The winter’s night draws its last breaths in the milky amber glow of the street lights. Snowflakes trickle down, the camera slowly circles a small guardroom in a driveway. Night after night, this lonely island is occupied by: Nobody. As a security guard in the cold, he guarantees the safety of the warm homes and their owners. He passes the time with a recalcitrant oil radiator, a calendar girl on a green meadow and his meandering thoughts. His security logs serve as a seismograph of reflections on life and nightly rounds of the square. Nobody is wrapped in a shell of coolness grown over a long time, which makes it hard for him to react to a rare smile the way he would like to in his heart.
Nadia Hallgren and Jamie-James Medina condense an autobiographical short story by artist and musician Willis Earl Beal aka “Nobody”. The actor Michael K. Williams, who died in 2021, lent his voice to this inner monologue and gives it a sleepy, melodious sound. In this very cinematic, melancholy piece in a state of limbo, casual observations open a philosophical cosmos. But every time the journey of the mind crashes on the tarmac of the carpark in front of the block of flats.

Poland, 1981. Six friends squeeze into an old car that is far too small and set out for the Polish Baltic coast, fuelled by their longing for freedom. The further they come, the clearer the decrepit state of their country emerges. The pension where they spend the night has nothing that could be served for breakfast. Food and fuel are also in short supply elsewhere. There is a shortage of everything. The only thing one can buy anytime and anywhere is booze, which is plentiful. Just like the country, the car also falls apart piece by piece. But the trip continues, past demonstrating crowds, tanks, barricades and armed policemen.
Singing, laughing and carefree, Leszek and his companions finally make it to the sea. Is this the end of their journey? Or should they join the hundreds of thousands who have already left Poland? The borders of the frame, at least, are open. The sparse, fragmented graphic elements on the empty white background hardly seem an incentive to stay. There is no obstacle that could keep the friends from setting off for new shores.

Into a starry sky full of coloured spots! The propellers have been revved up. Accompanied by the drone and roar of the engine, the aircraft takes off. Its mission, to be followed live: compare images, sort out, superimpose, create a visual reality of dots and pixels. A park is requested, but with how many trees? A racy car is dreamt of, but which design is sleek enough? The variables dictated by the pilot determine what appears on the monitor – sculptures of possibilities or morphed set pieces. The tank is filled with millions of continuously flowing images for an infinite number of combinations. But who controls the projected flight path?
Aurelijus Čiupas’s short film essay is a well-considered and not unironic investigation of ethical and philosophical questions. What can and should animation generated by artificial intelligence based on diffusion models do? Pilot Čiupas prescribes “a kind of artificial dementia” to the machine. We can truly watch it come to rest, come to transcendence. The world of images dissolves back into a cosmos of coloured spots.

Lines scrawled on white paper with a ballpoint pen. Everything looks like a hastily drawn scribble – a sketch of ideas rather than a finished film, possibly only a quick storyboard. The jerkily connected images show a food stall somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Something extraordinary happens here: Two filmmakers – brother and sister – hire the chef as the leading actor of their project. They are planning a biopic about their father. The fast-food expert is not only the spitting image of the famous man, he is just like him! The casting could not be more apt, the film business newcomer lets them convince him. But the task turns out to be difficult. Though the cook does everything to do justice to this demanding role, he seems less and less suited for the job every day. Completely engrossed in the preparations for the part, he becomes increasingly distant from his own children. The boundaries between the film and the single father’s real life begin to blur. Is it possible that shooting has already begun?

Something is wrong. Something is completely wrong. With the sound and with the image. The notes are crooked, the piano lid squeaks, the movement falters. Corrections are needed to bring everything together in harmony and in tune with Johann Sebastian Bach’s beautiful music.
Six roles of painted toilet paper are worked on by human hands on an editing table, one after the other. The editing device consists of coloured building blocks and a few wooden sticks. It is a game, a trick, it’s entertainment. At the same time, the simple images on the film strip take us deep into the current events of our time. But the material resists sharply delineated representation. It soaks up the paint and blurs the boundaries. It tears. It is limited. Before the story can pick up speed, the roll is unspooled. Narrative is difficult in view of this situation. And yet animation artist Anna Samo manages, with a very light touch, to transform ambivalent feelings, confusion, rigidity and speechlessness into a work of hope and courage.