A slight body, wrapped in dusty rags. The gas mask on the face reveals only a tired pair of eyes with almost extinguished pupils. The figure slowly winds its way through a grey landscape of crumbling concrete and rusty iron parts. The human-amphibian hybrid contorts itself so bizarrely in this post-apocalyptic world that the laws of physics seem suspended. It is unclear what is up and down, almost impossible to determine on which planet the action is taking place. Observed by other fantastic chimeras, the creature sneaks out of its hiding place again and again to find water for a modest bath.
This avant-garde balancing act between documentary remnants of civilisations, found footage, dance, performance, puppetry and pantomime finds fascinating ways to push familiar definitions of animation to the limit – and beyond. With superbly staged movement choreographies, clever visual ideas and outstanding audio design, Niles Atallah makes a different kind of tale shine brightly.

The capybara family live peacefully among the reed islands near a small farm when suddenly a shot rings out – hunting season is open. Alarmed and scared, they try to shelter in the chicken-coop, but the rooster is suspicious and drives the strange animals away. Still, the capybara child and the chicklet are curious about each other. Their friendship has unexpected consequences.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Tehran and other major cities seem far away from the place where Sara lives. But in her rural community in northwestern Iran, the protagonist of this film advocates the same feminist values in a practical, everyday way. Again and again, we are reminded by the images that her father once taught her to ride a motorbike – to the disapproval of the whole village. A small favour with big consequences: For Sara, it paved a way outside patriarchal marriage. Mobile on two wheels, she works as a midwife and has delivered many girls for whom she now wants to fight: At the start of the film and in middle age, Sara decides to be the first woman in the history of her community to run for the local council. A step which earns her enthusiastic support on the one hand; on the other, she must endure open hostilities and an interrogation by the moral enforcers of the Islamic Republic. In “Cutting Through Rocks”, Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni capture these power structures and their individual impact as precisely as the gestures of solidarity and self-determination.

It’s hard to make out which images are from the past and which are from now, just like when the director looks into the mirror in the house of her great-grandparents and sees different generations of the maternal line reflected in it at the very same time, the same women who used to make figurines in clay and sing songs to the guitar-like vihuela. The house is in the forest, in the mountains: gnarled trunks, rushing water, verdant leaves and shimmering blooms captured on celluloid that blends colour and texture into one ravishing whole. But this natural paradise is no longer what it once was, as wildfires have scorched away the ancient oaks and the undergrowth around them.
When the man on horseback drags a wooden cross behind him through the now-barren terrain, it’s as if he’s mourning the very landscape itself. The monocultural pines set by the government are no replacement, just more fodder for the timber industry, waiting to be fed into the vast chipper whose spray of wooden fragments submerge the director’s naked body in shards and splinters. “Green Desert” is a hugely personal essay film full of beauty, anger and regret, linking the history of a family to the wider traditions that shaped their lives and the changes wrought on a specific region of Chile to a broader environmental malaise.

In collaboration with the mycologist and activist Giuliana Furci a VR experience was created that actually contains a whole universe. Hardly anyone knows the world of fungi, though it surrounds and shapes us. We shrink to the size of a hypha, communicate with tree-roots, transform toxins into valuable nutrients and become part of a nearly endless but invisible network carrying our earth.

Spending your twilight years alone in a remote forest cabin in the Andes with your faithful four-legged friend – what more could you want? Petra, in any case, seems quite content all alone, chopping wood and listening to the radio. But one day her dog discovers a permafrost body in the snow and literally sinks its teeth into it. The result is that Petra has no choice but to take this accidental find back home.
With gloriously absurd and light-handed twists, Stefania Malacchini and Malu Furche tell a warm-hearted and macabre story of growing old – and of late love, for the frozen body is marvellously easy to unthaw, integrate into daily life, or swing back and forth as a dancing partner. The puppet animation is just as affectionate and detailed, whether it is the resolute grey-headed Petra with her no-nonsense style, her dog, whose hunting instinct and playfulness have comic consequences, or the frozen body itself, this 20th-century hiker who died in the deep snow and sometimes looks as if he was about to come to life and run away fast. Petra enjoys her new happiness. But it could be finite: The police are looking for the missing body …

Students of the State Technical University in Santiago de Chile film and accompany the “March for Life”, which was part of the September 1970 presidential elections in their country. An electoral alliance of communists, socialists and sections of the Christian centre, the “Unidad Popular”, successfully supported Salvador Allende’s bid for the presidency.

With reference to Władysław Starewicz’s animation film experiments with insects, the Chilean artist duo León and Cociña develop a fictitious counter-narrative to the history of the stop motion technique – and a vision of a Chile liberated from autocrats. A pigtailed girl in puppet form confidently handles the remains of the authoritarian power tradition, in the shape of morbidly staged body parts of two symbolic representatives of the oligarchy and Pinochet’s dictatorship – Diego Portales and Jaime Guzmán.

Chile is the only country in the world in which water management has been almost completely privatised. Three women stand for the profound damages suffered by the population as a result: a general water shortage, above-ground poisoning by industry and underground contamination via landfills. All parallel and interrelated facets of the same problem.