the_ongoing_process_of_trying_to_make_sense

With the China’s reform and opening up which began in 1979, it became big differences among areas’ economic development level. The population migration occurred with accelerated urbanization process, like birds. The cognition of hometown and native place has changed qualitatively. As the impact of modern technology on chicken in chicken coop, no one could escape. They are all domesticated. City is like a modern chicken coop, and people are like the domesticated chicken. Imagining human beings returning to an original state and conventional rules ae no longer apply. Imagining human beings are objectified and the next dominating species have a completely different social system - what would the world be like? Whenever we observe and approach other creatures, they are observing and approaching us at the same time.

Branches asks how our lives could differ based on a single decision or encounter. Drawing on director Masumi's experience as a minority and immigrant to the UK, we examine how the environment and society shape us. Exploring neuroses and fears through the multiverse, viewers will ponder how choices in life topple like dominoes. We present opportunities for viewers to reflect on their lives in our post-COVID information-oriented society, which fragments our ideology.

When we run out of words, the body takes over. Dancers Berengrere Bodin, Samir M'Kirech and TK Russell agree thus far, when asked: why are we fighting? Based on their personal experiences, they search for the whys of the violence around them in the world, but also the violence within them. How do you deal with fear, frustration and disappointment in today's world, where you are not heard or understood? Is it even possible to act in a non-violent way? Or is that privilege reserved for those who create dance, music, art or words?

In Why We Fight? choreographer Alain Platel and director Mirjam Devriendt pay tribute to the arts and to humanity, which always seems to balance between creating something spectacularly beautiful and something horribly cruel. The film is inspired by a scene from the dance performance Nicht Schlafen that Alain Platel made in 2016 with the company les ballets C de la B, in a set by visual artist Berlinde De Bruyckere.

The film does not provide an unequivocal answer to the question of why we are fighting. It does show how a complex set of individual psychological, social, political and religious factors causes constant outbreaks of violence throughout human history.

Using various types of film and image material, as well as visual metaphors, the film analyzes social change, the lack of emotional processing and the strength of humanity. Various historians, philosophers, artists and writers, including Berlinde De Bruyckere, Tinneke Beeckman and Koert Debeuf, will have their say.

Despite the pessimistic signs we see on the world front today, the creators urge us never to lose hope! Or as writer and historian Phillip Blom puts it in the film: "We don't have the luxury of giving up!".