A new father takes his wife and daughter on a journey to his mother’s birthplace in Scotland. It is 1976 – the year in which NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 space probes land on the surface of Mars. They send images of an only vaguely explored area from a great distance, enabling a first look into the history of an alien planet. Like the NASA scientists, the small family are hoping that their journey will give them insights into the past, an understanding of the present situation and perhaps even the chance to anticipate the future.

Texts from the father’s travel diary, photos and video recordings are interwoven with visual and sound material from the NASA archives to form a multilayered narrative that navigates several decades of family history, cosmological questions and philosophical reflections. A filmic multiverse unfolds before us whose elementary particles oscillate between times and worlds, between reality and fiction.

It is Alice’s 27th birthday today. She lives in her old room in her parents’ apartment. Her mother coddles her like a little child. Her kid brother gets on her nerves. The only space for self-realisation and living out her sexual desires is in her imagination, if at all. For economic reasons, she and many other young people are denied the chance to live an independent life in their own four walls. So Alice has to endure the confinement.

On the night of her birthday, she goes pub-crawling with a buddy and dances, free at last for a few moments, at a party on the roof of a high-rise. Looking at the nocturnal city and sobering up after all the exuberance, though, her dilemma re-surfaces again: Where is her private space where body and soul can unfold unobserved? Haunting, colourful, with a fantastic soundtrack and full of eroticism, the film describes the depressing situation of a whole generation.

The teenager Zoe and her little brother Theo spend a day at the public swimming pool. Theo loses himself in his childish fantasies. The visitors of the pool look like characters from Greek mythology to him. Zoe, less than pleased at having to watch her little brother, hides in the changing room. She has problems of her own because she is struggling with the changes in her youthful body. She looks at her breasts in the mirror, which the tight bathing suit does nothing to disguise. The horror that this change provokes in her manifests in a terrible panic attack.

Theo’s flight to the realm of mythical creatures and Zoe’s anxiety attack are both caused by a shared traumatic experience. The two find a way to overcome past experiences – even without their mother’s support. Ingenious transitions, cleverly constructed details and, not least, great empathy for the siblings’ communicating inner and outer worlds make this film a convincing double portrait.

At some point years ago, Joel’s life took a wrong turn. He let himself be drawn in by the energy of unscrupulous gangsters to run criminal errands for a pittance. He has known his way around envelops and guns ever since. But now the day has come when he wants to leave the sinister night shifts behind and follow his actual destiny: repairing motors, keeping his car repair shop in Mexico City afloat and getting people moving. But the gang boss chooses the birthday of Joel’s beloved nephew of all days to direct him to a last job. Joel must debate this with himself and, above all, make a decision.
Director Esteban Azuela stages this debate in a space of passage between this world and the next, where decisions can no longer be revised, only relived. With an intricately composed mix of memory fragments, car body parts and existential junk he adequately brings his protagonist’s breathless existence to the big screen. Jagged 3D scans animated in single-frame captures as well as camera angles and plotlines from the early days of ego shooter games stylishly evoke the urban Mexico of the 1990s: heated, threatening, refusing to stand still.

“Are you with us or against us?” Nothing less lies in the air, unspoken. No nuances, no discussions, hardly any choice. Did the tired man expect such life decisions after work? Unlikely. He just wanted to chill out and watch mindless television when suddenly an alien world on the screen catches up with him in the comfort of his home: A cult-like community lives next door, their behaviour ape-like, their faith fanatical, determined to convert him. Their flat is decorated with forests and deserts. Anyone who tries to look behind the painted wallpaper, to separate scenery from reality, commits treason and deserves banishment or death. Plato’s Cave Analogy in a radicalised version for the 21st century.
Freedom and truth or stability and a sense of belonging? Is the price of accepting a distorted reality just to be allowed to live too high? And most of all: Is there an alternative worth living? The world outside, behind the window, remains vague, its threats only implied. In this parable about passivity, curiosity and free choice, Alexandre Sousa touches on the urgent questions of our time: questions of isolation, echo chambers and the impossibility for humans to stay unpolitical. Do we even have a chance to resist?

