Thomas Becka

In a bustling Mexican household, seven-year-old Sol is swept up in a whirlwind of preparations for the birthday party for her father, Tona, led by her mother, aunts, and other relatives. As the day goes on, building to an event both anticipated and dreaded, Sol begins to understand the gravity of the celebration this year and watches as her family does the same.

It is during a night in a post-reconstruction world that a masked call rings out. Cheikh Morad Djadja wanders through these non-places in search of an anonymous telecommunication space. This universe with its illusory and oppressive walls, makes us notice the existence of an abstract space-time in which a trans-identity tries to find a place. #31# (appel masqué) is a proposal halfway between documentary, fiction and installation, exploring the hidden meaning of a coded message, this one coming from a literary/musical genre, the raï.

Obāchan is Japanese. She left her native archipelago in 1941 to marry one of her compatriots, 17 years older, settled in Mexico. Through fragments of family films, manga and sequences that she has shot, Nicolasa Ruiz sculpts a complex and delicate memory landscape between the two shores of the Pacific.

A machine that contains a ghost. From two eyes to one eye. The same four limbs. The artificial body. The appearance of things, their incandescence. The light on the screen feels more alive than ever. The satellite guides me. Through a transmutation exercise a human in old age performs a ritual that allows him to deposit his essence in the body of a drone. In the gaze of the machine, a new illusion is reconfigured.

Fedor is a young locksmith in Murmansk, a frozen city in the obscurity of the Russian Arctic. Client after client, he roams through the alleys of concrete animated by a fantasy that isolates him from the city and its population. His dreams corrode his relation to reality and open the door to a phantasmagoric universe; a second sun is rising above the Russian Arctic.

A man returns to Tijuana in the hope of finding a woman who has lost herself in drugs and darkness and has apparently become a "white lady", a ghostly creature half way between heaven and earth.