As night settles over the fields, a human figure merges into the darkness of the woods, held in the ghostly beam of a truck headlight. Inspired by Christina Rossetti’s 19th century poem On the Wing, in which a dream of love is ruptured by violence and abandonment, Kate Solar conjures dark, modern Romanticism rooted in the material life of film. The film is shot on 16mm black-and-white reversal stock and developed by hand, with a developer made from comfrey leaves.

Sincero, apaixonado wanders through Portugal’s countryside as men’s voices read, and reread, fragments from a diary found in an abandoned house, dated 2009. The writer is unknown; a vagrant caught in a love story that keeps tipping into obsession. Across day and night, the film follows that feverish drift through landscapes shaped by distance and disparity. The diary’s lyricism is captivating, but it’s also steeped in narcissism and masculine self-mythology. The film lives with that tension as it moves through the country, tender and uneasy, infatuated and self-questioning.

A fractured stream of thought tightens into a spiral of love addiction, longing, jealousy, sex, drugs, and psychic instability. The inner monologue is built from fragments: half-finished sentences, memories flaring up, thoughts looping back. Somewhere between intoxication and reality, it moves by feeling. Set against a series of self-portrait photographs, Volkmer traces mental health, queerness, and desire with unselfconscious vulnerability.

A fox sleeps under a birch tree as a hand edges into the frame and touches its flank, brief and tender. The animal stirs, stretches, then runs away into the woods. In How to Run a Trotline, touch becomes a way into what passes between bodies and what keeps resonating afterwards. A memorial to paternal and queer legacies in life and in art, Elsaesser builds the film through montage and correspondence. He draws on the sonic architecture of Michael Snow’s Presents (1981) and threads in William E. Jones’s Tearoom (2007), assembled from police surveillance footage of a public restroom in Mansfield, Ohio, used to charge and convict men for sex. Alongside Elsaesser’s own images, these fragments land as tribute and lineage, with the risks around desire still attached. A deeply personal, archival, and collaged film about bodies, misbehaving or otherwise.

Gernot Wieland’s films keep dissecting his upbringing in postwar Austria, an environment of repression where fear passed as common sense, cruelty came with permission, and a child’s imagination learned early on how to fall in line with power. In Thievery and Songs, this material opens into a strikingly beautiful tragicomic work that unearths something utterly sad as it traces the obscene and absurd textures of the Austrian condition, where trauma, guilt, repression, and social hierarchy keep shaping the present. Haunted by recurring dreams of landscapes, the narrator enters therapy, where animals, fairy tales, and Freud drift into the conversation. In the end, the landscapes dissolve into fog and silence as he concludes: “Now I know why I dream of these landscapes. They are the opposite of fear, and I do not exist in them.”