663114
Isamu Hirabayashi
Every 66 years a cicada emerges from deep in the ground and climbs up a tree to shed its skin there. It’s been like this forever. But this time it’s different …
D
Film Archive
Every 66 years a cicada emerges from deep in the ground and climbs up a tree to shed its skin there. It’s been like this forever. But this time it’s different … With the monologue of this insect, Japanese animation filmmaker Isamu Hirabayashi created one of the most poignant and unsparing reactions to the disasters of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima.
Duscha Kistler
Duscha Kistler
A Free Man
Andreas Hartmann
After Kei tried and dropped out of university and military service he finds his happiness in turning his back on his performance-oriented society.
A Free Man
A young man deliberately chooses to live on the streets. After Kei tried and dropped out of university and military service he finds his happiness in turning his back on his performance-oriented society. He sleeps under bridges, meets new people in the streets and devotes all his time to his passions – classical music and military games. It’s doubtful whether he can keep up this lifestyle, because reality always catches up with him. The film follows this freedom-loving dreamer who is completely carried away by his outsider’s role with an almost meditative calm and breathtaking music.
Kim Busch
Kim Busch
Anal Juke. Anal Juice
Sawako Kabuki
Fukushima and a broken heart lead to a meltdown of body and mind.
Anal Juke. Anal Juice
Fukushima and a broken heart lead to a meltdown of body and mind. Using colour and speed to maximum effect, Sawaku Kabuki gives her female protagonist extravagant acrobatic skills and lets her get even with her ex boyfriend. Fuck him!
Ines Seifert
Ines Seifert
Anomalies
Atsushi Wada
We try to enrich ourselves through prayer, faith and devotion to someone or something “other”. Similarly, we believe in the existence of “anomalies”, such as unknowable and uncontrollable monsters.
Anomalies
Animated Film
Japan,
UK
2013
3 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
We try to enrich ourselves through prayer, faith and devotion to someone or something “other”. Similarly, we believe in the existence of “anomalies”, such as unknowable and uncontrollable monsters. But can such beliefs advance us?
Honorary Mention in the International Competition Animated Film 2014
Honorary Mention in the International Competition Animated Film 2014
Beyond the Wave
Kyoko Miyake
Aunt Kuniko from Fukushima must reclaim the meaning of her life: a very personal exploration of the path from humbleness to quiet rebellion.
Beyond the Wave
Documentary Film
Germany,
Japan
2013
83 minutes
subtitles:
English
Collapsed roofs, broken windowpanes, withered plants, dead animals – a deserted place. A grocery store looks almost exactly as it did on that day in March 2011. The few people one sees wear white paper suits and surgical masks. They are the ones who lost the world they lived in on that March day. One of them is aunt Kuniko. “It’s only natural to look for new sources of energy.” These words once advertised the construction of a nuclear plant in this now dead region. “Beyond the Wave” is a unique demonstration that after the disaster of Fukushima this sentence should become the leitmotif of our future. Caught between the grief of having lost their past and hopes of a personal perspective, the protagonists are forced to redefine themselves in their ruined home, this no-man’s country that many left long ago. Kyoko Miyake shows, not least through her personal voice-over, how a fairly atypical, albeit non-angry rebellion starts to germinate in the remaining Japanese citizens, and how her businesslike aunt and many others are ceaseless attempting to reclaim the meaning of their lives, against all prejudice and in the spirit of “I cannot let this disaster ruin all my efforts.”
Claudia Lehmann
Claudia Lehmann
Book-Paper-Scissors
Hirose Nanako
Kikuchi Nobuyoshi is an old-school book designer. In his studio in Tokyo, he uses sheets of paper, adhesive tape and rulers to design minimalist works of art of great sensitivity.
Book-Paper-Scissors
Credits
Kitahara Eiji, Amy Aoyama
Hirose Nanako
biobiopatata, Suzuki Tsunekichi
Hirose Nanako
Hirose Nanako
As a book designer, Kikuchi Nobuyoshi has drafted more than 10,000 covers. Working the traditional way, with graph paper, ruler, printed-out Kanji (the Japanese letters) and tape, every copy is first created by the most delicate haptic work, before his assistant, with whom he has been collaborating for more than thirty years, transfers the finished design to the computer. Kikuchi’s books represent a considered, minimalist aesthetics in which every single element – cover, binding, spine, marker ribbon – continues the story he encountered while reading it. Renowned writers like Furui Yoshikichi, who translated Robert Musil and others into Japanese, trust the intuition and skill of Kikuchi, who claims that he has grown increasingly empty over the decades. In her gentle portrait, director Hirose Nanako shows a man whose whole lifestyle is shaped by an elegant and cultivated attitude to things – whether it’s brewing freshly ground coffee, using an old gramophone or strolling through a Tokyo flea market.
Carolin Weidner
Carolin Weidner
Broken Down Film
Osamu Tezuka
The cowboy hero, the lovely lady, and the evil villain – in his spoof on one of the oldest genres in film history, the western movie, Osamu Tezuka sets up a funny obstacle course of projection blunders and celluloid flaws.
Broken Down Film
Animated Film
Japan
1985
6 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
The cowboy hero, the lovely lady, and the evil villain – in his spoof on one of the oldest genres in film history, the western movie, Osamu Tezuka sets up a funny obstacle course of projection blunders and celluloid flaws for his drawn protagonists. What follows is a dramatic fight against a frame line with a will of its own, a tempest of scratches and the ruthless film tear.
Ines Seifert
Ines Seifert
Datum Point
Ryo Orikasa
Waves keep rolling at the screen, breaking, forming powerful eddies, leaving traces of their energy. They are made of plasticine.
