Brute Force

Felix Lenz & Ganaël Dumreicher

Áustria, 2025, 29’

‘Brute force’ is the term for a hacking method that breaks into systems through sheer computational power, and it is used in this film as a metaphor for the relationship between our digital age and the physical world. The film takes us through silicon mines in France, data centres in Vienna and salt lakes in the United States, revealing how processes of measurement, mapping, and computation do not merely represent the landscape: they transform it, deplete it and leave their waste in it. Developed over five years of artistic research at the crossroads of ecology, geopolitics and technology, “Brute Force” is a rigorous and unsettling film essay on what Nature loses when it is transformed, by our force, into data.

Messengers

Jeffrey Zablotny

Canadá,  2025, 45’

Somewhere on Earth, at three very specific points on the planet’s surface, scientific communities are building giant telescopes to detect neutrinos, subatomic particles that pass through matter without leaving a trace. In little-known and inaccessible locations in Canada, Japan and Antarctica, Jeffrey Zablotny creates a poetic meditation on geological time, human endeavour and the questions that science shares with philosophy and art. Questions hang in the air, as does the eternal fascination with the unknown. Also worth highlighting is the soundtrack, another layer of the film like a second skin, composed by Jana Irmert.