How brutal is it when your own language casts you out of your home because it has been turned into the language of crimes against other people? In her autobiographical animation, Irina Rubina analyses why Russian can no longer be the language of security for her and why German – historically riddled with guilt and therefore insecure – does not offer a new home yet. The stark factuality of the director as narrator is enormously unsettling because it describes the irreversibility of this emotional state precisely.
On the visual level, dark spots eat into idealised images of home, until the planes become deadlocked in abstraction. The pictures were created on a so-called pinscreen. Reliefs can be “painted” and animated by the pins’ shadows on this screen on which around 200,000 pins are arranged in lines. The alternation of light and shadow and their immediate proximity lend drastic expression to the inner turmoil and ambivalence.

Breathing is vital and needs space. A small blue square appears out of nowhere, vibrating nervously and growing into a narrow line. Its red mirror image follows suit. Both take up more and more room in a contest to outdo the other, while a growing shortness of breath is wedged between them.
Martin Schmidt pulls off an astonishing feat: He generates a physically tangible cinematic experience from abstraction. He choreographs smooth surfaces in the cold, technical logic of their skirmish and electronically deconstructs the sounds of gasping. As the battle is getting fiercer, things are visually and acoustically compressed and stretched, twisted and filtered, until a heavy monster of tension emerges. “Lines” is big and loud; it can be read metaphorically, but also understood only in terms of its aesthetic power.

In 1945, the Red Army are advancing on German territory, the Second World War is drawing to an end. Families are still trying to escape to America, but many plans fail. Five-year-old Sophie also loses her father and mother during the flight. They are killed by Nazi officer Scharf and a Soviet soldier named Vasily, with Hitler Youth Beckmann as a witness. The gruesome event takes place in an extremely strange hotel which henceforth will bind the four survivors to its premises in bizarre ways, no matter which rooms of the truly scary building they find themselves in. Up in the lounge, where the new customers arrive one by one, down in the kitchen, where the now grown-up Sophie prepares food, or even in an alcove near the elevator shaft, where Beckmann hides with the rats. The involuntary permanent guests age but never tire of courting Sophie.
Heinrich Sabl has built an excitingly disturbing dollhouse decorated with quotes from reality for the German-Soviet history of guilt and coping. In his first feature-length animated film, on which the director worked for more than twenty years, he sends extraordinary characters on an equally extraordinary visual and acoustic time journey through the war-damaged suites of the 20th century.

Something is wrong. Something is completely wrong. With the sound and with the image. The notes are crooked, the piano lid squeaks, the movement falters. Corrections are needed to bring everything together in harmony and in tune with Johann Sebastian Bach’s beautiful music.
Six roles of painted toilet paper are worked on by human hands on an editing table, one after the other. The editing device consists of coloured building blocks and a few wooden sticks. It is a game, a trick, it’s entertainment. At the same time, the simple images on the film strip take us deep into the current events of our time. But the material resists sharply delineated representation. It soaks up the paint and blurs the boundaries. It tears. It is limited. Before the story can pick up speed, the roll is unspooled. Narrative is difficult in view of this situation. And yet animation artist Anna Samo manages, with a very light touch, to transform ambivalent feelings, confusion, rigidity and speechlessness into a work of hope and courage.

A dimly lit, scarcely furnished flat, the hissing and buzzing of an open microphone. What follows is an argument in Arabic between mother and son. She complains about his lethargy. He sees no point in school while the country is at war. At last, the boy sets out through the busy streets of his neighbourhood which is a chaotic patchwork of everyday life and the debris of war.
Using 3D graphics software, Husein Bastouni reconstructs from his personal memories the situation in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in the south of Damascus when the area found itself between the frontlines in the Syrian war. Visually and acoustically – indeed, almost olfactorily – his film draws you into this world from the first second with terrifying immediacy, and yet poetically. In a moment of shock, the rhythm slows down, the images become sparser, but the protagonist’s reflections become crystal clear. In the silence of thought, the eye glides like a deep-sea diver through a sunken city and a lost home.