Using rhythmic, ecstatic music and fragments of folk songs, Yasmine Djedje-Fisher-Azoume takes us to the mythic ancestors, goddesses, and guardians of the Bété people on the Ivory Coast – the place where the director’s ancestors came from. In her film study, inspired by traditional wooden sculptures and masks, she transforms these into many-shaped female characters through coal drawings and copper reliefs. Spinning, multi-faced and all-seeing, dancing in fluffy garments, they perform rituals and unfold an infectious choreography. The whole film pulses to this rhythm, so it comes as no surprise when one figure literally releases a stream of creative energy.
This stream is so strong that it extends into the present day – to a modern temple where living goddesses rotate in the endless flow of existence. Unlike the lifelessly arranged displays in European museums, witnesses of colonial violence, Djedje-Fisher-Azoume collects a pantheon here of what she honours and deeply moves. A temple that exists only for those who know their own origins and treat them with respect to derive from them strength for the presence and the future. The whole film, from the tip of its roots to the buds, is pervaded by this power of mystical self-knowledge.

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.

Sardinia, 1940. The harmless term “horsing around” takes on a very serious and ultimately tragic meaning for 14-year-old Michele and his 11-year-old friend Ventura. When they learn that the peasants have sold their best horses for serious money to the state and thus to the military for the approaching war, the two boys take a decision that is as naïve as it is intuitive: They free the herd in a daring nighttime operation. Their happiness is short-lived. Betrayed by a villager, they are caught on the way home and Ventura is shot dead. A senseless death? Or a sign of special bravery, as the ambiguous Sardinian film title suggests?
Director Giovanni Columbu, a Sardinian himself, has dedicated his late animation debut to his grandmother who once told him the story. He took the liberty of adapting it with brushstrokes on paper, his style drawing primarily on the charms of historical painting schools, animation techniques and cinema genres. Columbu’s associative visual language, marked by shades of black, white, and grey, is animated by impulsive hatchings, countless dots, and generous elisions. The soundtrack, too, sets rather sparse nuances – subtle illustrations that draw on Sardinian cultural traditions while opening a space for universal metaphors.

The discrepancy between a bleak, dreary provincial town and an imaginative woman in her prime who longs for adventure bursts forth as a stirringly animated cri de coeur. Maria Dakszewicz’s protagonist immerses herself so deeply in a Bollywood film that in her imagination she becomes the main character of the colourful and divinely joyous love story. This makes her return to the empty, cold “reality bar” all the more painful – with its annoying neighbours, depressing weather and the mocking slogans for self-improvement on advertising boards and in women’s magazines.
A high-proof cocktail of tragicomedy, garnished with enormous power, humour, love, physicality and melancholy. The last brushstroke is the equivalent of the unattainable, shimmering figure of the Bollywood sultan in the Bar Croquette reality – which also brings a kind of contentment, albeit of a quite different nature … With this film, Dakszewicz creates a distinctive, original and wild aesthetic: The clay figure, still warm from fingerprints, blends seamlessly into ink drawings –incongruous at first glance and yet as harmoniously fused as dreamt sensuality with an Indian sultan in the grey Polish province.

A man throws off the shackles of slavery, lays the traditional Kente cloth aside, puts on a business suit – and starts to walk towards the future. Or towards what he thinks is the future, because this is not a pleasant walk: To the cheers of the people, the man pushes into the backroom of an Asian restaurant where he flogs plots of land, moves to the next backroom, money case in hand, to bribe the pastor and ultimately ends up on stage to give a state-supporting speech as President – against corruption, of course. The career of our nameless protagonist – whose sunglasses-covered face, interestingly, we get to see only in the limelight – takes him right through the streets of an African metropolis, past protests being suppressed, through a dilapidated infrastructure, criminal gangs, and even natural disasters.
Nobody has thrown off the shackles of slavery in Francis Yushau Brown’s relentlessly critical film. Instead, a few individuals have chained themselves to nepotism and keep the rest of the population poor and backwards. His film is a 3D indictment brimming with rage, including of the Western and Far Eastern (neo) colonizers. And far above hover the enraged gods, waiting for the people to put an end to this situation at last.

Siren-like singing and rhythmic light reflections segue into a lyrical text and sketched silhouettes of coastlines and waves. Delicate lines and soft shadings on superimposed transparent foils form many-layered networks of shapes and structures. What is offscreen creeps into the frame through reflections and blends in with the visual design of the film. Then and now meet and merge into a poetic narrative about a childhood in Stralsund, at a time when the city was still part of the GDR. A fenced-in, circumscribed childhood, framed by nocturnal floodlights, the bawling of drunk sailors and the crumbling plaster of facades and walls gone grey. The narrator manages to leave this oppressive fortress behind, but she can never escape completely. The memories that have settled like grey dust on her interior will stay with her forever.

