Official selection

A film based on poems by the Chinese poet Li Bai.

The 1990s: In the chaos following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, two friends set out to rebuild their lives—by smuggling German cars into the wreckage of post-Soviet Russia.

In ghosting mother, personal mourning rituals and processes of scanning and development intertwine to create a search for traces in the manifestations of memory. Starting from the destroyed grave of my mother, a search begins for the remaining apparitions. A mourning ceremony, a movement of remembrance, attempts at resuscitation. ghosting mother works with methods of autofiction and deals with questions of grief and its ritualization in bourgeois catholic contexts in an experimental documentary form. The self-developed 16 mm film reflects in its own materiality and its damage the failed attempt to record what has been lost.

The film was shot around the place of O Fieiro, a small village of no more than twelve houses and nine inhabitants, among them Rosa. A ninety-year-old woman who dedicates her last years to watching the rain through the window. Her father was a canteiro, a house builder, before the reservoir changed everything. Rosa remembers how her father lifted the stones and the people transported them from one place to another. It is shown as an abstract visual poem where the rain and the stones are the protagonists of the story Rosa tells us.

In the marshlands of Southern Iraq, Ibrahim and his family live in solitude as strangers to the outside world, their lives tethered to the river, the reeds, and the buffalo they tend. Silent and withdrawn, Ibrahim finds comfort only in his buffalo, his sole companion. But as the rivers dry and the landscape withers, Ibrahim faces unrelenting forces threatening the only life he has ever known, and the only creature he has ever understood.

A polar bear and a penguin, who have lost their home and are looking for a new place to live, meet on the island where the dog lives. They all want the house for themselves until the ocean begins to rise and the island slowly sinks into the sea.