A contemporary answer to the avant-garde experiments of the 20th century. Once, artists like Oskar Fischinger drew graphic elements on the optical soundtrack of film strips to produce unexpected tones. Max Hattler turns the whole image into an optical soundtrack that directly translates into audio. Abstract movement becomes noise. What you hear is what you see.

The art of the documentary portrait is to introduce an individual to the audience within a short period of time while going beyond a collection of biographical facts and capturing what actually defines this person. “Open Game” succeeds by showing its young protagonist Amir as someone who seems permanently on the move. First, he mastered the unsafe route from Afghanistan to Germany, now he constantly moves between school, job, and chessboard. He finds rest only when he moves his pieces on the 64 squares of the board, when he delves into a world where every move must be considered and where strategy, not luck, determine the outcome. In chess, Amir knows all the rules and can determine the course of the game – from the cleverly chosen opening move to the end, planned move by move.
“Open Game” structures its material along the phases of a chess match and portrays Amir as a person whose life was exposed to chance. Those who have to hope for luck too often appreciate a controlled environment.

“There was a body that didn’t want to be human. It didn’t know it belonged to someone. To me.” María Cristina Pérez González opens her film with these poetic and cryptic words, diving deep into the visually powerful, hand-painted animation. Associative rather than narrative, the sad voice pulls us into a maelstrom of remembered fragments that all revolve around the protagonist’s body: A voluminous shape that sometimes eats itself with loathing, stretches until it fills the frame or cowers like a pea – in the blackness of the fluid, generous brushstrokes, but above all in its own fleshy self.
There is the estranged sister who once called the feet of this body ugly. The good friend who disappeared without a farewell. The father who once said that all unhappy women grow fat. And most of all there is this nameless figure that lives in her belly and feeds her depression with a cute grin. As so often in life, the only path to contentment is reconciliation. With the sister, of course, but above all with her own body which does not fit into narrow social norms – but is the only one she has. And with which she can dance, jump, and even laugh quite splendidly once she understands that it is not a monster to be fought.

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.

Like many artists of his time, Walter Ruttmann discovered film as a medium of experimentation with revolutionary forms of expression. He gave up easel painting in 1918 and acquired the first German patent for an animation stand in 1920, thus creating the technical prerequisites for his “Opus” series: abstract elements of painterly gestures and cardboard moved by stop-motion.

The dazzling sun hangs in the sky, but while it slowly sinks, a cacophony of unknown voices and sounds spreads across the horizon. “The darkness is coming like a smoke that expands,” the director comments in voice-over, and takes us deeper into the night, on the path risked by many migrants from Central America: on foot, through dangerous landscapes, with an uncertain outcome.
In her immersive short film, Violeta Mora brings this path to life. A shaky handheld camera follows heavy footsteps, we hear the fugitives’ breath and the sounds of animals. The flash-streaked blackness is full of scraps of desperate conversations and calls for help, while the sense of threat keeps mounting. A film that does not seek to explain but allows us to feel tangibly and directly what it means to cross a border – in hopes of a better life.

A huge, cheeky rat has moved in with the little man. It whistles to the music from the radio, helps itself from the fridge without asking, splashes in the bathtub and is simply everywhere – loud, annoying, just too much. When it suddenly disappears, the little man realises that the apartment has never been so quiet – and so empty. A heart-warming adaptation of Nadia Budde’s eponymous picture book.