A
Film Archive
The subway station is going crazy. The call box wants to bring about world peace like the Dalai Lama, the construction area light is heartbroken and the newspaper vending machines belt out a hit song from the eighties. A street filled with rhythm and passion.
Kim Busch
Kim Busch
Billy’s Balloon
Don Hertzfeldt
A child beams with joy at his balloon. Not for long, because the round red friend on the line has some mean ideas of his own about how to play with the little cutie. Don Hertzfeldt’s classic of black humoured drawn animation.
Billy’s Balloon
Animated Film
USA
1998
5 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
A child beams with joy at his balloon. Not for long, because the round red friend on the line has some mean ideas of his own about how to play with the little cutie. Don Hertzfeldt’s classic of black humoured drawn animation.
Ines Seifert
Ines Seifert
Bobby Bumps’ Last Smoke
Earl Hurd
Even in its rebellious youth, cartoon already tested its boundaries and freedom. In 1919, Earl Hurd drew the serial character Bobby Bumps and his dog Fido.
Bobby Bumps’ Last Smoke
Animated Film
USA
1919
6 minutes
subtitles:
English Captions
Even in its rebellious youth, cartoon already tested its boundaries and freedom. In 1919, Earl Hurd drew the serial character Bobby Bumps and his dog Fido. He lights a cigarette for the underage boy who promptly flies to the land of dreams in a cloud. “Gee, we’re in Turkey!” Mr. Hurd, what exactly was in that tobacco?
Ines Seifert
Ines Seifert
Cool, hip, nerrrdyyyyy … and brilliantly funny. Yung Jake nonchalantly raps his way through the online visual world of the digital youth, contaminating pretty boy Justin Bieber with a virus-like pixel infestation, celebrating hip-hop stereotypes with data errors. “I’m on my datamosh. Glitched out swag.”
Ines Seifert
Ines Seifert
Decasia
Bill Morrison
Archives are tirelessly fighting against the age-related decay of film stock. Chemical processes produce blisters and crystal carpets in the emulsion.
Decasia
Animated Film
USA
2002
67 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
Archives are tirelessly fighting against the age-related decay of film stock. Chemical processes produce blisters and crystal carpets in the emulsion. The ephemeral beauty of decay has become the subject of art – as the analogue’s aesthetic resistance in the age of digitisation. Bill Morrison’s masterpiece “Decasia” portrays the special nature of that thing called film. His touching, ingenious composition interweaves sequences from the early days of documentary and fictional cinema in which the damaged spots enchant and at the same time comment on the images. Michael Gordon’s music shifts between serial and No Wave Drone and supplies the speeding train on which the damaged images race across the screen once more.
André Eckardt
André Eckardt
Do Not Resist
Craig Atkinson
A country on its way to becoming a police state: a journey through the US featuring astonishing material about the military industrial complex that’s behind the shootings of black people.
Do Not Resist
Those were the days, when Hollywood allowed the world to laugh at American police recruits who stared at their guns as if they were flat irons! Of course reality was never like “Police Academy”. Today, however, regular police operations occasionally resemble cinema plots – of war movies. “Do Not Resist” opens with apocalyptic images from Ferguson, Missouri, where the shooting of the 18-year-old African-American Mike Brown in August 2014 was followed by protests against police violence. In the heat of the night heavily armed policemen advance, guns ready, accompanied by an armoured car. What exactly is their mission here? And who protects the rights of the citizens?
Starting in Ferguson director Craig Atkinson embarks on an investigative journey through the U.S. to explore the police methods of tomorrow and finds a lively debate about militarisation and becoming a police state. It’s true: councillors in communities with non-existent crime rates decide to buy armoured cars. Ideologists like police trainer Dave Grossman cite the frontier metaphor and the good-versus-evil formula. Windows are smashed at random in police operations against a few grams of grass. And criminologists examine the technical potentials of early recognition of criminals. The slogan “Yes We Can” acquires a whole new meaning.
Lars Meyer
Starting in Ferguson director Craig Atkinson embarks on an investigative journey through the U.S. to explore the police methods of tomorrow and finds a lively debate about militarisation and becoming a police state. It’s true: councillors in communities with non-existent crime rates decide to buy armoured cars. Ideologists like police trainer Dave Grossman cite the frontier metaphor and the good-versus-evil formula. Windows are smashed at random in police operations against a few grams of grass. And criminologists examine the technical potentials of early recognition of criminals. The slogan “Yes We Can” acquires a whole new meaning.
