The house is crammed with objects of no great material value. Years after her father’s death, the director, her mother and brother clear the family home, once a promise of social advancement and now a place nobody wants to live in. The memories lie in the remains of everyday life and the junk of countless boxes of dusty entomological specimens. The mother tried to stop the passing of time by excessive collecting. And so the dialogues between the members of the family revolve around the big question of transience. Can memories be shared? What’s left of a life when the next generation attaches a different value to its objects? When memories disintegrate like the wings of the butterflies in their glass cases?
De Felice focuses on the process of remembrance and the question of what our memory retains. It’s not about the faces in the photographs, but the process of posing for the camera, filming and commenting. And the moments of silence while the camera is still running. And most of all the shape our memories assume. In this case, it’s the ink watercolours sketched by the director. Pared-down and delicate, sparingly animated from time to time, they do what only art can do: take us into the inner spaces where our families continue to live when all artefacts have long crumbled to dust.

Grit Lemke

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Golden Dove Animated Documentary 2013

Jeanine and Alain live in the north of France. Both come from Algeria and sometimes miss their home. That’s why they planted their own Mediterranean garden which they enjoy cultivating very much.

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

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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