Danish Arts Foundation

Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma.

In rural Afghanistan, people are storytellers who make up and tell each other tales of mystery and imagination to explain the world in which they live. The shepherd children own the mountains and, although no adults are around, they know the rules; they know that boys and girls are not allowed to be together. The boys practice with their slings to fight wolves. The girls smoke secretly and play at getting married, dreaming of finding a husband soon. They gossip about Sediqa; she’s eleven years old and an outsider. The girls think she is cursed. Qodrat, also eleven years old, becomes the subject of gossip when his mother remarries an old man with two wives. Qodrat roams alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains, where he meets Sediqa and they become friends.

Alyona, Alika and Katya dream of love and friendship, but most of all of leaving Putin’s Russia. When the war against Ukraine breaks out, it becomes harder for the three young women to leave the vast country in the East, but also even more unbearable to stay. So one has left for Georgia, another for Spain, while the third stays behind in Russia. Their generation does not believe that political engagement changes anything. Instead, they show their resistance by living a modern and more Western life, where gender, sexuality, pop music and identity issues are vital. Set at night in cars, apartments and backyards, Sybilla Tuxen’s dark and artistically uncompromising debut film tells the story of a rebellious yet resigned section of Russian youth on the fringes of established society.

Tinne Zenner's 'Translations' (in Greenlandic: 'Nutsigassat') reflects on the power of language as a colonizer of foreign landscapes. A critical and graceful 16mm film in which the vistas of Greenland create a space for free thinking.

Filmed in and around the openings and entrances to caverns and cenotes in southern Mexico, Yucatan, Interim takes as its departure in the traditional Maya belief that these are places ‘outside time and space’, as they are understood to be entrances to the underworld. Interim contemplates the quiet suspension of the present day environments and practices around these spots. In a floating and dreamy observance, the presence of human beings is paid little more attention than that of plants, rocks, insects and the wind. Through the insistent use of overexposure, and almost silhouette-like burn out images, the holes in the ground become fix-points for the cameras journey through an all too bright over-ground world.