Lars Meyer
Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure
anonymous
“Climax Fables presents” the fantasy world of an unknown artist from the Roaring Twenties. Eveready Harton has adventures with wife, rival and pet.
Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure
Animated Film
USA
1928
7 minutes
subtitles:
English Captions
Credits
anonymous
“Climax Fables presents” the fantasy world of an unknown artist from the Roaring Twenties. Eveready Harton has adventures with wife, rival and pet. It’s astounding what his John Thomas is up to … One of the oldest pornographic animations, produced anonymously in three renowned New York animation studios.
Ines Seifert
Ines Seifert
Furusato
Thorsten Trimpop
Radioactivity is invisible – but omnipresent around Fukushima. An activist fighting a losing battle, a Tepco engineer and a young horse breeder between normality and shock.
Furusato
Radioactivity is invisible. And yet there is a fine black dust all around Fukushima that makes the Geiger counters go crazy. Men in white hazard suits comb the landscape to scratch it meticulously from the roadsides and fill it into small bags. Passers-by stop, worried. They had hoped to take up their former lives again. One by one not only the birds are returning to the town of Minamisōma, but the people, too. But the nuclear accident is a crack running through biographies and traditions, separating the old people who feared less for themselves than for their children from the next generations. All those who return must ask themselves daily what price they’re willing to pay for it. But while animals are perishing by the roadside, the new (old) ideology that home is more important than security is seeping into many people again.
“Furusato” takes an ancient cultural landscape as a framework to unfold the visually monumental panorama of a place where normality and shock are at war years after the accident. Its protagonists are, among others, an activist who wants to prevent a public children’s run, a proud young horse breeder who is determined to continue her family’s tradition, and a former Tepco security engineer. All of them have one thing in common: the human factor.
Lars Meyer
Golden Dove German Competition 2016;
Nominated for DEFA Sponsoring Prize, Goethe-Institute Documentary Film Prize 2016
“Furusato” takes an ancient cultural landscape as a framework to unfold the visually monumental panorama of a place where normality and shock are at war years after the accident. Its protagonists are, among others, an activist who wants to prevent a public children’s run, a proud young horse breeder who is determined to continue her family’s tradition, and a former Tepco security engineer. All of them have one thing in common: the human factor.
Lars Meyer
Golden Dove German Competition 2016;
Nominated for DEFA Sponsoring Prize, Goethe-Institute Documentary Film Prize 2016
I, Destini
Nicholas Pilarski, Destini Riley
Destini’s brother is young and black, like countless other often innocent prison inmates in the U.S. All the words and lines of this story made up of 10,000 single frames speak of both a distressing individual fate and active solidarity.
Credits
Nicholas Pilarski, Kathleen Lingo, Sarah Bassett, Lattina Lennon Riley, Lindsay Course
Nicholas Pilarski, Destini Riley
Markus Popp, Lucky Dragons, Nicholas Pilarski
Nicholas Pilarski, Destini Riley
Nicholas Pilarski
Destini Riley, Nicholas Pilarski, Sarah Bassett, Anabela Turlione, Isaac Sagastume, Kamil Adamski
Destini Riley
Nicholas Pilarski
Destini’s brother is young and black, like countless other often innocent prison inmates in the U.S. All the words and lines of this story made up of 10,000 single frames speak of both a distressing individual fate and active solidarity. Destini Riley’s artistic way of coping with grief is also an attempt to fight the prison sentence. The film was made before “Black Lives Matter” became a nationwide movement, as a collaborative effort of 13-year-old Destini and the director.
Nadja Rademacher
Nadja Rademacher
MissMe: The Artful Vandal
Mohammad Gorjestani
Refusing to be tamed, rejecting the “fancy job” in the art world and taking on the big advertising agencies? MissMe shows us how to do it.
MissMe: The Artful Vandal
Refusing to be tamed, rejecting the “fancy job” in the art world and taking on the big advertising agencies? MissMe shows us how to do it. Her street art also casually sweeps away female stereotypes and shows us what beauty can, even must be. “Who run the world? Girls!”
