“Imminent danger, fear, catastrophe,“ the Austrian-Jewish composer Arnold Schönberg wrote on top of his film score in 1930, to which – except in this collage, swaying like a battered boxer between austere reading document, black film abysses and roaring tempests of images – no film was ever made. Schönberg’s letters articulate the forebodings of the disaster the National Socialists were to bring upon the Jews, describe anti-Semitism that was becoming systematic, marginalization and defamation. Inserted in between, as a look back and forward at historical continuities: bombers approaching Vietnam, the shot Paris Communards in coffins arranged like letter cases.
An abstract, extremely reduced miniature that manages to express and capture all the more with minimal means. Only a few hand-drawn monochrome strokes, forming and transforming to the rough beat of electronic sound fragments, create a vast space. It is filled with image and sound signals, with successful and failed attempts at communication.
A poetical quotation puts a damper on high expectations of earthly life. Because human beings were not sent to earth but cast out to it. Disappointments are to be expected. In “I Still Talk to You,” Turkan Huseyn illustrates a conversation with her friend. It is about love and the longing to return to the past, about childhood and its no longer existing coordinates in time and space. A melancholy dialogue broken up by brief encounters: stranded looking people who also explain their views of and experiences with love. Meanwhile, the fish in the Caspian Sea are coated in a thin layer of oil that merely needs to be wiped off. It used to be less dirty here, Turkan Huseyn says. When you are a child, everything seems less dirty, her friend replies. A laconic zooming back and forth between inside and outside, in the centre of which a few buckets of blood-red flowers bloom anyway.
Ayala Shoshana Guy tries to grasp the ephemeral: She interweaves her grandfather Jancsi’s story, remembered only in fragments, who left Vienna with his brother Bandi to escape the Nazi regime, with her own inner images, thus questioning them in a way. A ship to Palestine turns into an all-inclusive cruise liner, the vague becomes concrete only to fade away again. Cautious and bold in equal measure, the granddaughter enters shadowy terrain.
She is the centre of attention, but exhausted by life. An old woman in her final days, bedridden and too weak to speak to her husband and daughter. Her selfhood fades away while in the care of her relatives, who have problems of their own. But Julia Orlik brings the woman back into the foreground with her minimalist concept and touching puppet design.
There is a house hanging from heavy ropes, firmly anchored to the rocks. Up there in the cliffs, far above the town below, a father lives with his son in the cold. In his 2D frame-by-frame animation, director João Gonzalez uses few colours, which makes the harsh shadows and extreme camera angles of his drawings all the more atmospheric. He has realised a metaphorical tale that can do without dialogue, relying on sound and images alone.
Lamine recently moved from Germany to Senegal with his family. His parents have bought some land and are now starting a farm. There’s always a lot to do and Lamine helps out after school. The fish have to be fed and the plants in the garden watered. But the afternoons are too hot to work, so it’s off to the beach with his new friend.
“Grrr, I’m a tiger!” Vanja and his big sister turn the flat into a jungle. Then Thea gets a visitor. Three can also play hide-and-seek, suggests Vanja. He runs into the courtyard, where there are dark corners, creepy shadows and strange noises. To overcome his fear, he turns himself into the dangerous tiger again – and discovers that even the big ones are scared sometimes.
A woman’s voice shouts and whispers her wishes, depending on how she feels and what she wants. Her cartoonishly reduced and exaggerated body dances compromise out of the world. Straight, zig-zag or in sweeping curves, on we go through the hustle and bustle of life. Anne Isensee formulates an enthusiastic wake-up call for self-determination and lust for life.
When the artist duo Karnapke and Johnson are separated by Covid-19 in the middle of a project, the result is a correspondence about the constant change we live in. The VR experience based on this is a walk-in meditation: about reality, about normality and about the signs that distinguish the rule from the exception, visualized in a space made of countless particles.
“Whoever has discovered a truth must also bear witness to it and make it known,” says the critical Potsdam high school graduate and pastor’s son Alexander Schulz at the start of the film and adds: “You must also endure the personal disadvantages.” Between March 1989 and March 1990, Kurt Tetzlaff follows the intelligent boy through a time of upheaval. At their graduation, Alexander and his class perform the play “Dictatorship of Conscience” by Mikhail Shatrov. He takes part in the demonstrations in autumn 1989 and refuses to serve in the army. Sequences from the GDR news demonstrate how far removed from the citizens the state leadership had become.
Once again Kurt Tetzlaff portrays Alexander, who in 1990 works as a nurse and is active in the “Action Reconciliation”. The sense of departure of the autumn of 1989 slowly gives way to disappointments about the outcome of the People’s Chamber elections in 1990, the currency reform and the Unification Treaty. The political and social changes took place at a rapid pace that many found hard to follow. The sense of community that carried people through 1989 is fading. “Now it’s every man for himself”, Alexander states. He has no use for capitalism: “I feel just as lied to and cheated as before.” Resignation spreads.
Marta Pajek (digitally) created a complex, atmospheric universe – with minimalist means and yet rich in detail. References to contemporary history meet visions of an intuited, dystopian future. We are made aware of (our own) transience in subtle, but almost brutal ways. Ageing bodies, ageing ideas. In the end, the grande dame of Polish cinema, actor Anna Polony, sings: “… when will we ever learn?”
In the blink of an eye – as the film is titled – 66 years pass by, seven centuries of stone crumble and a savings bank replaces a church. In six and two half chapters, Jorge Moneo Quintana succeeds in a feat of archival work, montage and sound design. The organic merging of images that show the site’s transformation submerge the audience into a pleasantly sober reflection on the beauty and sadness of decay.
Animals have no “LGBTQIA*”, they simply are and do, practicing gender, sexuality and family constellations according to desire and necessity. There is still a lot to discover here, as Marcel Barelli reports. He went stalking, observing and listening closely. Briskly animated and wittily narrated, he tells of fantastic zoological caprices and miraculous relationships.
Standing in the water in fishing gear, catching fish and taking in the rugged winter landscape. What at first sounds like a dream for outdoor fans is part of the working routine of prison inmates in the East Slovakian town of Perín-Chym. Their job is to breed carp, which are primarily consumed at Christmas dinners. Marek Moučka anonymizes the prisoners by erasing their eyes in his artful black and white film. He talks to them about freedom and missed holidays.
