"Can I Hug You?", dir. Elahe Esmaili, UK, Iran 2023, 35 min.

In the religious Iranian city of Qom, there are restrictions imposed on women in the name of “sexual safety.” Hossein grew up in this context, but as a young boy he found himself victimized, left to carry this secret into adulthood. Now, with the help of his wife Elahe, he is confronting his trauma.

"At That Very Moment", dir. Rita Pauls, Federico Luis Tachella, Argentina, Germany 2023, 12 min.

A boy raised in the mountains films his home surroundings. He shows his sister, his father, their house with a treehouse in the garden, and the family’s old dog. He runs and cycles while holding the camera, creating choppy, chaotic images that match the energetic life of a child. Snippets of a young life pass by, but the result is by no means superficial. The boy’s flowing thoughts produce observations that suggest a strikingly philosophical nature. He thinks deeply about life and feels everything intensely, and that is evident when he talks candidly about his doubts and fears, or disappears under the covers crying. But as things go in the life of a child, a moment later his attention may be grabbed by something else, something mundane, and an existential thought or wise philosophical observation may easily switch into calling the dog or playing with his big sister.

"Dentures", dir. Siddharth Potade, Nikhil Lama, India 2023, 16 min.

It is a special day for Ajju: he is celebrating his father's 90th birthday. However, the latter is suffering from dementia. He is continually losing his bearings and has problems recognizing his own son. While his party is ongoing, the father embarks on a solitary quest to find his teeth, presumably lost somewhere in the hotel where the celebration is taking place. For him, the hotel is a strangely familiar non-place, completely void of memories, which he wanders through in a disconcerting hallucinatory quest for his missing prosthesis.

"Grandmamauntsistercat", dir. Zuza Banasińska, The Netherlands, Poland 2023, 23 min.

The classic Slavic witch figure, Baba Jaga, is reimagined as a “prehistoric goddess from the times of the matriarchy” using found footage from the Polish Educational Film Studio archive. This transformation incites layered reflections on kinship and identity, guided by a child grappling with binary gender roles. The often sexist and anthropocentric images, created as didactic materials in communist era, are repurposed into an emotive portrait of a multispecies matriarchal family seeking freedom and empowerment.