When a working girl in a chicken suit encounters a schoolboy in trouble, the walls that she has built around herself will be put to test as some bridges start to appear between them, amidst juice boxes and melancholy. But the vulnerability needed for communication and the price of empathy might prove to be too heavy for a tired heart.

A little girl tries to put a smile back on her grandmother’s face after the disappearance of her television, her only window on the world.

In a distant village in the Western Ghats of India where a storm is approaching, a young pregnant Marathi woman is dreaming of making love to her dead lover inside a cowshed.

A philosophy professor keeps getting assignments from a dead student... Behind it all lies a puzzle of technology and thought.

CONTRAPUNCTUS V (5) is an experimental documentary featuring mind fragmentation, a search for patterns and Japanese urban architecture. A time capsule of sorts, centered on (biological or artificial) brain states, it makes different themes and voices converge and connect in a rhizomatic, multitasking structure reminiscent of musical counterpoint (and attention deficit behaviour symptoms).
The images show simultaneous events and multi-layered architectural structures. The soundtrack involves multiple voices interacting in a polyphony, each voice associated with one theme: there are quotes about sleep, capitalism and work, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, the effect of the internet and related technologies on the brain, and quotes from people suffering from dementia. Japan is according to recent statistics the country where the population sleeps the least, and has the worlds largest percentage of older adults. It is in those ways and others at the forefront of issues and trends that are global. The film is not a straightforward portrait of the cities it shows. They become metaphors and a point of departure for a reflexion on those global themes, as well as symptoms of time and space disorientation.
In a world where the border between work and free time is increasingly blurred, the time when we sleep and dream may be the last area completely free of work. We are (often voluntarily) trying to change that.
Many try to sleep less (to different and sometimes extreme degrees, like those experimenting with polyphasic sleep) in order to work more, often motivated by the productivity mindset. A correlation has been observed between lack of sleep or disruption of sleeping patterns and the onset of dementia.
In parallel to our brains striving to multitask and adapt to media technologies (involving changes in attention patterns, some addictive behaviours etc.) and our presently unavoidable ageing-related neurological decline, we witness the increasing capabilities of an old fantasy, artificial intelligence.