The Perseids

In 2018, a user called AnathematicAnarchist published a suicide note in an online forum for incels – a subculture of heterosexual men whose self-pity, misogyny and fantasies of violence dominate the internet in many places and trigger offline actions in some. Did he really take his own life? Is America responsible for his death, as he claims in his text? A search for clues in the darkest corners of the net, an essay about pain and loneliness in the age of algorithms.

Carla is pregnant and naked, imitating the poses her mother took when she was pregnant with her. Sunlight filters through the windows. You see pictures in Super-8 of mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, smiling, sewing, reciting poems. Then, a young girl travels from the Sixties to the Eighties, until today, crossing the thresholds of femininity and history, until the meeting with Carla by the Blue Sea of Catalonia and with Manel, Carla's newborn son.

An orphaned girl named Atenea lives in isolation with other children. When adopted by a family, she glimpses a chance at belonging, but her fear of losing this newfound home drives her to extreme measures.

Artin, a young Iranian bodybuilder, and Jahan, a Kurdish man who recently discovered his love for painting, live in Kærshovedgård, a former prison now used as a deportation center.

Thoughts, sometimes just numbers, reach us from offscreen almost like music, like a mantra or a prayer. What we see are circular fragments from familiar spaces: a mirror, a magnifying glass. A day like any other day: without medication, or perhaps better with? A film like the investigation of an uncertainty principle: do we really see better with a magnifying glass? A face scratched out of the family album: the gap is draped with flowers and cut-out pictures of clothes and finally filled again by a drawing.

A filmmaker revisits home videos of her 13-year-old self, reflecting on the loss of innocence, self-awareness, and memory, creating a dialogue between past and present.