These lands had a different name in years gone by. They were inhabited by other beings. It is said that those beings founded cities. The prophetic stones with which they were built possessed an ancient power. It is said that such dark power keeps us confined amidst a mirage which makes us believe that we truly exist. But no one remembers anymore. (Jaime Puertas)

A woman sits in the back seat of a car moving through magenta skies at dusk, in the southern Spanish village of Puebla de Don Fadrique. She cares for her husband who is in a coma and performs the daily routines society has lined out for her. Yet something begins to slip in — desire, perhaps — waking her up from a type of slumber.

Workers at a theater performance wait for their cues to act in accordance with the running of a show that is continuously happening somewhere else. Disjointed, tired, and randomly they find tiny moments of rest and play against a lifeless facade.

The photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud is enveloped by the interior of an apartment in which one senses a city outside. An interior in which time and representation become disordered, yet remain contained. She and the son of the director, Boris Eustache, go through a collection of her pictures, pointing and speaking of precisely what is seen — or is it? 

She flicks through a folio of images (still lifes, self-portraits, ghostly renderings of her friends, father, lovers, and stalker), which have often somehow been marred by light tricks or processes of erasure, leaving oblique compositions. At first, her descriptions match up, but slowly they become out of sync with what we are seeing; when she gestures to a human body, there is only a pillow. A picture is not reality, she tells us; it is at once “much less than reality, and much further.” Like Rivette’s, Eustache’s and Cléo Roubaud’s obstructions playfully undermine the idea of cinema as a tool of explanation and exposure. Images, especially moving ones, bear an inherent futility, but this capacity for disappearance is the crux of their magic. (Indigo Bailey, Rough Cut Films)