News coming out of the darkness of night is like a journey into another reality, which is why the good citizen, effortlessly ignoring the brothers and sisters pushed into the shadow during the day, prefers to draw the curtains at night to protect himself from the worlds of refugees, migrants, the fragile survival economies of the invisible people. But the Iranian-French director Bijan Anquetil carries us off into a different kind of night. It works like developer in an analogue photo lab, slowly bringing faces, fates, longings and defeats out of invisibility. Under a bridge in a Paris industrial district Anquetil meets Sodan and Hamid, two illegal immigrants from Afghanistan. An improvised campfire, a forlorn moon in the sky, but no trace of fatigue or anger. Instead Anquetil’s night is filled with hunger for life, laughter, plans and an endless supply of stories. The short films Hamid recorded on his mobile phone during their long march into the promised land disrupt the darkness of their camp like the light from a torch, illuminating the refugee lorries in the Greek port of Patras, a burning refugee camp or protesters demanding asylum – brief flashbacks which also chronicle the time lost in waiting. And this is the real problem of these passengers of the night: they have reached their goal without ever really having arrived and are therefore no longer masters of their own time.

Matthias Heeder

---

Honorary Mention in the International Short Documentary Competition 2012

On 18th October, 2011, the sheriff of Zanesville, Ohio, got an agitated phone call: the animals that eccentric Terry Thompson was legally keeping on his ranch were roaming the county. Red alert! That night, a heavily armed police force killed more than 56 bears, tigers, wolves, leopards and lions. Thompson had opened the cages, shot himself and offered his body as food to the animals. So far, so good, so American.
British media artist Ramon Bloomberg has turned this bizarre incident into a Brechtian story. Bloomberg combines Brecht’s play “The Yes Sayer” about traditional custom and formalised law with the American settler’s anarchical logic of freedom which fights every kind of state influence as an infringement on individual freedom: I am the lord of my animals, my land, my house, my family. End of story!
Bloomberg translates epic theatre into the language of film in the age of Play Station games. Real live shots are combined with images from the police car’s video camera, Google Earth data mining sequences and computer animated re-enactments. We hear minutes and statements of everyone involved as well as a comment taking the form of an (antique) chorus, the voice of the law, the neighbour and the animal. The only voice we don’t hear is Terry Thompson’s. His motives remain a big secret.

Matthias Heeder

---

Honorary Mention in the International Competition Animated Film 2014

When knights parade up and down, unknown flying objects whirl through the air and the room suddenly turns into an impenetrable maze, we are in the classroom of an ordinary school on the outskirts of Paris. That’s roughly how five young teachers experience their first days on the job. And since words can hardly express what’s going on at a school, Jeanne Paturle and Cécile Rousset resort to a rich arsenal of animation techniques to translate this mixture of desperation, anarchy and chaos into images. Photo collages, cut out animation, plasticine and classic cartoon animation make historic personalities rise from the history books, reconstruct the Big Bang and make numbers begin to dance. The film literally explodes! But it aims at more and, above all, refuses to lament the dreadful state of education. Only when the teachers themselves become students, understanding the alphabet of the street and the key to every single student, can the nightmare of school perhaps turn into a space of freedom.
Cornelia Klauß