When Marc confesses his love to his girlfriend Hélène, all she answers is “Later!” The timing of his confession could not be worse, as there is a whole other dimension to Hélène’s reply. Both belong to a group of activists who have just burned their mobile phones and tackled the ultimate important questions in the forest. Questions of fear, power, courage, loyalty, and doubts. Following this, they attack a rich and influential retired couple in their posh mansion, representing those guilty of the dilemma of this world in their eyes. The armed attack ends in a bloodbath. In the midst of the shootout, though, Hélène is struck with a strange kind of paralysis and soon afterwards sucked into the surrealistic maelstrom of a fatal second chance.
Canadian director and writer Félix Dufour-Laperrière says, he writes “with colours in mind, with transformations, dreamlike sequences, mental images that take shape on screen.” Hand-drawn templates unfold in a powerful symbolic 2D animation of flowing figures and silhouettes that neither shrinks from aggressively formulated messages nor from the exuberant magic of the format.

The images, whose finely chiselled materiality recalls the surface of the human skin, explore the experience of physical contact. Dark ink spots cover the paper background, disrupting its clear white colour. Flashing colours and an electrifying sound make the sensation of touch tangible. The extreme enlargement creates an intimate relationship with pigments and textures.

On 4 September 1970, a group of Vietnam veterans set out on a long march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Their goal: to convince the local population along the way of the injustice that has been going on in Vietnam for years. They did this not just with speeches by the wayside, but with shocking, unannounced and publicly performed re-enactments. Complete with uniforms and plastic machine guns, supported by extras, they thus draw attention to their own war crimes in Indochina. Both camera and tape recorder stay close to all this, capturing the reactions of passers-by and city residents. Solidarity on the one hand, vicious insults on the other. A deep divide runs through the “home front”.

Sarajevo–Rimini. This route once took ten-year-old Mirela to safety from the Bosnian War in 1992, when she was evacuated to Italy by a United Nations convoy along with a group of other orphans. Their stay was to be temporary, but no one came to pick her up. So Mirela began a new life on the Adriatic coast. As an adult, she returns to her homeland in search of a mother whom she last saw as a four-year-old, a journey accompanied by many questions: Why was she among the few who were sent to exile? Would it have been better to have stayed in Sarajevo, free of guilt? Mirela finds no clear answers. But from the traces she gathers and the threads that cross in her life, “Dom” weaves a sensitive meditation about identity and belonging.

Originally intended as an anti-drug public service announcement for local television, this 60-second film instead takes us on a trippy ride through Day-Glo colours and pop-art visuals, all melting into each other with the help of the Scanimate video synthesizer. Although one of her earliest films, it was also one of Pat Lehman’s most successful, going on to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

This visual symphony unfolds according to the principles of swarm behaviour. Digitally created clouds of dots organically flow into each other. Everything lives, breathes, is sensual and tactile, feels soft and harmonious. A warm, light sound carpet flows around the constantly moving landscape. An allusion to the cyclical nature of our life.