Stars are shining in the evening sky, the sea is lapping against the shore, Esther is standing on the beach with her telescope. She cannot get enough of the celestial bodies! A fish creature appears, looks into the front end of the telescope and gets on Esther’s nerves. Whatever is so interesting about these stars, the sea dweller asks. After all, the underwater world also has some luminous discoveries to offer!

Shimmering lines intertwine constantly to create ever new digital webs. The third dimension is added by diagonals. A moving camera allows us to finally recognise the secret that the visual elements have kept hidden so far: A 3D model of the Kunsthaus Basel creative centre disentangles itself – only to fade back into the luminous void.

Doing research in Swiss museums, Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige comes across objects in storage that were collected as evidence of the life of an Indigenous Adivasi community in her country. Even though Switzerland had no colonies, it benefited from the colonial system. Between 1883 and 1913, naturalists Fritz and Paul Sarasin organised expeditions to British Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies. They explored these areas – assisted by forced labourers – and brought exotic animals, plants and artefacts, as well as human skulls and skeletons to Basel: The result was one of the largest ethnological collections in German-speaking Europe – paradigmatic of colonial violence and Eurocentric scientific pretensions. Sri Lanka demanded their return as early as the 1970s, but Switzerland refused.
Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige travels along the Sarasins’ route and, together with Adivasi representatives, campaigns once again for restitution. An obstacle course through bureaucracy and rigid museum structures begins. The film consistently follows the interdisciplinary artist and co-author of the script as she creatively and investigatively negotiates ownership issues, shedding a highly uncomfortable light on the colonial entanglements and their still existing blind spots in the global North.

“Can we be moved by the disappearance of rhinos if we have never experienced the feeling of a butterfly walking on our hand?” Marcel Barelli asks not without pathos, but hitting the mark, in his animated manifesto. He is quoting Daniel Pauly’s Shifting Baseline Syndrome Theory: We humans always measure normality by our own experience and not by historical changes and therefore tend to accept environmental destruction. This is not the only allusion in Barelli’s compact three-minute-film: He references the “sixth extinction”, the current human-caused extinction of the species, and the hourglass symbol of the Extinction Rebellion movement. His film, however, which should definitely be understood as a call for active resistance, embeds these reflections artistically.
With his evaporating water animation on paper, Barelli has chosen a simple and consistent animation technique whose ephemeral character perfectly captures species extinction and oblivion. Archive material is added. Unlike the “Cinétracts” pamphlet films from 1968 that he admires, but just as forceful, he has chosen a contemporary, personal approach. He touchingly weaves his theses into his own biography: Family pictures point to a time when Barelli himself “played with dinosaurs and ate chicken”.

We are travelling back in time to the early 19th century on the south coast of England. This is where Mary Anning lives, a 12-year-old girl who is inquisitive, persistent and fascinated by fossils. She spends every free minute at the beach to look for the fossilised remains of long extinct animal species in the strata of her hometown’s coastal cliffs. Her father, too, is an enthusiast and earns a little extra for his family by selling fossils. When he disappears after the collapse of a cliff, Mary’s life is shaken. All that her father leaves behind is a mysterious drawing whose meaning Mary only gradually makes out. She is determined to uncover the secret together with unexpected allies. An entertaining and warm-hearted biopic about one of the first female palaeontologists.

Samson, the green dragon, moves to Humanville because he gets laughed at all the time in Dragonville. But life among the humans is not so easy, either: He has to hide because everyone here is afraid of him. But then he meets Simon, a little boy who stands by him. Animated in colourful cut-outs, the film tells the tale of an unusual friendship.

Scene by scene, a biography is delicately peeled back layer by layer, and German history along with it: National Socialism, GDR, the post-Reunification era. A granddaughter visits her grandfather. The elderly gentleman exercises regularly, has a gym in the house. She explains her project to him – and her film will remain a project in character. It is a permanent probing of how deep, how far she can go with her questions.
He keeps family photos from the Nazi era in a shabby metal box that has obviously not been opened in a long time, including a picture of his older brother in the uniform of the Nazi’s Reich Labour Service. It was not until a few months after the end of the war that great-grandmother took it off the wall, fearing it could be seen by Red Army soldiers. Grandfather revered his brother, who fell on the east front in 1944, admiring his strength and athleticism. He continued this cult of the body in the sports-obsessed GDR. The talks frequently revolve around personal responsibility and moral grey zones, around forgetting and repression. The granddaughter seems to be wondering who she is actually sitting opposite.