The Park (Dancing on the Rubble of Empire) + This suffocating now + Your Cards Are Bleeding
Three uncompromising short films about contemporary political tensions and the structures that shape our lives: 'The Park (Dancing on the Rubble of Empire)' by Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah, 'This suffocating now' by Vika Kirchenbauer and 'Your Cards Are Bleeding' by Kåre Frang.
The Park (Dancing on the Rubble of Empire)
Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah / United Kingdom / 2026 / World Premiere / 34 min
Over two long summers, this film spends time at a community park in London and asks what it means to celebrate, play, and belong amid the rubble of empire.
Public space is an ideal, democratic place – at least in theory. Artist couple Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah (‘And Still, It Remains’, CPH:DOX 2024) test this theory in practice in a participatory video work, filmed in a London park at a time when censorship and suppression of critical voices are on the rise – and when collective historical memory of the imperialist and colonial background of the places and spaces we know and share is simultaneously fading.
Aburawa and Shah strike up conversations with visitors to the park, and out of the rubble of imperialism, an image of a community across differences nevertheless emerges. With filmmaking itself as a condition for the social situation being documented, ‘The Park (Dancing on the Rubble of Empire)’ is an open and horizontal work that arises from the communal contributions.
This suffocating now
Vika Kirchenbauer / Germany / 2026 / International Premiere / 15 min
Vika Kirchenbauer’s essayistic video work examines the political currents in contemporary Germany, where censorship of critical voices is becoming increasingly repressive.
At a time when elements of fascisation are becoming ever more apparent, ever more pervasive, artist Vika Kirchenbauer takes a personal look at what is in the air in Germany today. Her new essay video witnesses the historical present as a condition marked by vectors of violence that have continuously and habitually existed, and puts its focus on the fault lines that have most explicitly exposed the illiberal underbelly of a liberal state and society in recent years: Palestine solidarity as well as queer and trans rights.
Your Cards Are Bleeding
Kåre Frang / Denmark / 2026 / World Premiere / 29 min
A performative work of fiction set in contemporary America, where both reality and fiction itself crack open in small, unsettling ways as a couple attempts to help an absent friend move house.
A couple has agreed to help a friend arrange a move. But the friend has dropped out of the project, leaving the couple and their baby on an increasingly chaotic journey through an unnamed American city. Visual artist Kåre Frang’s ‘Your Cards are Bleeding’ allows a performative fiction to unfold in the midst of a crisis-ridden reality, allowing both to crack further and further. A disturbing mood report from a contemporary world where our attention is constantly challenged by distractions from the insurmountable crises that cannot be suppressed and which – if one attempts to do so anyway – simply transform and reappear in another, ambiguous form.