Arata Mori

In Germany’s big cities, members of families involved in crime live in a parallel world. Young men with well-kempt beards, bulging muscles and big cars let us into their homes and share their dreams. Gangsta rap and a different kind of integration. Better than any fiction.

In Japan, thousands of people disappear voluntarily every year. And there are companies ready to help those who want to disappear without a trace and start a new life somewhere else. Meet some of them in a film that soberly examines a modern phenomenon.

Screened in competition at Alternative Film/Video Belgrade Festival 2014.

The wastelands and crowded streets of an African country are traversed by a woman bearing a wooden cross on her back. She is followed by sellers, beggars and passersby, outraged voices, pity and curious glances. Parallel to her, among a herd of sheep, a lamb toddles its way from the far away mountains into the heart of the city, only to find itself dangling, skinned and headless, on a butcher’s shoulder. In the meantime, under the scorching sun, in a roofless house, a woman is persistently knitting a garment, unwinding a thread coiled over her son’s face.

The account of a journey through an imaginary city, filmed along China’s new trade routes. Like the fictionalized Marco Polo from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, the traveller in this film talks of worlds that resemble familiar places but follow their own, sometimes seemingly incredible rules. The observations condense into a meditation about the nature of cities and the transformation of the concept of globalization.