A film about men and games, somewhere in the Mediterranean, directed by a Slovenian master of the playful, somewhere between speculative and pseudo-documentary form. Oily bodies in a wrestling match, hooking fingers, a wheel of cheese rolled through a village – all these are archaic occupations of the utmost importance. The filmmaker meticulously captures the events until he is overcome by a major creative block. From now on, he will experience his surroundings as part of the game. Childhood memories and the footage of the unfinished film project merge seamlessly into an ode to the absurdity of the gesture.

This film grows somewhere between “forever” and “no longer”, between infinity and constraint, between absoluteness and concreteness. Everything is set in a square format, the original or pixel shape. But this square seems to be like a mirror facing another mirror, a self-referential optical illusion of infinity – with more than a grain of salt. We experience the humorous negotiation of an eternal issue of dispute among visual artists: Can a mathematically calculated vector line, scalable ad infinitum, inspire the same feelings in the beholder as a finite, imperfectly drawn line of pixels? Is the former not the visual equivalent of the neo-liberal illusion of infinite growth – shiny, but sickening? Could the mysterious pixelated moth resolve this eternal dispute? It guards the “Vectorial Superlooper” to ensure that this marvellous invention does not fall into the wrong hands.
Jon Frickey spans an arc from our absurd, finite existence to the technological inventions that shape our sense of style, our taste, and thus our life. His film is a tongue-in-cheek declaration of love to the technology and aesthetics of the past 60 years: to pixel art, video games, television series, vector monitors – and, of course, to pixels and vectors themselves.

An infinitely growing fractal evolves into a hybrid shape that seems to consist of seawater frozen in time and liquid stone. Watching this, you find yourself in a field of tension: between an organic swirling that evokes repetitive movement sequences in nature and sterile, cold materials and patterns.

De Antonio was already forty when he became involved in filmmaking. He produced two early films of the New York Beat movement, “Pull My Daisy” (1959, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie) and “Sunday” (1961, Dan Drasin), the latter also featuring in the 2025 Retrospective. He was also one of the founding members of the New American Cinema Group, along with Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and others. “Point of Order!” became his directorial debut, the first cinema film compiled exclusively from television images. From 188 hours of material of the “Army–McCarthy hearings”, a tribunal broadcast live from the Senate in 1954 in which the notorious communist hunter Joseph McCarthy had to face an investigative committee, de Antonio distilled a farcical show trial at the end of which everyone involved looked like a convicted criminal.

Pompon the little bear is excited: He dreamt of a special tree with pink blossoms last night. His parents are bursting with pride because this is a sign. The bear cub is now ready to go out alone and find a tree for life. A new episode from the animation series based on the successful French series of children’s books, “Pompon Ours”.

Students of the State Technical University in Santiago de Chile film and accompany the “March for Life”, which was part of the September 1970 presidential elections in their country. An electoral alliance of communists, socialists and sections of the Christian centre, the “Unidad Popular”, successfully supported Salvador Allende’s bid for the presidency.

A brief historical summary to begin with: The Lagos International Trade Fair centre was built in the mid-1970s, intended to serve as a marketplace for the non-aligned states. Archival footage and inserts alternate abruptly. While the news images of the time are rather propagandistic in tone, the inserts supply the sober facts.

Some fifty years later, vast tracts of the exhibition halls are under water – an ideal place for ferns and other humidity-loving plants. The initially static camera begins to move. Young craftsmen have converted one tract of the giant complex into workshops: they hammer, carpenter, repair bicycles, prepare meals. There is also a lot of activity outside the rambling site with its artificial lake; people are still trading; everyone is busy with something. A woman’s voice remembers bygone days while two young men ride a bicycle through an empty exhibition hall. A building may have lost its original purpose, but new and independent life has moved in. An open, trans-historic space in the making.

A sentimental journey through the main market in Odesa. Pryvoz is a place of recurring myth. It is mentioned in songs and books and is truly the heart of this disorienting city with a complicated history. Neymann looks at the inhabitants with empathy: lost souls in the bodies of humans, dogs or cats. The opera soundtrack adds a sense of fatality to the old vivid market that will become reality. The city of Odesa has been under Russian fire since February 2022.

When puffins on Vestmannaeyjar leave their nest, they often get lost in the village, irritated by all the lights. Birta and Selma live on this small island a few kilometres off the coast of Iceland. Together with other young people, they have made it their mission to find the little fledglings and bring them back to the cliff the next day, where they will take their first flight.

Rich in information, fiercely timely and as dense as it is accessible, Lee Anne Schmitt’s third feature is a biography of John Brown (1800–1859), albeit one that uses the life of the famed American abolitionist as a jumping off point to narrate myriad other stories of Black discrimination and resistance that chime with his legacy. As Schmitt criss-crosses the country visiting sites of protest and remembrance marked and unmarked and referencing Frederick Douglass, Sun Ra and Nat Turner, her own feelings are always present. For, as she states at the outset, “Purge This Land” was made for her son with partner Jeff Parker, whose enveloping soundtrack channels 1960s Black heritage in tying together the film’s thrillingly heterogenous elements.

Our hovering gaze circles a free-standing rock on a wide plain. The recording gets stuck. At ever shorter intervals the massive rock formation breaks out of the solidifying background until data smears and artefacts accumulate as fine digital sediment layers and congeal into new formations. The video signal interference acts like a primal force of geological history.

Asude lives in Lower Bavaria. Her grandparents came to Germany from Turkey in the 1970s. She’s currently studying for her school-leaving examinations and, at the same time, training for her dream of becoming a kickboxing champion. Unreservedly supported by her sisters, Asude competes in the European Championship in Skopje. It is her first fight in the jersey of the German national team.

A shimmering shoal of herrings are swimming through the wide ocean when they are suddenly broken up by seagulls. Separated from the shoal, a small herring ends up all alone in a tidal pool. Looking for a way out, he encounters many other marine creatures. Some scare him. But there’s no time for this now: Only by joining forces can they defend themselves against the hungry seagulls.