Yes, of course. There's the character of a farmer who, contrary to all instructions, has remained in the disaster zone and continues to rear his animals. You can see the tumours with which these creatures are now riddled. So there are images of that. But the effect of the radiation is, of course, insidious and almost impossible to capture pictorially, so you have to find visual metaphors to describe how uncanny and monstrous this force actually is.
You have a number of films in the programme which, by dint of focusing on a small section of a society, are able to present whole societies in their entirety. For example, Al-wadi (The Valley)...
It's no secret that small stories which symbolically represent a bigger situation can be more powerful than attempts to capture everything in one go. The more bombastic a film tries to be, the less effective it usually is. At the same time it can't be denied that films by directors who consider themselves artists rather than craftspeople are usually made with less money and are therefore obliged to take on such stories. That's just as true for The Valley by Ghassan Salhab as it is for La mujer de barro (The Mud Woman) by Sergio Castro. And also the Turkish film Nefesim kesilene kadar (Until I Lose My Breath). They are small, more or less private stories which either really refer to something bigger only for the viewer or, as in La mujer de barro, openly contain social criticism because the film also addresses working conditions. Or, as in the case of Ghassan Salhab, an apocalyptic vision which is created through really meagre means but is actually very effective.
Like last year, you have many films in the programme which concern themselves with the subject of work. La sirène de Faso Fani (The Siren of Faso Fani) and Über die Jahre (Over the Years), to name just two examples…