A lovingly designed mini-drama about a droll puppet with a button nose and jug ears in scary situations we all remember from our childhood. The horror on the one-metre board under which a bottomless abyss is yawning. The panic when the door of a public toilet won’t open. Every scene illustrates children’s fears, and we don’t laugh about a little man in distress but about ourselves.

Somewhere on an ocean the crew of a fish trawler go about their work day and night. Every step must be perfect, every movement automatically leads to the next. Heavy chains have to be secured, nets reeled in, fish swiftly gutted and packed with ice into large boxes. A cigarette is always dangling from the lips and hopefully there’s always something left in the jar of chocolate cream. The camera moves in the same rolling beat as the ship in the waves.

With childlike ease, entertaining and touching, this colourful animation shows the transition of a woman who was born in the “wrong body”. With her family’s support and understanding, Ivan becomes Lada – a happy, content person. Based on a true individual story, this film is also a parable on the ingenuity of the transgender community who sometimes have to take unusual paths to establish a life worth living in an ignorant environment.

After years of touring together, the Berlin supergroup “Moderat” decided in 2017 to go on a (recently terminated) hiatus. “The Last Days” portrays the three protagonists of “Intelligent Dance Music” at their most human. Black and white images taken around their last concert tour serve as a projection surface for off-screen interviews in which Sascha, Szary and Gernot describe each other, allowing deep insights into their artistic dynamics.

Please note:Stroboscopic effects are used in this film.

In Hamsterland, everybody is 100 percent happy. Their religion is statistics and the perfect employee is young, a team player and stress-resistant. Even the most mindless computer jobs and piece work drudgery are fun, without exception. Until one day something goes wrong after all and the mantras “think positive” and “follow your dreams” are temporarily silenced. An entertaining polemic on hyper capitalist, neoliberal societies that makes you smile.

A life dedicated to decay. Johannes Weigelt (1890–1948) was a palaeontologist, a dilettante photographer, a Nazi, all of it fervent. This essay is dedicated to the pioneer of taphonomy – sober and at the same time exciting in form. Three image fields are filled with changing content: black and white documents of fields of animal carcasses, a snapshot with Göring, text panels, artful photomontages. They all charge one another, containing a vibrantly shimmering biography fossilised in images.

It’s lonely out in space and only the sun can warm you. In his imaginative 2D animation, Darko Masnec makes lines come alive and breathes life into abstract geometrical figures, as if Paul Klee and the Shadoks were celebrating a colourful banquet of metamorphoses. Stylised forms sprout luminescent organic compounds that tell a touching love story in outer space.

Born blind, the hero of this film turns seven before he begins to see images from the past that soon follow him like a curse. Like the stars in the night sky, what he sees has often long since passed away and gone out. In this tragic masterpiece by the directing duo Kijek/Adamski, the almost tangible pastel-coloured cut-out technique of the present-day narrative contrasts with delicate black and white 2D animations that represent the shadows of what is lost.

Our heroine’s previous film was invited to multiple festivals and awarded a number of prizes. Maybe the success went to her head a little. She was so busy working that she spent four years without a single day off. Now she sits in her parents’ garage and works on her graduation film. Its heroine is the animation film student Julita who is working on her graduation film. An affectionate film-in-film puppet animation with a surprising end.

Yasin El Harrouk is Yonii is actor, rapper, singer, Swabian, Moroccan. This portrait presents him as a lively shifter between life and creative cultures, between the roles he plays in the studio and in front of the camera, and the expectations that family and community have of him. Yonii has two languages and even more worlds – and enjoys this wealth. But on the sofa in his mother’s Stuttgart living room, it becomes clear that this range of different worlds also means a constant balancing act.