A/D
Film Archive
- All
Amerykanka. All included
The “Amerykanka” is the headquarters and notorious torture centre of the KGB in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe. Immediately following a protest against the results of the presidential elections of 19 December, 2010, a number of opposition members were arrested, among them Alyaksandr Fyaduta. He was detained at the “Amerykanka” over a period of three months, 50 days of which he spent in solitary confinement. During that time he wrote “American Poems”, the book on which this courageous and formally unusual film by Viktar Korzun is based. It revolves around Alyaksandr Fyaduta: his arrest, interrogations, humiliations, life in prison, though he appears not in a traditional interview setting but as an active agent in front of and in animated prison scenery. The real live image of the “slightly overweight protagonist with glasses”, as Fyaduta self-deprecatingly describes himself, constantly changes into his animated alter ego and vice versa. The way this artistic device, born out of the lack of a real location, is realised reveals a strong taste for playfulness and creates a surprisingly ironic distance both to the events and the state of the country. And perhaps mockery is the only possible attitude left in the face of a government that arrests people, as recently happened, merely for clapping their hands silently and in public.
Matthias Heeder
Matthias Heeder
This is the story of Michal Rechter. She was only 14 when she left her home in Poland and travelled to Israel by herself on the eve of the Second World War. Her memories come to life in a colourful animation depicting her lonely transition from childhood to adulthood.
Casa
Daniela De Felice
This is where the family used to live: a house filled with objects and memories is cleared. A finely spun examination of the process of remembrance in delicate watercolours and sparingly animated.
Casa
Documentary Film
France
2013
54 minutes
subtitles:
English
French
The house is crammed with objects of no great material value. Years after her father’s death, the director, her mother and brother clear the family home, once a promise of social advancement and now a place nobody wants to live in. The memories lie in the remains of everyday life and the junk of countless boxes of dusty entomological specimens. The mother tried to stop the passing of time by excessive collecting. And so the dialogues between the members of the family revolve around the big question of transience. Can memories be shared? What’s left of a life when the next generation attaches a different value to its objects? When memories disintegrate like the wings of the butterflies in their glass cases?
De Felice focuses on the process of remembrance and the question of what our memory retains. It’s not about the faces in the photographs, but the process of posing for the camera, filming and commenting. And the moments of silence while the camera is still running. And most of all the shape our memories assume. In this case, it’s the ink watercolours sketched by the director. Pared-down and delicate, sparingly animated from time to time, they do what only art can do: take us into the inner spaces where our families continue to live when all artefacts have long crumbled to dust.
Grit Lemke
Golden Dove Animated Documentary 2013
De Felice focuses on the process of remembrance and the question of what our memory retains. It’s not about the faces in the photographs, but the process of posing for the camera, filming and commenting. And the moments of silence while the camera is still running. And most of all the shape our memories assume. In this case, it’s the ink watercolours sketched by the director. Pared-down and delicate, sparingly animated from time to time, they do what only art can do: take us into the inner spaces where our families continue to live when all artefacts have long crumbled to dust.
Grit Lemke
Golden Dove Animated Documentary 2013
When parents go to prison, children often don’t know how to cope with the situation. This film is a sensitive attempt to gain insight into the thoughts and emotions of three children who have to visit one parent in prison.
Emergency Calls
Hannes Vartiainen, Pekka Veikkolainen
Emergency calls: a birth, an accident, the last radio message of the “Estonia”. And images from space. An experimental exploration of the worst case and an ethereal warning.
Emergency Calls
Documentary Film
Finland
2013
15 minutes
subtitles:
English
Credits
Hannes Vartiainen, Pekka Veikkolainen
Hannes Vartiainen, Pekka Veikkolainen
Joonatan Portaankorva
Hannes Vartiainen, Pekka Veikkolainen
Hannes Vartiainen, Pekka Veikkolainen
Hannes Vartiainen, Pekka Veikkolainen
Hannes Vartiainen, Pekka Veikkolainen
Joonatan Portaankorva
What is your emergency? The question that’s at the start of every call to an emergency centre is also at the start of this film. Excited, sometimes desperate people on the soundtrack. The emergencies: precipitate labour, a multiple car crash. But also a killing spree and the last radio message of the “Estonia”. The call marks the boundary between life and death which – perhaps – will be crossed. It also depends on those who take it: embodied here by white figures lacking any status-generating symbols such as clothing or hair. Reduced to the naked, pure human being everything depends on. Or are they the Erinyes who hold our fate in their hands?
There is no blood, no images of disasters. We see NASA footage of earth as seen from space instead, clouds, lightshows, radar signals, pointedly distorted. What is one man’s need in view of the infinity of the universe? – Everything, claims this film which, like all works by the directing duo Vartiainen/Veikkolainen, defies categorisation. It reminds us of the conjunctive which runs through our secure lives in the shape of the potential for the worst case. The writing on the wall that silently hovers above us. Would have. Could have. What is your emergency?
