Old Child

With a single camera movement, this film explores humankind’s relationship to the ground. The viewpoint continuously changes. Places, objects, people, and events come in and out of focus. These observations gradually speed up and reveal a double-sided ground, flipping like a tossed coin, which then slows again to oscillate around the Earth’s edge.

Filmmaker Nahid Rezaei returns to her all-girls high school to explore the lives of young students in Tehran. At times, the girls are very open about their hopes and dreams, sweet even, but when their future is discussed, they are occasionally sad.

Intimate, emotional, and sometimes violent moments of farewell: men, women, and children leave their homes for an (unknown) future as migrants.

Filmed in Shatila, a refugee camp built in Lebanon when thousands of Palestinians fled their country in 1948. At an undetermined moment in the future, the refugees’ dream of returning to Palestine becomes a reality.

Zinal, a small town in the Swiss Alps, looks straight up toward the melting glaciers of the Couronne Impériale. The townspeople struggle with nihilistic indifference. When the threat is so immediate, and their powerlessness so great, can their response be anything other than cynicism? Then a paraglider falls mysteriously from the sky, and Zinal starts to change.

By means of visual material gathered from online sources, filmmakers Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes create a unique poetic realm in which thoughts, fears, desires, and worries are shared via webcam, and merge together.

The thaw of the so-called eternal snow of Páramo, a neotropical alpine ecosystem in the high Andes, exposes a layer of meaning about the origins and survival of the landscape.