"1/2" is an animated short film about one question: How do you get up if you have lost everything that is worth living for?

A poetic and reflective exploration of the surviving silhouettes marked on rocks sometimes thousands of years ago: Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio regard the petroglyphs they sought out in many places of the world as captions meant to express our ancestors’ understanding of the world, or as mirrors in which they saw their own reflection. But most of all they regard them as phenomena charged with a magic aura: objectifications of human amazement. Stories are adapted and transformed. “Make a picture in which you can live forever”, says one of the narrators. Subject-object relations apparently set in stone are made liquid again by the magic. Frequently the images in the film speak, say “I” and talk to “US”. Because not only do we look at the figures on the rock, they look back at us. At one point these enchanted creatures, animated by the filmmakers’ visionary power, even detach themselves from the rocks, cross to the other bank of reality like shamans – and immerse themselves for a moment into the present day of a dance ritual before they return, ghost-like and thoroughly unconcerned, to their stony eternity.
– Ralph Eue

Numbers figure prominently in the lives of the Hungarian-Romanian charcoal burners Piroska and Imre – just like the wireless, the Caribbean and a booming poverty tourism industry. The young directors Iacob Marius and Vlad Voinescu mix these ingredients with a light touch and a sure sense of drama.
Imre and Piroska spend their summers in a forest in Transylvania piling up pyramids of wood that will travel to the whole of Europe as charcoal. Which means it travels further than the couple who live in a rundown railway car with no electricity and spend their evenings listening to radio features about distant countries and discussing the perfect lottery numbers. The world regularly visits them in the shape of tourists wheeled in on horse carts – how authentic! – and willing to pay a small consideration for permission to take pictures of real Eastern European poverty, preferably featuring themselves posing with the shovel. Piroska and Imre take it with a sense of humour and prefer to think about the problem of transforming 230 bags of coal into the lottery ticket that will take them to the beach of their dreams – one day.
A smart reflection on the allegedly documentary view, for the affluent citizen feels deliciously horrified, fills his memory card with photos and decamps. Left behind in their authentic filth, the others must continue to hope for a miracle – or the right number.

– Grit Lemke

Riding and swimming in the river, in combination with Meredith Monk’s music, become symbols of the fight against ovarian cancer.
„Freedom is a horse galloping with mane and tail flying in the wind. Freedom is my eye and mind following the flow of expression through movement. Freedom is riding my horse on a trail exploring the unknown and seeing with fresh eyes as the world becomes new again. „A Horse Is not a Metaphor“ is about the power of living in the present to the fullest and with the greatest freedom.” (Barbara Hammer)

Remember Oliver North? In the late 1980s under President Reagan he secretly sold weapons to Iran and used the profits to support Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Risqué – the United States had issued an arms embargo against Iran and Congress had prohibited any support for the Contras. When the scandal was exposed, Reagan dropped Oliver North. The lieutenant-colonel was found guilty of corruption, lying and destruction of evidence. He appealed and was acquitted – for reasons of immunity. Now he needed a new job. This is where “A Perfect Candidate” comes in: the charismatic North entered the senatorial race in Virginia as the Republican candidate. Over seven months, we follow him and his opponent, the democratic incumbent Charles Robb, through the highs and lows of campaigning. Following the “spin doctors”, the people who pull the strings behind the scenes, very closely, Cutler and Taylor open up deep insights into the strategies and pitfalls of the political machine. The result is a captivating and extremely thrilling film in the spirit of Robert Drew’s and Richard Leacock’s Direct Cinema classic “Primary”. The Washington Post praised “A Perfect Candidate” as the “best American documentary since Hoop Dreams” and called it “one of a small handful of essential films about the politics in this country”.
– Claas Danielsen

A little sea turtle is born amidst dangers lurking everywhere. The film recounts the adventures the turtle must survive in its life.

A little girl and the snowman have exciting adventures in the forest.

Are you in the wrong film? Didn’t you expect to see a short documentary about the souvenirs of a deceased American couple? Why are they screening the opening credits of a Hollywood movie: Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby”?
Fiction and documentary reality keep clashing in this film. The hero is not Mia Farrow, but the bit player Elmer Modlin and his wife Margaret, a passionate painter. Based exclusively on found letters, photos and other documents, the director reconstructs these two people’s life stories. Having appeared in “Rosemary’s Baby” as an extra, Elmer left the States with his wife and son to move to Madrid, where they lived a reclusive life in a small flat for more than 30 years. Margret played the artist; Elmer worked as a television actor. What is left of them? An empty flat and a dustbin full of discarded souvenirs. Evidence of their lives, discovered by chance by the filmmaker on a walk through Madrid. It’s true that the most exciting stories are found in the street.

– Antje Stamer

Two poor little Chinese children looking for the land of freedom travel across oceans and foreign continents but don’t find it. Finally they come to a Soviet pioneer camp and are received with cheers, flag salutes and lock step marches. One of the studio’s first puppet animations.
– Günter Agde

A mother-son relationship, subtly and poetically depicted in fluid images. Man and woman, human and animal.

Real excitement is always kind of out of focus. Unfortunately. All joy lies buried in a blind rush and hasty perceptions. That's why I never got my eyes lasered.

Jan Lenica’s cartoon and collage animation is a variation on the outsider theme of his early works: an “old Adam with new problems” travels by bike and time machine through a world of lemurs and phantasms in a futile quest for paradise. Lenica called this Kafkaesque, pessimistic parable, frequently obscured by the ciphers of depth psychology, “autobiographical” (Der Spiegel 1975).

A poetic snapshot of the life of a couple who just live side by side and have ceased to pay attention to each other. An unexpected incident disturbs their routine and brings the couple closer again.

An electrical banana, a mammoth in the garden, a singing mushroom and the “synthe-sigher” – or avant-garde, cult and underground, all these terms can be applied to this total work of art from Karl-Marx-Stadt. Founded in 1998, the band quickly became an insider’s tip in the relevant clubs of the GDR and managed not to be swallowed by the system until their abrupt end in 1993. Music with electronic elements, dadaist lyrics, monotonous sprechgesang, cryptic or deliberately silly costumes and masks on stage, and the use of painting and film – multimedia before the term was invented – were the hallmarks of AG Geige’s style. Their consistent rejection of sense and worship of the absurd were not just expressions of a whole generation’s attitude to life, but a subversive strategy in a country where even the most banal utterances were seen as political statements.
Carsten Gebhardt, a native of Chemnitz, raises a monument to the band by interviewing its members and reanimating the specific AG Geige aesthetics in collages of music and Super 8 films. Big names like Ronald Galenza, Christoph Tannert and Lutz Schramm describe the concept of a superficial “dilettantism” concealing “professional work and a lived quirkiness”. In that sense, Gebhardt’s film is a worthy amateur film.
The subversive seed flowered, by the way. The sons of two members of the band founded Kraftclub, a contemporary cult band.

Grit Lemke

Two girls find a machine that makes them older so they can go to the movies and the disco.

Agnieszka experiences a family breakup which causes her to withdraw into herself. The events she goes through in her loneliness allow her to finally reconnect with her mother and to come out of seclusion.