The sound of an alphorn echoes in the mountains while glaciers are dripping. Far away, on an oceanographic boat, researchers probe the invisible seabed. Geological bodies of salt and ice emerge from the digital depths of a software. They melt and disintegrate in the hands of scientists.

When night falls, the city exists only in halos. Vigil or guardian, you must keep watch among the shadows, confusing tiredness with sleep, night after night, scrutinising the darkness even if it means opening a breach in it and stirring the invisible.

Wang Xilin, 86, is one of China's most important modern classical composers. During the Cultural Revolution he was the target of severe persecution, enduring beatings, imprisonment and torture. With excerpts from his Symphonies, he revisits for this film some of the horrifying events that still live on in his memory as testimony to an era that saw the dehumanization of the entire Chinese nation.

The world is alive, but maybe without mirrors and images, none of it would exist. The blind create images in a different way – with sounds, textures and experiences. When you enter the rabbit hole, imagination plays the main part.

L’éléphant s'évapore is an absurd film mixing symbols and metaphors, embodying a relationship between cinema and theatre, so to make a work exist as if in a game.

The director creates a parallel, a causal relationship between the young man Chang (elephant in Thai) and an inflatable 3D elephant: when Elephant dances, the 3D elephant inflates; when he stops dancing, the elephant deflates.

All the parallel worlds unite, becoming one dimension. The inflatable elephant reappears on a film set: the electricity is cut off, the film set and the crew disappear: the real world disappears, leaving the place to the 3D elephant, free of any support, and to the voice-over which takes control, like in a game.

They spin, wobble, shake and leap. Out of the corner of my eye, I see bottles being knocked over, then I see my hands trembling, rejecting the food they were raising to my mouth only a moment ago. We can’t help ourselves, the dance contaminates us, transports us and intoxicates us in a swirl of hair, sweat and feathers. Some scream, others wet themselves. The village is on its knees. The feet pound the arid ground, the storm sets the tempo.

How to cope with a horrific event? In Still Static, filmmaker and visual artist Adam Kaplan presents two people who have experienced something ghastly. One is a cameraman who says he was “at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He was filming at a gathering, probably a party, when suddenly something happened that caused all hell to break loose. The cameraman describes in detail the human misery he witnessed. The images, flashes and visions were burnt into his retina, and the impact on his life has been huge. He has become someone else, and has never left home since.

Kabylie, in the north of Algeria, is a region where Berber culture is still very much alive. The residents know that life can be hard, but last summer was exceptional: fires reduced entire hillsides to ashes, and even ancient olive trees perished.

In an Argentina divided between a deep conservatism and an unprecedented momentum in feminism, the film delves into the political journey and intimate lives of Claudia and Violeta. Trans women who identify as transvestites, the fight they lead with their comrades against the patriarchal violence is visceral and embodied. Convinced of their roles at the center of an ongoing revolution that intersects with so many struggles, in defiance of the old world they redouble their energy to invent a new present, to love and stay alive.

Jean lives as a hermit in a forest. From his cabin, he listens to and records the sounds of the animals that inhabit the surrounding area. One night, he hears the cry of an unknown animal. Along with Mana, a young girl who sings with the birds, he goes in search of the mysterious creature.

In the shadow of a colonial past and a neo-capitalist present, Inti, Jai and Pauline are searching for their place in a world that was not made for them. As they roam the neighbourhood looking for somewhere to settle, they question their parents about faith, spirituality, roots and their experiences of migration. They decide to occupy an empty bank building in order to fill it with their memories, dreams and role play. A portrait of our time that oscillates between documentary, performance art and surrealism.

Filmed in Amazonas in 2021, on Estrada Fantasma BR-319, Transamazônica BR-230 and in the real city of Realidade, “Curupira and the Machine of Destiny” documents the encounter in the present time between a curupira and the incarnate ghost of Iracema, a character in the movie “Iracema – an amazon sex”. Open as wounds during the civic-military dictatorship that entangled Brazil in the cries of order and progress, the asphalt rebars that crisscross the country were built, destroyed and are now drowning in a process of reconstruction. Warm ruins of an addicted future. In love, Iracema ghost sets off at the crossroads of the straight roads of the Amazon to find Curupira and avenge the future.

A night doctor walks through a village invaded by the Wohlfahrtia Magnifica fly. Indoor and outdoor, winter tourist activities in Bessans rub shoulders with the rurality of local residents.

Béton des Anges is about the relationship between Sam and Joey, two sisters, pulled apart by the darkness of a fatal night, where Joey disappears in a nightclub. Forgotten, pushed to the edge of memory in the pictures Sam captured of her, Joey returns as a ghost.

In a parallel universe where Mies Van der Rohe’s pavilion is transformed into a service station in the middle of the desert, a white cat lives a peaceful life. Its daily existence is built around habits and it is perfectly at ease with that. A disturbing companion, like a maleficent double, warns it of an imminent threat and the reality seems very different. Bunches of grapes placed on a bench evaporate as if by magic, ushering in the threatening arrival of a giant fugu fish. Marble becomes steel, glass becomes fabric, brick becomes wood. About these unexplained phenomena, the cat chats freely in its scatty, casual way. It is determined to stand at the frontier between reality and fiction. A tragi-comic quest for identity, at the intersection of the surrealist worlds of Lewis Carroll, the light of Edward Hopper and the memes of the post-digital age.

The main character, Ewa, is a young woman at early-stage career of a medical professional. She is taking up training in a futuristic looking Simulation Center, where she practices her skills by participating in life-like simulations, impersonating medical mannequins and role-playing. At some point, she starts losing recognition between experience and simulation. Suffering from insomnia and paranoia, she faces situation where she has to find her way to differentiate reality from fiction.

Posing, selfies, and the imaginary freedom through a journey into a girl teen's practises on social media. The desire to exist only as an image collapsed when she lost the control over her avatar. From a distance, Anhar casts two girls who are shooting and acting for the movie as fictionalized versions of themselves. Exploring and hovering between private and public life.

Jean-René is a retired workman who has lived in Mâcon, France, since emigrating from Reunion Island at the age of 17. Today, for the first time ever, the quiet man recounts his story to his daughter. His journey is interspersed with enigmatic dreams and pains that are rooted in the wounds of the French colonial past.

3D reconstruction of my grandparents' kitchen where we had dinner together every Sunday and talked about death. Kitchen.blend is a film about grief, created almost entirely inside a Blender computer graphics software.

Barzakh is a term of Persian origin which designates an intermediary place between the living and the dead. More precisely, it signifies the distance or time that both separates and inserts itself between these two worlds. Halves Through Night explores this veiled space in which beings are in suspense, disembodied from the real, and belong to no place. When repairing a car engine and deciding to disappear into the city, Layl experiences strange phenomena. He opens up to what is still unknown about the plurality of worlds and their inhabitants as the night closes in around him. The film probes the possibility of a hybrid body in a crisis zone, itself becoming a territory where purity is impossible. He vacillates between an alienated experience and the mystique of the real.