As Clare moves from childhood, she strives to create a personal way of dealing with her Dad‘s illness from asbestosis. „All That Glisters“ is a stop-motion adaptation of a short story by Scottish author Anne Donovan.

Detailing the daily trails of a man, his wife, and a film noir private detective is not an unusual accessory to a film, but the mechanical storytellings used in this case change everything.

“There’s no such thing as rigid resistance in nature”, says Shingu Susumu, a Japanese creator of kinetic sculptures in the tradition of Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely. For many years, Shingu has explored the energies of wind and water as an artist. As a seismographer of the state of our world he designs sculptures that face up to the forces of nature, absorb them and are transformed by them. Making the power of the elements visible is his credo. In "Breathing Earth - Susumu Shingu's Dream", Thomas Riedelsheimer accompanies the artist on a worldwide search for a suitable location where an interdisciplinary project initiated by him and called “Breathing Earth” could become reality: a community fuelled only by the natural energy of wind, water and the sun, serving as a place of inspiration for artists, scientists and children and thus becoming a prototypical future laboratory.

– Ralph Eue

Centrefold is a moving and thought provoking animated documentary exploring the reasons why woman have labia surgery. Increasingly, women in the UK are undergoing a labiaplasty to neaten the appearance of their genitals. The film presents three woman’s accounts using stylized animated imagery.

During the war in Afghanistan, Ali, now ten, fled his country with his grandmother, leaving behind his parents who were unable to leave. This film explores his pain of being separated from them, as well as living for years without knowing whether they were alive. Despite now having contact with them, they are still unable to be united, and Ali describes his hopes of one day seeing them again. This is part of a series using real-life stories of young refugees and asylum seekers, told by the children themselves.

Childhood dreams areare full of fascination and imagination. This film is about what people really wanted to be when they were younger. However when time passes by, many of them start to forget... This film aims to remind people of their dreams and encourage them not to give up.

The Russian long-term observation “Born in the USSR” is known worldwide for having followed the chequered lives of nine children born in the Soviet era for 28 years. Emmy award winner Sergey Miroshnichenko creates fascinating insights into the worlds of his protagonists who have now grown up in quite a different value system. Take nine ordinary seven-year-olds and change their whole environment. Put their parents’ values upside down and exchange them for the norms and values of the society they will grow up in. Add puberty and hormones at the age of 14, followed by military service, financial difficulties and the onset of adult responsibilities at 21. Then wait seven years. “Born in the USSR” portrays very different people from Russia, Central Asia, the Baltic States and the Caucasus. It’s more than a film about life in the post-Soviet era, more even than a collection of biographies. It is always a very universal film about growing up, about dreams and hopes, realities and disappointments and the big question of what life holds in store for each of us.

Production note

Hamid, aged ten, is from Eritrea. His father had been receiving threats from people in the government so Hamid and his mother escaped to the UK when he was just seven. His father also tried to escape but couldn’t and was later killed. Hamid describes the struggles of coming to terms with his father’s death, as well as settling into a new country. This film is part of a series entitled 'Seeking Refuge' using the real-life stories of young refugees and asylum-seekers who have fled their homeland, told by the children themselves.

A “story of nicotine and mercury” is what Chico Pereira calls this film in which he portrays the end of a working life and a region. For 2000 years, mercury was mined underground in the Spanish city of Almadén, the director’s hometown. Then, in 2011, a EU-wide ban on the resource marked the end of a proud culture of miners. The pensioner and chain smoker Pablo was one of them. Now he spends his days watching television, grumbling to his wife and producing billows of smoke. What’s left when the jobs are gone, the doctor forbids one to smoke on top of that and one has no idea what to make of the lifetime gained? When all that’s left in the end is a name in a yellowing file and a notebook full of memories of heroic labour disputes, fretwork classes in the pensioners’ club or a dance on Valentine’s Day just won’t do the trick. Carefully framed and arranged like a feature film and yet deeply authentic, the black and white scenes (camera: Julian Schwanitz, Golden Dove Short Film 2011), tell the story of a new beginning in the midst of decline with some cautious humour. There is an element of utopia in the old man’s almost fairytale-like encounter with the boy Jaime. At the end the miners’ choir appeals to their patron saint, Barbara. But she is no longer responsible for Almadén. Only Pablo is left to hold the fort – and smoke.