Datum Point
Animated Film
Japan
2015
6 minutes
subtitles:
English
Waves keep rolling at the screen, breaking, forming powerful eddies, leaving traces of their energy. They are made of plasticine. The animation becomes the visible expression of the intuitive forming of and the resistance offered by the raw material, accompanied by minimalist electronic sounds. With this film Ryo Orikasa creates a compelling haiku based on the works of the Japanese “poet of silence”, Yoshiro Ishihara.
André Eckardt
Nominated for mephisto 97.6 Audience Award
André Eckardt
Nominated for mephisto 97.6 Audience Award
Down Escalation
Shunsaku Hayashi
Nervous flickering and blinking until both shell and form dissolve. A vivisection under the cinematic microscope, using painting, animation and sound as surgical instruments.
Down Escalation
Shunsaku Hayashi dissects a cocooning process. Using painting and animation as scalpels and accompanied by composer Makoto Itabashi he creates fine cuts of a transformation into largely abstract images and sound as well as layers of time. Seen under the filmic microscope, we observe with wonder a radical reorganisation of physical and emotional structures. A nervous flickering and blinking in the silence and distant closeness while shell and shape are dissolving.
André Eckardt
André Eckardt
Feed
Eri Okazaki
Carefully executed actions hold this world together, following their own inner logic in constant repetition and uniformity: two large, gentle creatures in black and white plant trees.
Feed
Animated Film
Japan
2016
7 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
Carefully executed actions hold this world together, following their own inner logic in constant repetition and uniformity: two large, gentle creatures in black and white plant trees. Hamburgers are fried, packed in numbered boxes and stored for two children. A goat is petted and fed. And something is being counted.
Duscha Kistler
Duscha Kistler
Fortress of the Land
Kiichi Hoshi
Spring 1969: Tachikawa Airfield is of extreme importance to the United States’ Vietnam War. A coalition of peasants who already fought against its expansion in the mid-1950s as well as various factions of Japanese student and anti-war movement(s) tries to sabotage air traffic. ...
Fortress of the Land
Credits
Kiichi Hoshi
Kiichi Hoshi
Kimio Tsukamoto, Takashi Ueda, Masaaki Yoshimaru
Hiroko Kono
Yukio Kubota
Spring 1969: Tachikawa Airfield is of extreme importance to the United States’ Vietnam War. A coalition of peasants who already fought against its expansion in the mid-1950s as well as various factions of Japanese student and anti-war movement(s) tries to sabotage air traffic. As the war ends, the differences between the groups re-emerge …
Olaf Möller
Olaf Möller
Hide-and-seek
The film covered a residential area with a superb view of both ocean and mountain. From that day this town became pitch-dark. Hidden in this darkness were lights of the town, my way home, my mother, and my expected my baby in my belly.
HOMO DIGITALIS – Wie lange sind wir noch Mensch?
(none)
Austria,
France,
Germany,
Japan,
UK,
USA
2017
60 minutes
Credits
Andreas Martin, Dietmar Lyssy, Marcus Uhl
Christiane Miethge, Nils Otte
Kyrill Ahlvers, Tenzin Sherpa
Tim Sprado
Anna Hunger
Dagmar Petrus, Maik Siegle
Helen Fares
Thomas Sessner, Mustafa Isik (BR), Katja Ferwagner, Katja Dünnebacke, Aurélie Marx, Annina Zwettler (ARTE), Siegfried Steinlechner (ORF)
Miriam Mogge, Bernd Paulus, Max Karadeniz
Benny Nero
Phuoc Le, Lena Fischer
Christiane Miethge
Bernd Paulus, Phuoc Le, Lena Fischer
Anna Hunger, Sven Schulz
We live in times of upheaval. More and more technical innovations are part of our everyday life. But how dependent do we want to be? Or are we already addicted? Will there be a time when we have nothing but digital friendships, sex with robots, when we hack our own bodies? The transmedia project “HOMO DIGITALIS” consists of a documentary web series and a self testing game. How does the digital revolution affect us human beings? Does it turn Homo sapiens into a new species – Homo digitalis?
Institute Benjamenta or This Dream People Call Human Life
Brothers Quay
Jakob enters the Benjamenta siblings’ servants’ school. The protagonist of Robert Walser’s novel “Jakob von Gunten” becomes an observer of a place that lies still and dreams.
Institute Benjamenta or This Dream People Call Human Life
Feature Film
Germany,
Japan,
UK
1995
105 minutes
subtitles:
German
Jakob enters the Benjamenta siblings’ servants’ school. The protagonist of Robert Walser’s novel “Jakob von Gunten”, which was published in 1909, becomes an observer of a place that lies still and dreams. The pupils still take mysterious exercises, for example the canon of the singing forks. But the soul of the institute glows in hidden chambers. The Brothers Quay’s first feature film features a brilliant cast, but breathes the spirit of animation. Just as Walser’s language personifies matter and states of being and objectifies persons, objects, light and the forest take over that role in the film.
André Eckardt
André Eckardt
Jam
Mirai Mizue
Creatures of different shapes dart, jump, swarm, wiggle, hang, float, pulse next to, amongst, over and under each other across the frame. Sheer life!
Jam
Animated Film
Japan
2009
3 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
Creatures of different shapes dart, jump, swarm, wiggle, hang, float, pulse next to, amongst, over and under each other across the frame. They are created to the rhythm of a hammering beat, every new sequence of sounds generating another, different-coloured creature. Sheer life! Until total overpopulation is reached – visually and acoustically.
Duscha Kistler
Duscha Kistler
Modern No 2
Animated Film
Japan
2011
5 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
Using a sheet of graph paper, typically used for architextual drawings, Mizue combines straight lines which stretch out in three directions as a result we receive a driven animation of changing geometrical figures and rhythm.