UNDR • WHAT FOG? • Shokouk: A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts + Q&A

UNDR – A helicopter sweeps the desert, surveying a land at once ancient and modern, natural and built. Farmers work their fields, children play and bells sound a call to prayer. Dynamite ruptures the earth. UNDR is a poignant found-footage essay film about an otherworldly landscape charged with history and potential – and an eerie site of surveillance and incursion.

WHAT FOG? – A fog clears, revealing new forms of camouflage. Techniques for its dispersal  aim to restore perception of space – yet it does not disappear, it changes location. Inspired by a triumphalist statement from the West German Federal Railway, WHAT FOG? apprehends ideals of unobstructed vision and boundless locomotion as forms of unreliable technological determinism.

Shokouk: A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts – A vertiginous odyssey of transhistorical vignettes exploring infrastructures of space travel and the cosmic imaginary. Documenting interstellar machinations connecting 12th century Persia to the fictional Chinese company ‘Skybridge Unlimited’ and the modern day Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Shokouk traces an anachronistic loop of historical facts and archival fabulations to question the violence and sublimity implied in the conquest of the outer wilds.

UNDR | Dir. Kamal Aljafari | Palestine, Germany | 2023 | 14m

WHAT FOG? | Dir. Philip Widmann | Germany | 2024 | 29m |

Shokouk: A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts | Dirs. Rouzbeh Akhbari, Felix Kalmenson | Uzbekistan, Canada | 2023 | 17m | Kazakh, Russian, Uzbek, Chinese, English with English subtitles