The sound of the sea, waves – and a yellow plastic stick floating in them. An image that now seems like an allegorical commonplace of the Anthropocene forms the prelude to Michael Heindl’s Afterlives. It is about the afterlife of all sorts of plastic objects that, when withdrawn from the consumption process, often travel long distances before finally ending up in the sea. In this case, the director has collected the remains of rubbish washed up on the coast of Tanzania, mostly high-quality and still intact plastic, in order to take them back to their fictitious places of origin. In Afterlives, these are partly inconspicuous, partly cleverly prepared everyday contexts in the urban space of Vienna, which here stands pars pro toto for the West’s wasteful, throwaway society.