This hand-drawn animated documentary provides subtle insights into the patriarchal structures of South Korean society and discusses the roles assigned to women there. Challenged as a restaurant owner and single parent, the director’s mother was helped by the characteristics of her animal zodiac sign: fierce as a tiger, she earned respect. But to her daughter she insisted that she tell nobody about her father’s absence. That is only whispered about.

A young taxidermist is fascinated by crows, paying considerate attention to their dead bodies. Her work on the birds is simultaneously a careful study of anatomical connections and a kind of service toward the resurrection of this mythical creature from the realm between life and death. Through detailed, pulsating black-and-white images and a sparingly intense soundtrack, a charged atmosphere unfolds between craftsmanship, imagination and poetry.

While the transaction tax collectors seem to be dancing to jazz music, a pointedly staged text passage by Patrick Chamoiseau lets not only our visual and auditory but also our olfactory senses unfold: The third-largest Nigerian city can be experienced by smell. In this rhythmic portrait of life in Ibadan the urban cinematic poetry is by no means at odds with the profundity with which it captures themes like lack of perspective, globalisation and corruption.