The true adventures of a proud Belgian cock whose will to survive and fighting spirit made a lasting impression on his owners.

Signe Bauman is known for her open attitude towards taboos. Her films are explicit with a funny and ironic touch. So far she has told her stories only in the short format. “Rocks in My Pockets” is her first feature-length film and probably her most personal work, for the filmmaker takes a trip into her family’s past. She herself describes her latest work as “a funny film about depression”, but it’s probably more of a story about strong, independent women, domineering men, restrictive systems and mental illnesses that none of those involved take seriously. Her grandmother died mysteriously and the family remained silent about it. Signe assumes that she killed herself for she, too, suffers from depression and three of her cousins are mentally ill.
The filmmaker animates external influences and internal states of mind for her film, tries to make her own emotions and those of her fellow sufferers comprehensible to others and explains the connections between her personal and artistic emancipation and the process of coming to terms with the family secrets.
Annegret Richter

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

Innocence is no guarantee of freedom. Three cases that are exemplary (not only) of the US system of justice: Edward Baker, sentenced to 24 years for murder, James Landano and Joyce Anne Brown, both sentenced to life for capital offences. There are hundreds of innocently condemned prisoners like them in the States – including death row inmates who have been waiting for their execution for years. James McCloskey and his “Centurion Ministries” organisation have taken up the task of re-opening cases, questioning trials, getting new results through DNS analysis, and even identifying those as murderers who once accused an innocent person of their own crime.
How a wrongfully imprisoned person who feels abandoned by justice, lawyers, families, and friends reflects this injustice is hard to put in words. So director Sheila M. Sofian has conjured up an inferno of expressive animations painted on glass, abstract re-enactments, and surrealist details, which condenses into a passionate appeal to politicians to abolish prejudgements and racial discrimination. “If they’re not doing time for this, then surely for something else.” This statement by a cop encapsulates the cynicism that’s part of the system.

Cornelia Klauß