Bizarre animations of strange beauty on a metal plate, set to Free Jazz. Light reflexes. Lines and circles that take on human or insect form, merge and dissolve. Sometimes a voice from offscreen gives directions, demands a new plate. Then everything starts again – but differently. The realization dawns slowly: This is an expedition to an underworld that generates silently communicating ghost lights.

A young woman attaches acoustic sensors to a tree, hammering nail after nail into the bark. Something stirs in the bowels of the earth, apparently attracted by the sound. This being, whatever it is, starts to search for its origin, gliding through tunnel systems, bizarre subterranean formations. Sometimes you see our world from below, people walking their daily paths. The soil lives! There is still a lot to discover.

In the spring of 2022, security guards in Moscow are tense. Under the guise of a film competition on the architecture of the city, Yana Osman and Anton Khamchishkin are permitted, if nothing else, to film the battlements of the Kremlin wall. But how to speak of the attack when you have to say “special military operation”? How to create pictures of resistance when filming any protest is forbidden? By pondering swallows and mathematical catastrophe theory, for example.