Into a starry sky full of coloured spots! The propellers have been revved up. Accompanied by the drone and roar of the engine, the aircraft takes off. Its mission, to be followed live: compare images, sort out, superimpose, create a visual reality of dots and pixels. A park is requested, but with how many trees? A racy car is dreamt of, but which design is sleek enough? The variables dictated by the pilot determine what appears on the monitor – sculptures of possibilities or morphed set pieces. The tank is filled with millions of continuously flowing images for an infinite number of combinations. But who controls the projected flight path?
Aurelijus Čiupas’s short film essay is a well-considered and not unironic investigation of ethical and philosophical questions. What can and should animation generated by artificial intelligence based on diffusion models do? Pilot Čiupas prescribes “a kind of artificial dementia” to the machine. We can truly watch it come to rest, come to transcendence. The world of images dissolves back into a cosmos of coloured spots.

The day is dwindling, and the world is exhausted. The hour of the great sandman has come. He enchants his clients with grains of slumber while busy helpers fluff up pillows so that everyone who is sleepy may lie softly. At some point, almost everybody is likely to sense that there are more things between night and day than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

In the passing busses and trams, people look out of the windows in disbelief. The reverse shot shows a crowd of protesters. Two dozen people perhaps, some holding signs, one shouting “Putin behind bars!” It is a symbolic image of the pathetic state of the Russian opposition. The year is 2017, the war of aggression against Ukraine is still to come. Over a period of several years, “The Last Relic” portrays people from different opposition groups: a student from the Marxist-Leninist “Left Block,” a teacher with sympathies for Navalny; a digger driver demands the redistribution of resources. These activists lack support, but not courage. One of them has just been released from prison and survived a hunger strike. The others must expect to be prosecuted at any moment.

The setting of this film is the Ural metropolis of Yekaterinburg. The bulk of the population, an insert announces, dreams of a “return to imperial glory.” Estonian director Marianna Kaat, born in 1965, has spent a considerable part of her life in the Soviet empire. She shows the majority society as a uniform crowd at military parades, contrasting it with the individuals of the opposition. Few films offer such insights into the latter’s continuing precarious situation.