Athens 2014. Between bereaved desires and lost hopes, a film diary bangs against the walls of the city. The daily life of a country in crisis, the individual issues that confront the political. Can we still ask the simplest questions?

While Daphné Hérétakis is reading from a diary caught between sentimental setbacks and rushing ahead, a portrait of contemporary Greece looking for meaning is implicitly sketched out. As youth feels itself ageing, questions persist and the desire for liberty is tinged with idleness in a country with memories of splendour. A resolutely modern film, full of poetry, in search of the truth.

In Zwirchmayr’s short film Venus Delta a sequence of dreamlike scenes unfolds quietly. Set in an otherworldly layered landscape of rock formations by a pristine mountain spring, an atmosphere of eerie feminity pervades the images. Round, golden objects of unknown origin lie scattered about mysteriously. Somehow they seem connected to or springing from a nearly motionless young woman whose face is hidden behind a voluptuous, almost menacingly grand, mass of hair. Seen only in fragments and shot from odd angles, the body remains anonymous at all times. A surreal quality infests these visually sumptuous quasi-still lifes, accentuating barely noticeable tensions between human form and nature, body and object, between male and female forces in minute details. (Julia Dossi)

“Nowadays, the hospital welcomes me as a medical miracle. It feels ungrateful to admit I’m not very keen on living to doctors who’ve done everything to save me. I’ve been cured, but not without being physically and mentally damaged during the treatment. Through the lens of my father’s camera, I look back at a period of my life of which I remember nothing. Twenty years after surviving cancer as a child, I search for traces of illness between scars and desires."