The image of China as a music nation is dominated by drilled masses and exceptional instrumentalists. This accordion class, however, presents a different image: wrapped in down anoraks, children practice “Hänschen klein”. During the Cultural Revolution, the piano and violin were frowned upon as “bourgeois”, unlike the accordion – its performative qualities were well suited to propaganda. Today the heart-warming squeezing looks almost like a gesture of resistance against the state-promoted virtuoso culture.

Esther Buss

An imaginary football match played by blue and red ink figures: attack – defence – goal. And one injured player. Caibei Cai and Ang Li draw us into their graphically fascinating sci-fi cosmos of the cellular tissue which serves as a football pitch for blood corpuscles and defence cells, visualised by microscopic negative shots of cells, insects and plant particles.

André Eckardt

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Nominated for mephisto 97.6 Audience Award

Overgrown urban wasteland with forgotten objects, stairs, railways leading nowhere, a dripping moon – Yuan Gao’s paintings are straight objective representations of the unspeakable und uncertain. In “Lunar Dial” she arranges her paintings in time, animates important details and creates an associative and compelling bicycle ride. A trip under the influence of the moon, whose gravitational pull dictates the tides and keeps the mysteries together by magic.

André Eckardt

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Nominated for mephisto 97.6 Audience Award

The vegetables in China – contaminated by pesticides. The local meat – loaded with hormones. Do they still want to stay in China, Wang Yan Peng asks two college students. Sure, it’s a good place to live. Whether the student residence where the six young men in this film share a small room is also a good place to live remains open for discussion.

Carolin Weidner

30-year-old Dong is lying on the bed, smoking and wondering: “What can I do to be a valuable member of society? Should I get up? No, I won’t.” When director Tao Gu, who hasn’t seen his old friend in ten years, meets him again in 2011, he meets a man crushed by personal defeat and the latest turbo developments of Chinese society. A man living in student digs who, with his leather jacket, lovesickness, guitar and alcohol, has come to epitomise the antithesis of the dictatorial career ethos. Dong spends his days dreaming and living out his emotional outbreaks in a social environment programmed for reticence.

This sensitive portrait doesn’t show a deliberate dropout but a man whose failure is due to self-doubt and the capitalist “freedom’s” pressure to succeed, who despite his youth is already cleverly sidestepped by a next generation boldly juggling with the logics of the market economy. The protagonist and the filmmaker set out by train to Dong’s home in Inner Mongolia. This train journey of several days runs like a thread through the film as it revels in Dong’s dream of taming horses in the endless steppe and enjoying a peaceful life with a simple Mongolian girl. The young man breaks off the journey.

André Eckardt

The metropolis looms in the night. No people, just scattered lights, sounds of cars, murmuring. A resolute woman talks of the good old days, while two young students are looking for their identity and place in this complex world. Even in the opening tracking shot, Stephan Knauss’s documentary illustrates a Chinese metropolis in transition. Between concrete desert and nature, old and young, tradition and departure, beats and emotion – always on the lookout.

Julia Weigl

Accidental, private sound recordings: a whispering child’s voice, a ticking clock, household sounds in the background. Old catalogue photos alternate with wild bonsais and sober furniture arrangements to their beat. Backdrops for ghostly animation studies. The gentle fog of the tapes’ and paper fibres’ own white noise settles over the cryptic collage. At their gaps and seams, the concrete images and sounds spark off a semi-waking dream, a vague creative memory.

André Eckardt