Saturday, June 20, 17:00 – 20:00

at the Van Abbehuis (Bilderdijklaan 19, Eindhoven)

Who defines the ideal citizen, and who decides where the boundaries between belonging and exclusion lie? Moving through speculative futures, historical technological dreams, ancient myths, and collective fantasies, the films in this programme explore the visible and invisible forces that shape our lives and societies—and the stories we create to challenge them.

Across these works, the corporation, the machine, the vampire, and the mandragora become powerful figures through which to question our ideas of care, progress, community, and our relationship with the natural world. They reveal what often remains hidden beneath everyday life: corporate interests disguised as care, the promises and dangers of technology, the unseen violence of urban transformation, and forgotten relationships between humans and plants.

Drawing on science fiction, folklore, horror, and fantasy, the programme uses imagination to make the unseen visible. These films invite us to look beyond the realities we take for granted and imagine different ways of living together.

Line-up:

For Your Own Good | Benjamin Francis
2026 | 22:00 | English | The Netherlands
In a world where corporations increasingly shape our private lives, the cleaning company For Your Own Good offers free assistance to citizens who have been ‘flagged’ as in need of help. Yet behind this act of mercy lies a system of surveillance, correction, and ideological cleansing. Through its deceptively beautiful dystopia, Benjamin Francis exposes how capitalism weaponizes care to enforce conformity and productivity, absorbing even resistance into the logics of profit.

Cybersyn 1973/2023 | Bassam El Baroni, Constantinos Miltiadis and Gerriet K. Sharma
2021 | 15:34 | English | RELEASE LOCATION

Cybersyn 1973/2023 revisits Project Cybersyn, an ambitious experiment in socialist economic planning developed with British cybernetician Stafford Beer under Salvador Allende’s government in Chile between 1970 and 1973. Taking its iconic sci-fi control room as a point of departure, the film transforms this vision of technology as a tool for collective organization into a space of alien mutations and speculative encounters. By bringing past dreams of collective governance into dialogue with the present, it asks what possibilities remain for imagining technologies beyond the logics of profit in today’s hyper-financialized world.

BREAK

If Only | Leonie Brandner and Nina Guo
2025 | 09:51 | Swiss German/English | Switzerland

A plant that screams when uprooted – a myth that takes human form. If Only brings the ancient story of the mandragora into the present. Moving between imagination and material reality, the film explores how we seek meaning in a world more mysterious than our minds can comprehend. At once a legendary figure and a medicinal plant, the mandragora carries centuries of stories and knowledge.

Buurthuis 2 | Josefin Arnell
2024 | 16:00 | English | The Netherlands

Buurthuis 2 is a fantasy film developed with the community center De Witte Boei in Amsterdam’s Wittenburg neighbourhood. Visitors and staff take on the roles of vampires, wizards, and zombies caught in a real-estate scheme that threatens to transform their neighbourhood into a luxury spa resort.

Drawing on a Dutch fairytale about the dangers of excessive wealth, the film was created through collective scriptwriting workshops and explores how communities confront gentrification, inequality, and the erosion of public support. By bringing the community center into the cinema—and the cinema into the museum—Buurthuis 2 turns horror and fantasy into tools for collective storytelling and resistance.