Interweaving pure documentary with semi-scripted sequences, Johanna Domke and Marouan Omara’s Dreamaway follows the absurd days and fantastical nights of a group of young Egyptian workers lured from home by the promise of jobs and a freer lifestyle in Sharm El Sheikh, a popular resort town on the edge of the Red Sea. Recent terror attacks have driven the local tourism industry into the ground, yet its young workers ritualistically carry on with their jobs in the nearly deserted hotels, despite the lack of guests. Between work, they wander the empty environs dreaming of alternative lives. Preceded by CROP, Domke and Omara’s reflection on the power of images, set in the offices of Egypt’s state newspaper Al-Ahram and told from the perspective of a fictional photojournalist who missed the 2011 revolution due to a hospital stay.

Open your ears, steady your gaze, relax your body, and free your mind as Manon de Boer guides you through a meditation on creativity. Four artists—a dancer, a performance artist, a musician, and an actor—ponder extracts from psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s An Experiment in Leisure (1937) and On Not Being Able to Paint (1950). There’s a Norwegian seascape to contemplate, whose soundwaves will penetrate the artists’ workspaces inducing a state of mental flow somewhere between presence and absence.

Graced with beauty, humanity, irony, and touches of humour, Jumana Manna’s sophomore feature witnesses the afterlife of a unique event that captured headlines worldwide: the first complete withdrawal of a nation’s seed collection from the ​“doomsday vault” (officially known as the Global Seed Vault), which is burrowed deep beneath the Arctic permafrost as an agricultural safeguard should disaster strike. The film traces the journey taken by the Syrian backup seeds:

The works in this program see Earth’s future through an African lens. The disembodied voice in Relic 0 delivers the prologue: an account of postcolonial traumas that seeps into the soil around colonialism’s ruins, ushering in a relic traveller from the future. Afronauts unearths a story whose truth is stranger than fiction: NASA is readying Apollo 11 for launch, unaware that thousands of miles away Zambia has entered the space race, vying to beat both the United States and the Soviet Union to the moon—with a teenage girl at the helm.