By skyline or perspective, these shorts offer new and unique insight into unseen spaces in which characters and ideas cyclically live, ruminate, and survive. In an expansive, gorgeously composed short—The Mauritania Railway: Backbone of the Sahara, directed by MacGregor—we ride atop the railway car that serves as a 704-kilometer-long lifeline supplying goods and iron ore to people in different towns of the Sahara desert. Monica Klemz’s experimental documentary A Singular Garden blends old and new images of the garden next to the presidential palace in Rio de Janeiro and incorporates natural sound as a way to connect past and present. In Celia Peterson’s The Good Struggle, although few words are spoken between them, monks at a Greek Orthodox monastery in Lebanon provide voice-overs to their daily routines—their devout thoughts echoing the beauty of their solitude.

Q&A following screening