For thirty years, Sofía Brockenshire’s father travelled the world as an official of the Canadian Immigration Service, his family always by his side. Diaries and other contemporary documents show the numerous relocations, the destinations in South Korea, India, in South and Central American countries. The result is a detailed mosaic of memories and audiovisual snippets that tries to take not only the civil servant’s perspective, but also that of his wife and children.

When asked where they originally came from, the Brockenshire kids answer cleverly: from the suitcases. Because they travel with them year after year, always prepared to have to leave a place they just moved to. The life of the family is determined by the Canadian authorities, they seem to have practically no say in the matter. Neil Brockenshire’s views on his professional career are ambivalent: full of gratitude and certain to have helped people, but also thoughtful and occasionally resentful. In her film, Sofía Brockenshire re-assembles what was scattered across the globe over the decades: photos, thoughts, desires. “The Dependents” is a personal portrait and something of a reflection about the existence as a professional expat in a world that has no borders for some and nothing but obstacles for others.

On an uninhabited island off the Mexican Pacific coast, members of the army do their uneventful duty. The film watches drills and everyday routines, but mainly the breaks which they spend playing board games in the shade of trees, in hammocks, swimming, flying kites or doing karaoke. The peaceful environment, however, does not hide the violent reality of their country which they are always confronted with, even out here.

In this paradisiacal seeming island landscape, the life marked by gang wars which these young men and women escape for an indeterminate time is visible only in metaphorical images, for example when the calm ocean surges up or when an octopus caught at the beach is slaughtered with bare hands. But in the conversations, the self-descriptions of the military men and women, everything revolves around the reality they grew up in: the brief moment that determines which side you’re on, the constant game of hide-and-seek, kin liability, the cruel consequences of wrong decisions. In her first feature-length documentary film, which is carried by the tension between the visible and the invisible, Mariana Flores Villalba wisely chose not to show the event but its effect.

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.