“No utopia is a utopia” – this tongue-in-cheek quote from Rainer Werner Fassbinder states that we’re desperately attracted to ideals of togetherness and out-of-reach heavens.

In The Blessing, a bar becomes the center of the universe, an unreal safe space where it’s night and day at the same time, where to dance and live to a non-stop music. In If Only, one life is not enough as the audience can watch multiple realities in the same, being parallel or overlapping in the most playful way. The same quantic quirks and uncertainty apply to the polyamorous relationships in Schöneberger Herz when it’s possible to “feel so close and so distant” from someone.

Utopia means “a place which doesn’t exist” in Greek, and Thessaloniki, reinventing and respawning itself through the years, is certainly a City of Illusions, as told in the eponymous film. And Tokyo seen in Drawing Three Thin Lines Up to the Length of the River is certainly an ideal of the city, far from the usual clichés and transfigured by poetry.

Foreword by the programme curator: Filmas par utopijām, eksistencēm un pasaulēm, pēc kurām ilgojamies, pat ja tās ir pretrunīgas.