During her research in Swiss museums, Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige comes across a collection of human remains and cultural objects from the Wanniyala-Aetto, an indigenous Sri Lankan Adivasi community. The objects were brought to Basel at the beginning of the 20th century by Swiss naturalists Paul and Fritz Sarasin - using methods that combine colonial violence and scientific aspirations in a disturbing way.

Sri Lanka demanded the return of some of these items already in the 1970s - but Switzerland refused. Now, decades later, Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige and Uruwarige Wannilaththo, the chief of the Wanniyala-Aetto, are committed to ensuring that the human remains and artifacts are finally returned. A lengthy process begins…

«Elephants & Squirrels» sheds light on Switzerland’s involvement in the colonial system. The film tells the past and the present from various perspectives and confronts Switzerland with crucial questions about power, historical responsibility and cultural heritage.

Production: soap factory GmbH, Basel
Writers: Gregor Brändli and Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige
Director: Gregor Brändli

«Journey to the End of the Night» tells stories from an imaginary night. In almost all cultures, the night stands for the primal, the uncanny, the uncontrollable, for evil, the irrational and the passionate. The very word «enlightenment» makes it clear that only those who chase away the darkness can come to knowledge and reason.

«Journey to the End of the Night» is set in a nameless city and follows the traces of a wide variety of people. We meet some of them several times in the course of the night, others appear only briefly and then disappear again like shooting stars in the darkness of the night sky. Fleeting moments alternate with longer scenes. In between, the camera loses its narrative focus and lets itself drift through empty streets, dancing clubbers, haunted houses or phantasmagorias. As the darkness blurs the clear logic of the day, even time loses its sharp contours: the night becomes an entire year and, metaphorically, an entire lifespan.

The film makes use of documentary as well as essayistic and fictional means. The rhythms, the play of light, movement and energy are just as important to the narrative as words and thoughts. The film is an ode to the night and at the same time a meditation on modern life between reason and irrationality, control and escape, longing and disappointment, a sometimes ecstatic, sometimes melancholy homage to the human condition on the threshold of the age of artificial intelligence.

Production: RecycledTV AG, Bern and soap factory GmbH, Basel
Writer, director: Frank Matter

Reverend Beat-Man, underground musician, cult figure and citizen terror, is a living legend. For almost 40 years, the Reverend has been on the road at festivals, in rock clubs and dimly lit cellars, even far beyond Switzerland's borders. Since the early 1990s, he has also run the record label Voodoo Rhythm Records – a unique piece of Swiss music and social history. «Records to ruin every party» is the quirky motto.

In 2014, a young boy attends a Beat Man concert with his father. The loud, punky music and the eccentric stage performance frighten the boy - but the concert is also a formative experience for him. Fast forward to the present: Milan, the boy from back then, has become a young man who wants to become a musician himself. He plucks up his courage, goes to Beat-Man's record store and asks the reverend if he can play with him. After some initial hesitation, Beat-Man agrees to play with Milan - and soon they are on tour together, the old fighter and the young man who is still searching for himself. Beat-Man also agrees to Milan joining Voodoo Rhythm in order to contribute his ideas. What makes a young person turn to the edgy scene around Voodoo Rhythm in a time of slick and short-winded Spotify and Insta click culture trimmed for success and self-optimization? But Milan is curious and wants to try out even more. While starting out with Voodoo Rhythm, he works on subtle pop songs with the young Finja Keogh and goes on tour with the much more commercially oriented Birdman Jäggi.

«From Punk into the Future» uses touching, cross-generational encounters to tell the story of major changes in the cultural scene and the struggle to find one's own artistic position in a confusing time. By juxtaposing Beat-Man's story and the legacy of the Bernese youth movement of the 1980s with the doubts and conflicts of very young musicians, the film gets to the bottom of the question of what fades from cultural and political movements and what lives on in the work of later generations.

Production: soap factory GmbH, Basel
Writer, director: Steff Bossert