The images we make outlive the moments they capture. They travel into new contexts, where their meanings change and their effects become difficult to control. This year’s Day 1 program follows these afterlives through the systems that produce images and the environments in which they continue to act, moving from a distant planet into interior life, contested land, and digital space.
We open with KRONOS, a wordless animation in which two technicians make a routine visit to a remote planet. They observe its living creatures, and one of them draws what he sees. Yet the machine they maintain ultimately destroys the planet.
The film neither assigns technology a fixed moral position nor reduces environmental destruction to a clear lesson. Instead, it leaves us with the indifference of a technological system severed from what it affects. The technicians are capable of observing life without recognizing their own role in its destruction. The drawing preserves the image of a creature, but not the world that sustained it.
This is the first afterlife: an image that remains after its environment has disappeared.
Lasse Falk
Germany, 2025
5 min 9 sec
Two technicians make a routine visit to a remote planet, where they encounter its living environment and intelligent creatures. While servicing a gigantic machine, one technician draws a creature they have seen. Only after they leave do we realize that their work has destroyed the planet.
Trading Cards turns from the planetary scale to the interior life of the mind. Through a familiar childhood object, the filmmaker explores the horror of uncertainty within their lived experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The card game provides a stable structure, yet every shuffle introduces an outcome that cannot be known in advance. It offers order without certainty.
The system functions correctly, but it cannot resolve the player’s fear of what may happen next. In this respect, Trading Cards extends the problem introduced by KRONOS. A system can be internally coherent while producing consequences that remain beyond human control.
This tension carries particular weight in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). AI is designed to identify patterns and anticipate outcomes, but prediction cannot make an environment fully knowable. It may help us manage uncertainty without removing it. The film therefore asks a more difficult question than how uncertainty might be escaped: can it be inhabited without first being resolved?
Radheya Jang
Australia/UK, 2026
14 min 59 sec
An enigmatic man journeys back in time to find his younger self, seemingly to revisit the nostalgia of trading cards. An exploration of identity, mental health and the erosion of childhood innocence, Trading Cards is a dark fantasy animated film about the weight of living with Obsessive-compulsive disorder.
If the future cannot be fully predicted, the past cannot be fully reconstructed. The Mother, The Sons and The Holy River places the present alongside memory and folktale to trace the histories carried by the Sutlej River in Punjab. The environment here is the material form that history has taken.
Colonial division continues to shape the river’s present. Political conflict determines its meaning as a border, while ecological damage alters its physical existence. The river does not simply witness these forces. It bears their consequences.
History therefore acquires an afterlife in the environment. What appears to be a natural landscape is also a record of the power that has moved through it.
The Mother, The Sons and The Holy River
Natasha Javed and Nirmal Bano
Pakistan, 2025
16 min 21 sec
Along the flood-ravaged banks of the River Sutlej in Punjab, a ghost returns to recount a tale shaped by colonial rule, Partition, and a treaty.
Muzungu Sweets takes this relationship between history and land further by asking how such an environment is viewed in the present. Following two white eco-activists through a savannah shaped by colonial history, the film gradually turns its camera upon those who initially believe themselves to be observers. The researchers become the objects of investigation, and their gaze is exposed as an inheritance.
The film rejects the idea of nature as a space separate from political relations. The landscape that Western environmentalism seeks to preserve may already have been produced through the exclusion of local communities. Environmental protection cannot therefore be understood as neutral when the authority to define nature remains unequally distributed.
Here, the camera does not only document colonial relations. It identifies their continuation within the act of looking. To care for an environment must also mean examining the position from which that care is offered.
Caterina De Angelis and Matteo Carosi
Italy, 2026
30 min
Two white eco-activists set out for the East African savannah they know from documentaries and popular culture, only to confront a land deeply shaped by colonialism. Their search for the colonial origins of nature conservation gradually turns the camera upon them, exposing the postures and contradictions embedded in their own gaze.
We close the day with Afterlives, which carries the problem of looking into the digital circulation of extremist propaganda. The film examines how images of violence persist beyond the events they depict. Once reproduced and placed into new contexts, they can continue to shape memory while renewing the conditions of violence.
When the film asks, “Can we ever truly look without being complicit?”, it asks us to recognize that viewing has a position and that images continue to act after they have been seen. The responsibility of looking begins with this recognition.
Kevin B. Lee
Germany/France/Belgium, 2025
88 min
A desktop documentary that critically engages with the historical and digital traces of extremist propaganda, and questions how images of violence circulate, mutate, and persist.
Across these works, images survive a lost planet, an altered sense of self, and histories embedded in land. They also expose the gaze that produced them and the violence sustained through their circulation. The program asks us to consider an image not only by what it shows, but by what it continues to do.