The Garden of Earthly Delights

On October 3rd, 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa and over 360 people drowned. Abraham, one of the survivors, walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks and remembers this nightmarish experience. Meanwhile at the harbor, hundreds of coffins are being loaded onto a military ship.

Mankind distinguishes himself from the animal due to the ability of making goals in the future. He conceives of his life as a project. This project can be crossed with his awareness of death.

A Dutch photographer (played by David Verbeek himself – also a talented photographer in real life) takes a picture of a girl in a parking lot in nighttime Taipei as she plays with her kite. The photo transports us into her life. She is eight years old and is about to lose her best friend, a boy from a wealthy family who is moving to America. Back in the Netherlands, the photographer is confronted with his own constant loneliness. The photo of the girl evokes memories of his own childhood, when he still felt at home somewhere.

After more than four decades of forced silence, some of the last surviving atomic soldiers share their unfathomable experiences of the atomic bomb tests in the 1950s.

As a group of refugees tries to enter Europe illegally by boat, a storm suddenly appears and all hell breaks loose when an old man falls overboard. His perception shifts into another dimension: a dark, hallucinatory place. Driven by a mysterious power and desperately in search of his loved ones, his soul passes by the everyday reality of many castaway refugees at the border of the alleged paradise, Europe. The old man's spirit observes people on the street being chased away like dogs, follows an illegal worker and a drug-addicted mother and slips inside crowded refugee shelters. Wandering through this limbo, the old man questions the meaning of his existence.