Mary Bauermeister is considered the mother of the Fluxus movement. In an attic on Cologne's Lintgasse, she made art history in the early 1960s alongside personalities such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Nam June Paik. Today, at the age of 85, she has no intention of stopping. From morning till night, this extraordinary artist works in her studio near Cologne: a magical place.

An immersive cinematic poem of a 7 year journey of return, “Kitâb al-Isfâr: Book of the Journey” weaves together stories of near-death and mystical experience in Andalucia. According to the director: “When I was 19 I set out, hoping I could learn the meaning of life by ‘experiencing everything’. I bought a car for 20 marks in a cafe in Ulm. I spray painted it yellow and green and drove it from Holland to Romania to Spain, sleeping in the back seat in a red blanket. Driving down to Málaga, at the crest of the mountains, the brakes went out. As the car sped down the mountain then crashed, I lost consciousness, followed by three days and nights of visions. What did I see, what did I understand? The Shaykh al-Akbar, Sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn ‘Arabî , writes that the journey only has true meaning if it brings a new beginning. In traveling, the heart becomes the goal of the journey”.

For the past two years, the world population has been under the spell of the coronavirus. Emergency regimes have been established, civil liberties have been dismantled, surveillance programs were being installed and an unprecedented global vaccination program has been rolled out. Are we doing the right thing, or did we make a deal with the devil in exchange for a benefit? Through critical voices from various areas of expertise, PANDAMNED attempted for the first time to paint the whole picture and shed light on the darkness. It has become a relentless stocktaking of our time, which global organizations, governments and big tech companies would have preferred to prevent. Documentary maker Marijn Poels takes the viewer on an enlightening journey through the emerging absurd world of the "New Normal" and how we can still prevent it.