“It’s nice here, let’s play,” says Fakhri, holding a small loudspeaker for Fadil, the violinist. But there is no audience. The two men are standing in the ruins of Mosul. Three years of occupation by the Islamic State terrorist militia have left the old town almost completely destroyed. Along with the buildings, the 8,000-year history and culture of the second-largest Iraqi city seemed to have been wiped out forever. Life returns slowly. Art treasures are being restored, there are theatres, music again, and Fakhri’s small private museum where he collects anything he can lay his hands on: wooden doors, bronze figures, soap from1910, a ventilator. He has already amassed 7,000 exhibits and is especially fond of an ancient portal with two lions. Damaged, but perhaps still salvageable, it sits enthroned in the ruins of Bashar’s parents’ house like a peace time relic. Bashar visits it almost daily, hoping that reconstruction is possible. But Fakhri turns out to drive a hard bargain – he wants this portal at all costs …
With a steady hand, Kurdish-Norwegian director Zaradasht Ahmed tells a deeply human story, intertwining the darkest and lightest side of the species: the mania of destruction and the strength to go on.

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.

The carelessness of Western consumer society follows the absurd conviction that humans can live independently of nature. The earth’s resources are being used up without asking how they can be replenished. This VR parable tells of a past in harmony with what sustains, surrounds and nourishes us. We find not only devastation and destruction, but also hope.

Welcome to the Anthropocene. Welcome to an age entirely shaped by humanity’s actions. This multiplayer VR ritual arranges a meeting with Mother Nature. We get the chance to become reconciled with her, re-establish lost connections to the world and re-achieve some harmony with the earth and ourselves.

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.

The semi-autobiographical account of a European plantation manager on Sumatra during Dutch colonial rule becomes a starting point for reflections on the structure of the plantation itself. An essay about local tobacco and rubber cultivation, the construction of skin colour as a social category and the "tropic fever” which rises slowly but inexorably, edited from archive material dating from 1890 to 1930.

Very few films have made use of the extensive material shot by the colonists in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Those who took up the task, like “Mother Dao” or recently “They Call Me Babu”, did so from a Dutch perspective. “Tropic Fever” is the first feature-length film from Indonesia that appropriates that stock, using photos, documentary silent film footage, home movies and feature films as well as development plans from the archives of the former colonial power, along with the report of a Hungarian who managed a plantation on Sumatra in the 1920s. Mahardika Yudha, Robin Hartanto Honggare and Perdana Roswaldy impressively demonstrate how forests and swamps turned into rigidly organised agricultural areas and how the plantation and its structure became the foundation of the colonial project as such. Suddenly the assumption that “tropic fever” arises from the heat seems doubtful.