, he cooks, hangs out the laundry, goes to the field. The giant loudspeakers fixed to the streetlights fill his village with official news and advertising. In his stilt house, Liem prefers to listen to Vietnamese pop music. Soon we feel the rhythm, the unique beat of this life. When Liem and his friends set out in rubber sandals and carrying backpacks, the camera follows close behind, takes their perspective. Shot on Super 16, the film captures the green tones of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, the images develop a mesmerizing depth. The rustling of leaves, the buzzing of insects, birdsong and permanent rain come together in a melodious soundscape. Suddenly time seems to stand still, the separation between screen and auditorium is lifted.

Pregnancy, birthing and parental care are strongly charged social roles. The partly absurd public discourse about them – reinforced by hyper-positive media images and stereotypes – makes natural concerns feel less and less natural. Evolutionary necessities have been turned into ciphers whose collective emotional over-forming leaves next to no space for personal experience. In this phase of life, self-awareness and external perception often diverge substantially. There is usually little room, neither for fears and doubts nor for any other emotion, outside the generally prescribed bliss. Prenatal stages of development seem pre-defined, standardised, tried and tested. Little can be done “right”, much “wrong”. Every decision for or against a pre-natal optimisation measure counts. Nothing is left to chance.
But what if chance strikes anyway? When the ultrasound diagnosis yields a painful result? How does obstetrics, obsessed with detail, handle deviations from “the plan”, how does it deal with the fact that statistically one in six pregnancies ends in miscarriage? Filmmaker and editor Irem Schwarz’s found footage collage is a haunting combination of terribly omnipresent cliché imagery that addresses these relevant questions in a voice that is more than just her own.

Insects aren’t cute and often not beautiful, but very exciting, Pepe thinks. His favourite animals are dragonflies, which can control their four wings individually and take off faster than a jet plane. But where do you still find these flying wonders? Pepe knows that many insects are dying out in Germany because they are robbed of their habitats. He wants to change that!

Why do we see certain colours even when they aren’t there? Chinese director Tang Han meticulously analyses the 100 Yuan bill, which carries a portrait of Mao Zedong, and finds that – despite official representations and general perception – the note is pink rather than red. In a serious tone and colourful, merry images she also casually upsets any number of other entrenched notions about digitalization, globalization, capitalism and gender.

An investigative examination of the colour spaces of the 100 Yuan note reveals a paradigm shift. Officially declared by the central bank to be red, the note bearing the portrait of Mao is, physically speaking, actually pink. This has consequences for China’s political narrative, as Tang Han’s uncompromisingly precise and refreshingly clever cinematic experimental setup illustrates.

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.

A brief historical summary to begin with: The Lagos International Trade Fair centre was built in the mid-1970s, intended to serve as a marketplace for the non-aligned states. Archival footage and inserts alternate abruptly. While the news images of the time are rather propagandistic in tone, the inserts supply the sober facts.

Some fifty years later, vast tracts of the exhibition halls are under water – an ideal place for ferns and other humidity-loving plants. The initially static camera begins to move. Young craftsmen have converted one tract of the giant complex into workshops: they hammer, carpenter, repair bicycles, prepare meals. There is also a lot of activity outside the rambling site with its artificial lake; people are still trading; everyone is busy with something. A woman’s voice remembers bygone days while two young men ride a bicycle through an empty exhibition hall. A building may have lost its original purpose, but new and independent life has moved in. An open, trans-historic space in the making.

Our hovering gaze circles a free-standing rock on a wide plain. The recording gets stuck. At ever shorter intervals the massive rock formation breaks out of the solidifying background until data smears and artefacts accumulate as fine digital sediment layers and congeal into new formations. The video signal interference acts like a primal force of geological history.