Small and cu… No, not cute. This knee-high creature seems shy and in need of love instead. Until it comes snarling round the corner, chasing you on its short legs through the empty suburb. An uncomfortable lurking feeling spreads. With sparse drawing, mean sound bites and not-so-friendly characters, Malte Stein lays out the surgical instruments for a head game.

Sigmund Freud’s dream symbolism relates birth to water that one – or so he says – either dives into or rises out of. While an adolescent boy gets mysterious phone calls and shyly follows his clique to a shits and giggles party, his mother floods the ever-sparser home with separation anxiety and absurd scenes, mocked by the pompously wall paper pattern with all its curlicues.

She opens her arms wide: “I want to go home, do my dreaming.” Crossing from an unbearable reality to the world of magic sometimes takes only the snap of a finger, sometimes several press-ups. Gudrun Krebitz’s poetic combination of video and animation recommends pushing the gravestone aside and descending into one’s subconscious.