Blessed Are Those Who Grieve

A slice of an inner, surreal landscape of grief. Melting somatic work, multilayered soundscapes, and digital spheres, the film explores a hybridity of mourning through the birth of a creature pushing towards the reconciliation of a collective grief.

directors: Zora Arose Ritz, Evgenia Chetvertkova, Kayu Yeung, poet: Kayu Yeung, Germany, 2025, 14 min, in Yue Chinese (Cantonese) with English subtitles

About the Artists

Zora Arose Ritz (born1997 in Hünfeld, Germany) operates at the convergence of science and art, environmental & visual anthropology and embodied research. Currently they are pursuing a PhD in visual anthropology at the University of Bern. Rooted in filmmaking, their practice assembles a toolkit – artistic microscopy, experimental ethnography, animation, 3Dscapes, and performance – to carve out playgrounds for (post-)human encounters. Their works Alien Mama (2023), Saloua (2022), and Cutting (2024) have been shown at Ethnocineca – International Documentary Film Festival Vienna, Oyoun (Berlin), and Gelegenheiten (Berlin). They have participated in art & science residencies including “To Spiral, Drip, and Meander” in Cologne and “Künstlerische Tatsachen” in Jena, where they have exhibited their interdisciplinary work.

Evgenia Chetvertkova (born 1985, Moscow) has a background as a dancer-performer and a choreographer. Besides, she has been creating spaces and immersive installations for unusual encounters, participative experiences designed in a way to invite states of poetic wonder and surprise in participants. She created her works in theatres, for theatres and galleries, cafe’s, festivals, outdoors and often with a site-specific approach. Lately she found herself experimenting with videos and light design. Photography is her long term hobby. At the moment considers herself a multimedia artist.

Kayu Claire Yeung (born 1993, Hong Kong) comes with a background in literature from Hong Kong but initially struggled to find her voice as a storyteller. Her search eventually led her to Berlin, where she is studying scriptwriting and montage at filmArche, shaping a new voice through the language of film. In 2025, she will continue her artistic training at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB).  Weaving poetry and magical realism into her narratives, she aspires to create fictional realities for those constrained from expressing themselves truthfully—hoping that, in the end, they will be seen and heard. Her films were selected and screened at the Weimar Poetry Film Tage (Germany), Jumping Frames: Hong Kong International Movement-image Festival (Hong Kong), Hong Kong On Screen Film Festival (Los Angeles, USA) and Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival (Switzerland).