Grit Lemke

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Awarded with a Honorary Mention in the Young Cinema Competition and the Healthy Workplaces Film Award 2012

Using the New Age idea of a"dimensional shift" as inspiration, the animation in "Shift" combines science-fiction themes abstracted and explored through colour, movement and shape.

Kemi lives and works in the murky slipstream of a North London pub. As the booze flows the line between who belongs behind and in front of the bar becomes increasingly blurred.

They vanish without warning: fathers, husbands, sons who leave their home to meet someone and never come back. They leave behind families who may never learn whether something happened or whether they were abandoned. Sleeplessly, they keep turning over the clues in their minds, desperately looking for signs they might have overlooked in this puzzle, reconstructing every detail of the last hours. They wait for years, fearing nothing more than getting an answer. Director Inka Achté has found a shimmering visual language for this almost unbearable atmosphere of uncertainty. The views of train stations and crowds always carry the deceptive hope that the missing person might be among them. They are interspersed with images of the protagonists as silhouettes torn from the darkness by the camera. These oscillating images illustrate the fateful ties between those who are present and those who are absent, this life and the other. Only the pudgy boy who resembles his vanished father so much has something to cling to as he gingerly holds his guinea pig in his arms.

– Cornelia Klauß

A boy like many others of his age: Galaa (12) is a smart, pudgy little rascal who’s not overly fond of school. He prefers to hang out with his little brother (6), listen to hip hop music, watch wrestling on television or eat junk food and play at online dating. The latter is only a fantasy, though, for Galaa lives with his mother and little brother in a yurt settlement on the edge of Ulan Bator (without a computer, of course). For the family – his father died in an accident a few years ago – every new day is a balancing act of survival, for what they earn as ambulant petty traders on the market is barely enough to buy food. So enrolling the boy in a Buddhist monastery school is less a matter of vocation than of existential self-defence. It would be a relief for the family if he was accepted and Galaa himself would be offered a real future perspective. The boy soon realises that this thing would not be bad for him at all and acquires a taste for the whole ceremonial order of Buddhist monasticism with its drums, prayer mills, colourful clothes and bags. A charmingly light and fascinatingly profound documentary coming-of-age story deftly balanced between materialism and spiritualism and – last but not least –fuelled by a heart-rending sense of humour.
– Ralph Eue

Saying “I love you” on the phone presupposes a personal history. But Hari has never met his future bride Suman, with whom he exchanges these tender words daily over the phone while driving his taxi over the bumpy streets of his Indian hometown at the foot of the Himalaya Mountains. It’s an arranged wedding, its history the thousand-year-old tradition behind it. Hari’s father won’t rest until his youngest son, who is already 30 after all, is finally married. He invests all his money in this project, for one thing is certain: the wedding will be colourful and expensive.
Who wants to make their father unhappy? And yet Hari has found a way to soften the tradition a bit: his mobile phone. “When you talk on the phone every day you would even fall in love with a stone”, he says in his inimitable and practical way. The usually cheerful young man’s straightforwardness is a constant surprise. And yet the closer the wedding approaches the more thoughtful and withdrawn the young man seems to be. Because he knows that Suman is not a stone and there’s a real concern that she won’t be able to handle the separation from her family. This unusual love must still pass its acid test – at the end of a long ceremony on which the bridal couple have the least influence. The story of this traditional wedding comes alive with its small signs of cautious modernisation to which Hari makes his modest contribution.
– Lars Meyer

‘There are many things we cannot choose in life, no one can choose their parents. You have to learn to love them before knowing them.’ The film reflects the directors personal feelings to Hong Kong and its complicated relationship with China.