Details emerge from a storm of images, reduced to black and white, silhouettes only: a Ferris wheel turning mechanically, children playing ball, one of whom standing a little way off, a knife suitable for slitting one’s wrist. They are part of the nightmares of an eight-year-old girl whose mother is an alcoholic. Off screen the girl, now grown up, talks about powerlessness, shame and the long silence.

Cornelia Klauß

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Honorary Mention in the International Competition Animated Documentary 2016

What’s left are images, ordered by memory. A home, the cat, friends – Otto Alder’s restless photo animation balances openly and honestly on the border between what was real and what was also meaningful. Photos are caught in twitching loops like struggling insects in the spider web of recall. A brief poetic respite and then the unabashed run-up to the emotional finish.

André Eckardt

A first person singular film which begins where it should, which is right at the beginning: after nine months of snug peace the filmmaker had fought her way through her mother’s pelvis and the first thing she touched was the latter’s curly pubic hair.

Anka Schmid uses a playful biographical approach to tell her hairy story, which is also the story of a whole generation. She jumps from detail to detail, or from moustaches to full beards to shaving one’s legs and armpits. And, last but not least, to the very special haptic pleasure you feel when you stroke the even stubble of a buzzcut. If this makes your hair stand on end with pleasure, you are already in the midst of the next volte-face. And if not, there’s no help for you anyway! Anka Schmid discovers the enormous potential of this most delicate body part in life and in art. And at the end of her ingenious collage of real, archival and animated footage one feels thoroughly combed over and certain henceforth that there is a whole cosmos hidden in hair.

Ralph Eue