In only ninety seconds Marcus Grysczok tells a touching personal story of loss and takes us to great emotional depths. Tune in: an electronically distorted outcry. The protagonist talks to himself and to someone who no longer lives in this world, but all the more in his heart. He looks for a way out of this state of powerlessness, assuming a stranger’s role, a free-roaming paper dog that runs between real shelves and across tables, races past people on black-and-white photographs and everyday objects, chases himself on a plate rim. The images convey a feeling of home – a home for memory and for life. Tune out? As soon as the dog stops, reality puts an end to this restless racket and brings the awareness of enduring loss. Poetic in language and design, the film formulates a moving but clear-eyed farewell to a brother.

Bobby’s stomach is upset. She is ravenous. Normally, dinner should be on the table by now. But today everything is different. Mum lures her teenage daughter out of the house with a lie and takes her to hospital, where her relatives are already waiting. All dressed in black, with tears in their eyes, expressing their sympathy. But sympathy for what? Before Bobby realises what is going on, she is dragged into the endless corridors of the clinic by rude nurses, undressed and prepared for an operation she knew nothing about and never consented to.
Behind the scenes of this nocturnal horror trip, a disturbing tale about the relationship of trust between parents and children is revealed. Mansi Maheshwari’s genre mix of thriller, scary vision and educational satire is fascinating. Its dynamic design, dramatic animation and mesmerising soundtrack send us deep into a terrifyingly exquisite nightmare that lingers on.

Contemplating your naked body, drenched in tomato sauce, on a frozen pizza – that is the epitome of alienated wage work. Especially if it is the mass product whose quality has to be checked hundreds of times a day at the assembly line. Is it this alienation, the multiple daily consumption of precisely this meal or simply the absence of significant human relationships that make Frankie feel terminally ill and ready to say goodbye to an existence he feels is worthless and empty? Nobody cares, until his body transforms into a wild planet where evolution happens in fast-forward mode: the genesis of life, miniature Frankies performing absurd penis dances, cannibalism, Darwinism, mutual destruction, the eradication of other species – and finally the Frankie planet itself burning out.
Levi Stoops makes us laugh out loud – and yet we feel the bitter taste of self-destruction on our tongue. Will Frankie have the courage to risk a change of life after this apocalyptic experience? Or does the system have him so firmly in its claws that wholesome nature documentaries of exotic flowers are comfort enough – instead of cooking shows where the stone-baked pizzas are tossed into the air with verve?

A Malay fairy tale tells of Sang Kancil, the wily mouse deer that crosses a river by persuading the crocodiles in it to form a bridge for him. Inspired by this story, Zhang Xu Zhan, one of Taiwan’s most distinguished young artists, in his latest stop-motion animation depicts the crossing of the river as a breakneck shaman dance in the deep jungle where acrobatic skill replaces cunning. Spurred on by drummers on the bank, guided by ringing bells, the costumed creature, half human, half animal, leaps from crocodile back to crocodile back, always in danger of losing more than feathers.

Despite the overwhelming complexity of the animated scenery, the hand-made papier-mâché figures recall the seductive power of traditional Javanese Wayang shadow theatre. Its fixed backdrops are transformed here into an extremely fluid world of continuous transformation and metamorphosis reflected in oddly shaped mirror shards, giving us an idea of what it would be like to see through compound eyes.

How brutal is it when your own language casts you out of your home because it has been turned into the language of crimes against other people? In her autobiographical animation, Irina Rubina analyses why Russian can no longer be the language of security for her and why German – historically riddled with guilt and therefore insecure – does not offer a new home yet. The stark factuality of the director as narrator is enormously unsettling because it describes the irreversibility of this emotional state precisely.
On the visual level, dark spots eat into idealised images of home, until the planes become deadlocked in abstraction. The pictures were created on a so-called pinscreen. Reliefs can be “painted” and animated by the pins’ shadows on this screen on which around 200,000 pins are arranged in lines. The alternation of light and shadow and their immediate proximity lend drastic expression to the inner turmoil and ambivalence.