Persona Beach

Are even the best and brightest revolutionary movements doomed to inevitable compromise, betrayal and failure? That question haunts this documentary, a biography of Angolan-born Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990), a key figure in African revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles.

Immobile in a home where the sands of time fall to the rhythm of the rural Azerbaijani sounds, a mother waits for her son. When he arrives, their conversations circle around existential questions and news from afar. Unrest cloaks the world outside. Mother and son grow closer, silence melts into words, and life springs between them. The son leaves, and winter settles in to the forever-outdated house in which temporalities blurs and past and present beat to the rhythm of the same clock.

Eddie, a 65-year-old man from Sudan, seems to have been living for countless days on a remote stone-covered Swedish island. Surrounded by screaming birds and carrying a silent past, Eddie wanders around in nature, recollecting moments with a broken video camera. Accompanied by Jan, a ghostly hermit living deep in the forest, Eddie penetrates an otherwise hostile environment that is oblivious to his isolation. ​Despite his circumstances, Eddie looks for the miraculous in the overlooked present time.

A young woman works as a prison guard in a hopelessly overcrowded jail in central Madagascar. She passes the time daydreaming about her father, a murderer, who abandoned her as a child after killing his own brother. In her imagination, her father becomes a mythical killer, wandering the countryside and rolling enchanted dice to decide the fate of his victims. Secretly, she yearns for the day her father will turn up amongst the prisoners. When a new inmate arrives claiming to know her father, her fantasies begin to turn to nightmares.

Bergmanesque ghosts appear at the bedside of Edward Weki, a 75-year-old Sudanese man suffering from the final stage of Parkinson’s: Alma, the nurse of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, and a female version of Death from his The Seventh Seal help the old man recover lost memories of his life on the island of Farö.

26 TAKES FOR HARUN FAROCKI is a film collage made by former students. One minute per take. This film was shot by Arthur Sumereder, Axel Töpfer, Björn Kämmerer, Christoph Kolar, David Pujadas Bosch, Franziska Pflaum, Georg Tiller, Jessyca R. Hauser, Johann Lurf, Josephine Ahnelt, Karo Riha, Mina Lunzer, Michael Poetschko, Monika Rabofsky, Mrova, Nathalie Koger, Patrick Schabus, Peter Muzak, Selma Doborac, and Thomas Lehner.

LOAB is a creature of generative AI. The product of an anti-prompt, it haunts – as both a glitch and a ghost – the worlds of human-machine-made horror. In The Valley Where LOAB Lives, Georg Tiller takes his film craft by the horns and creates a whole new brand of storytelling: the Promptus. The Promptus openly reveals its origins and the problems inherent within it: “Working with generative models means working within systems that are designed to obscure their own origins.” In this film, he has found an ingenious solution to this problem, linking LOAB’s generated probabilities with the monstrous improbabilities of the film genre. Observing with a winking eye.