Book blurbs often say things like “unputdownable” or “you want to start rereading the book as soon as you’ve finished it.” The film Gonda (2012) by Ursula Mayer (1970, born in Austria, lives and works in London) has this same compelling and luring quality. As soon as her 30-minute film is over, you want to watch it again. There’s so much there you feel you didn’t quite get. The flow of images is seductive and in combination with the voice-over, the movie is sometimes stirring and exciting, sometimes soothing and calming. And somehow nothing makes sense if you approach the film rationally. There’s a certain desperation, even panic to some of the things the female voice says: “No, it’s not mine. I don’t understand how it ended up in my basket” or “It’s just that I don’t like to be touched” or stronger even, “My death would have nothing to offer me.” Is she a frigid kleptomaniac on the verge of suicide? Gonda starts with a tall, skinny woman running over the hills: not pastoral, lush, green hills but rather volcano-like, post-apocalyptic, dusty hills. Then a jump shot to an abstract image of colored stripes, and then an Egyptian cat figurine, …