Liquid Stranger

Life Is About Losing Everything is a hybrid documentary, equal parts feminist artist portrait and fantastical memoir, exploring loss and love through the lens of pop culture and art. Based on Canadian poet Lynn Crosbie’s memoir of the same name, the film follows multiple fictionalized incarnations of Crosbie as they embark on a delirious journey through the writer’s memories and imagination, encountering celebrity lookalikes, an inch-tall man, uncanny high schoolers, and a Zombie Sylvia Plath along the way. Drawing on a wealth of pop and literary references, Life Is About Losing Everything reflects on the role of art and storytelling in finding kinship and giving meaning to our lives.

Larger than life and decked out in outrageous 1990s garb, Serbian pop star Doris recounts her experiences as a former child star in a war-torn country. A tightly framed film, set in several distinct and technicolor sets lending it an air of artificiality not soon to be forgotten.

RETRODREAMING examines the common phenomenon of ghostly, abandoned schools due to demographic change in the countryside of Japan. Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story: May it be during the pandemic, after a nuclear catastrophe, or just due to depopulation. The film references the Japanese tradition of telling "Kaidan "(ghost stories/scary stories) and the multiple school-themed "Kaidan "(Gakkō no Kaidan, Japanese for "Scary School Story") in Japanese mainstream culture, which encompass the idea of entities and memories remaining in these architectures. The film focuses on the visual quality of the Showa-era architecture of the abandoned Sawada School in Nakanojo. A voice from a tape recorder recalls the reality of a secret experiment during a pandemic that resulted in further mysterious events. The audiovisual experience draws the viewer into a strange, suspenseful atmosphere somewhere between an unlived retro-future, a sci-fi dream, and an unfinished mystery tale.

When his two mature children Anton and Linda start leaving the house, after graduation, father Michael stops taking care of his body. Anton sacrifices his body for a bed-rest-study to contribute to spacetraveling, while Linda is in search of her first sexual experience.