Kim Busch
Kim Busch
Negative Man
Cathy Joritz
Film was long considered a medium of mass education in which talking heads explained the world. Cathy Joritz gleefully scratches the surface of these claims of authority, etching playful visual comments into the emulsion.
Film was long considered a medium of mass education in which talking heads explained the world. Cathy Joritz gleefully scratches the surface of these claims of authority, etching playful visual comments into the emulsion. And so the film professor suddenly grows pig’s ears.
Ines Seifert
Ines Seifert
Pets are only human, too. Debbie and Tom own a farm and have the biggest hearts for abused creatures one can imagine. They have given shelter to hundreds of animals – from cross-eyed Siamese cats to disabled opossums to the Pickle of the title, a poor little fish that became a nursing case and for whom they finally crafted a comfortable sponge corset. A heartbreaking animadoc mini-drama about the tragedy of being.
Ralph Eue
Ralph Eue
Removed
Naomi Uman
A film of unfulfilled dreams. Naomi Uman removed the objects of desire from a 1970s porn movie. Using nail polish remover and bleach, she made the women’s bodies invisible, frame by frame. What’s left is a phantom.
Credits
A film of unfulfilled dreams. Naomi Uman removed the objects of desire from a 1970s porn movie. Using nail polish remover and bleach, she made the women’s bodies invisible, frame by frame. What’s left is a phantom. The upstanding Romeos grasp nothing but emptiness and are left alone with their manhood.
Ines Seifert
Ines Seifert
The Boombox Collection: Boots Riley
Mohammad Gorjestani
“I got love for the underdog.” Boots Riley is not a capitalist for he knows the seamy side of the land of opportunity.
The Boombox Collection: Boots Riley
Credits
Malcolm Pullinger, Mohammad Gorjestani
Mohammad Gorjestani
The Coup
Michael Gioulakis
Malcolm Pullinger
“I got love for the underdog.” Boots Riley is not a capitalist for he knows the seamy side of the land of opportunity. Class struggle is what drives his art, not selling out, fame or fortune. Hip-hop is the boombox for his political vision.
Kim Busch
Kim Busch
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
Brett Story
The American prison system as economic factor and part of everyday life.
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
Documentary Film
Canada,
USA
2016
87 minutes
subtitles:
English
One of the pre-eminent characteristics of film and cinema is that they allow us a direct experience of universally visible phenomena of reality. “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” takes this one step further: the film is searching the mundane social environment for traces of an institution of American life that was carefully banished from people’s sights and minds and, by doing this, brings them back before our eyes and minds.
Statistically speaking, more people are detained in US prisons today than at any other time or in any other place in human history. Brett Story’s film is an ingenious documentary investigation into the American prison system across the States. Though we hardly ever see even the silhouette of a real penitentiary, we get a tangible sense of how much these places, which have been pushed out of sight, and their inmates are part of everyday life and at the same time an indispensable economic factor.
Ralph Eue
Statistically speaking, more people are detained in US prisons today than at any other time or in any other place in human history. Brett Story’s film is an ingenious documentary investigation into the American prison system across the States. Though we hardly ever see even the silhouette of a real penitentiary, we get a tangible sense of how much these places, which have been pushed out of sight, and their inmates are part of everyday life and at the same time an indispensable economic factor.
Ralph Eue
We Are Made of Bone
Olivia Ebertz
Nowhere else is death celebrated as joyfully and in such baroque fashion as in Mexico. It’s the same in the New York borough of Queens, where migrants celebrate the annual Day of the Death.
We Are Made of Bone
Credits
Olivia Ebertz
Olivia Ebertz
Olivia Ebertz
Olivia Ebertz
Gonzalo Espinoza
Nowhere else is death celebrated as joyfully and in such baroque fashion as in Mexico. It’s the same in the New York borough of Queens, where migrants celebrate the annual Day of the Death with lots of tinsel, holy water and lovingly decorated skeletons. The Day of the Death makes the living feel they belong to a vibrant community that sticks together even in a foreign land, where – at least that’s what they believe – the dead followed them.
Cornelia Klauß
Cornelia Klauß
