East of Eden

Ranging from Tuvalu to China to the Baltic to Poland and Hungary, the six films in this collection represent dreams and nightmares of the future. The most realistic among them is the documentary That Which Is to Come Is Just a Promise (2019), in which the Italian collective Flatform create a disturbing picture of the very close future of a Pacific island. Through long tracking shots, meticulously filmed over different seasons with the same protagonists in the same positions, we can clearly see the effects of climate change – the biggest challenge of our present and the main question for our future.

In another film based on present reality – all the more acute in the era when essential workers are helping us live our non-essential lives – we see a dream of a food delivery person in China, in Yuan Zheng’s tragicomic Dream Delivery, made in 2018 and thus, in a way, predicting our present. The director places these labourers not only out of time, but also out of space – and in all places at the same time. The Western World’s omnipresent services find their paradigm in what we used to think of as a quintessentially Eastern society.

Future is female and for some women it consists of regrets about the past. In the beautifully imaginative animated short Bye Little Block! (Pá kis panelom!, 2020), Hungarian filmmaker Éva Darabos shows us a girl whose future is decided by a man and who sheds (literal) stone tears for her old neighbourhood. This way, her present becomes the past in an instant.

Objectification of women that this society is only now truly grappling with finds its crux in robotic sex dolls. However, in Ieva (2021) by Lithuanian directors Domas Petronis and Vytautas Plukas we see a female robot in a clinical surrounding. She is dressed like a teacher and this makes her look uncannily realistic, more than a sex doll ever could. She performs tests that appear to be designed to prove how artificially intelligent she is. But is this all?

Not if we ask the authors of two other films that deal with technology which can destroy worlds. In Atomic (2020) by Finnish-Latvian HNV Collective, a woman wears a jewel made out of trinitite, a side product of the first nuclear tests in New Mexico in 1945. This is a deadly sun in her hair, but also a personal reminder of a pet spider she used to have – until she destroyed it, much like these tests led to the destruction of millions of lives.

In The Mask (Maska, 2021), Polish director Hanka Brulinska adapts Stanislaw Lem’s short story of a killer robot that develops a consciousness. That the robot is female is muddled by the fact that her personality comes from the mind of a male scientist. After all, who else would want to conceive a killing machine? Brulinska frames her identity in correlation with distant past, an age of dames and cavaliers that ensnared the woman’s position in society for centuries to come.

The future is female, and we better make sure it is, lest we are left without it. The clock is ticking.