8,500 kilometres lie between the Amazon and the Ardennes. In his home country of Brazil, Diego Quinderé de Carvalho only looks at the inaccessible and menacing forest from the outside. Its Belgian counter piece, however, is easy to explore. Here, everything is laid out by people, neatly ordered and reduced to the essentials. A geologist, a gold miner and an astronomer provide insights for a philosophical exploration of the origin of existence and the future of our planet.
The cycle of domestic violence: tension, escalation, remorse, and then all over again. The woman in Izabela Plucińska’s film shares the fate of many sufferers: She can’t manage to break out. The metaphorical dumbbells she would have to lift to do it weigh 98 kilograms – like the man who does this to her. All she can do is dissolve, disappear and breathe silently into her individual parts. The animations keep erasing themselves, but painful marks are left behind.
A very short film, infinitely sad and at the same time mischievous and playful. The opening credits tell us the devastating news: The filmmaker’s son was killed in an accident and left behind an unfinished flip book. The father resumes work on it and continues drawing the superhero tale, creating an animated film between deep mourning and carefree children’s logic. Capturing the proximity of happiness and loss in the most succinct form.
Everything splashes in this poetic portrait sketch: the rain on the roof, the dog in the puddle, the grandchildren in the kiddie pool and the protagonist in the river Vltava. A middle-aged woman has lovingly converted a freighter into a house boat. The film captures her daily life in impressionistic, analogue aesthetics, from morning coffee in her bathrobe to the last cigarette on deck at dusk. She seems to have fulfilled a wish – a life by and in the river.
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.
After a long time, a young woman once again holds letters in her hand that her father wrote her fifteen years ago when he was in prison. His words are full of love and affection: Never again were they to be that close, the daughter sums up today. What happened? This is what she tries to answer in a letter to him, writing down what couldn’t be said until now. The complex relationship between father and daughter in the form of a fragmentary animation.
Madrid 2020 seen from over a hundred years ago. A “Psycho-Sociological Study with Drawings and Photographs from Real Life” from 1901 sheds light on the various kinds of “lowlifes”: Criminals, parasites, outcasts and homosexuals populate the city. Both humorously and critically, the film examines the architecture, social structure and categories of outsiderdom. The result is a playful praise of disobedience.
Barely a kilometre off the Belgian coast, 35,000 tons of chemical munitions are buried at the bottom of the sea. The scraps of yesterday’s wars are secreting toxic gases today and the film explores the effects this will have – from fishing boats to delicatessen counters. An ominous droning lies over the impressive images of already dubious production processes. The shrimp end up in fish cakes. The seagulls lament the calamity. The people are at a loss.
Trees and other plants during the period of American colonial rule in the Philippines, photographed from the perspective of those in power. The images not only document the rich flora, they categorize and classify the resources of the colony. The forest becomes inventory. From potted plants to sawmills, from logging to reforestation: In her essay Shireen Seno takes us to the essence of photography itself – and to its relationship with colonialism. Because both are trying to pick something.
