The teacher introduces the new classmate. Nobody pays attention. But yikes, the boy has an elephant’s head! The whispering starts immediately, pictures are scribbled, nobody wants to sit next to the new kid. Only one of the pupils seems fascinated by the elephant boy. They play together in the schoolyard and discover things they have in common. Will the others’ mockery separate them again?

In 2018, a user called AnathematicAnarchist published a suicide note in an online forum for incels – a subculture of heterosexual men whose self-pity, misogyny and fantasies of violence dominate the internet in many places and trigger offline actions in some. Did he really take his own life? Is America responsible for his death, as he claims in his text? A search for clues in the darkest corners of the net, an essay about pain and loneliness in the age of algorithms.

A door that has been closed for seventy years serves as a MacGuffin in Mila Turajlić’s double portrait of her mother and her mother country of Yugoslavia. That very door has divided the bourgeois family apartment ever since Tito’s communists assigned several rooms to proletarians in need of shelter. Srbijanka Turajlić never cared a fig for her neighbours. But when Serbian nationalists began to threaten the unity of her country, she turned into a fierce opponent of the Milošević regime. In a virtuoso montage of archive material and conversations with her mother, the filmmaker recaps the latter’s development while gaining a new perspective on the time of her own youth.