Grit Lemke
There is no blood, no images of disasters. We see NASA footage of earth as seen from space instead, clouds, lightshows, radar signals, pointedly distorted. What is one man’s need in view of the infinity of the universe? – Everything, claims this film which, like all works by the directing duo Vartiainen/Veikkolainen, defies categorisation. It reminds us of the conjunctive which runs through our secure lives in the shape of the potential for the worst case. The writing on the wall that silently hovers above us. Would have. Could have. What is your emergency?
Grit Lemke
Eugenic Minds
Pavel Štingl
Optimizing humans, from the beginnings to the Third Reich to contemporary genetic research. Brilliantly animated archive images in a depressing essay on insanity.
Eugenic Minds
Documentary Film
Czech Republic,
Slovakia
2013
76 minutes
subtitles:
English
Expressive faces, body parts, anatomical associations. Human beings come in a variety of forms: “Some are smart, some are dumb, some are good-looking, some are ugly …” The term eugenics comes from the Greek. It means something like “good lineage” and is the term used for the science of improving genetic disposition by choosing the right sexual partner. In order to spare humanity “genetic burdens”, the smart and good-looking ones are chosen. If humans make the selection, they take “God’s work into their own hands”. The Third Reich used and expanded this science to serve its ideology, with the result that the term was avoided and at last forgotten. Captivating archive material, original animations and their graphic “insemination”, for example when the “transparent woman” frequently mingles with the crowds, reflect the narrative of a fascinating science practiced to the point of lunacy. This tale reveals more about the human species than any anthropometrical measurement ever could.
Claudia Lehmann
Claudia Lehmann
Green Fingers
Elsa Duhamel
Jeanine and Alain live in the north of France. Both come from Algeria and sometimes miss ...
Jeanine and Alain live in the north of France. Both come from Algeria and sometimes miss their home. That’s why they planted their own Mediterranean garden which they enjoy cultivating very much.
Childhood is an unbroken series of new challenges, which makes parental comfort and encouragement all the more important. But what if one’s father is absent for years or forever, because he is in prison? An insightful film about growing up in a difficult family situation.
Marcel, King of Tervuren
Tom Schroeder
The true adventures of a proud Belgian cock whose will to survive ...
Marcel, King of Tervuren
The true adventures of a proud Belgian cock whose will to survive and fighting spirit made a lasting impression on his owners.
Cup of tea? Come and take a seat in Lyn's cosy front room. Hear her story of love during wartime and watch as her belongings come alive with the hope, fear and humour of one spirited lady.
Nae Pasaran
Felipe Bustos Sierra
After the 1973 coup, Scottish workers refused to deliver engines for fighter planes to Chile. The reconstruction of a self-determined act of solidarity.
Nae Pasaran
What’s the connection between the military dictatorship in Chile and the workers of a Rolls Royce manufacturing plant in Scotland? Here are the known facts: when the workers learn after the 1973 coup in Chile that the machine parts they make are used in the Chilean junta’s fighter planes, they refuse to deliver them. According to later Chilean reports, however, the machines were deployed after all. The workers doubt it. What’s their secret? Director Felipe Bustos Sierra reconstructs the events like a thriller, focusing on three former Scottish workers who meet again at a pre-arranged place. He confronts them with the known facts and uses animated sequences to interpret what happened on the grounds of the factory under cover of night and fog. Combined with archive material from the 1970s, a tongue-in-cheek portrait of a self-determined act of solidarity among workers emerges.
Lars Meyer
Lars Meyer
Signe Bauman is known for her open attitude towards taboos. Her films are explicit with a funny and ironic touch. So far she has told her stories only in the short format. “Rocks in My Pockets” is her first feature-length film and probably her most personal work, for the filmmaker takes a trip into her family’s past. She herself describes her latest work as “a funny film about depression”, but it’s probably more of a story about strong, independent women, domineering men, restrictive systems and mental illnesses that none of those involved take seriously. Her grandmother died mysteriously and the family remained silent about it. Signe assumes that she killed herself for she, too, suffers from depression and three of her cousins are mentally ill.
The filmmaker animates external influences and internal states of mind for her film, tries to make her own emotions and those of her fellow sufferers comprehensible to others and explains the connections between her personal and artistic emancipation and the process of coming to terms with the family secrets.
Annegret Richter
The filmmaker animates external influences and internal states of mind for her film, tries to make her own emotions and those of her fellow sufferers comprehensible to others and explains the connections between her personal and artistic emancipation and the process of coming to terms with the family secrets.
Annegret Richter
Still Born
Animadoc
Sweden
2014
10 minutes
subtitles:
English
A pregnant soon-to-be mother is forced to choose whether her beloved child should try to live or not with a cardiac malformation. Feelings of anger, powerlessness and immense grief overwhelm her.
Golden Dove in the International Competition Animated Film 2014
Golden Dove in the International Competition Animated Film 2014
T's World: The Over-identification of Terry Thompson
Animadoc
France,
UK,
USA
2014
29 minutes
subtitles:
No
Credits
Ramon Bloomberg
Ramon Bloomberg
Ramon Bloomberg
Stark Haze
József Szimon, Balázs Őrley
On 18th October, 2011, the sheriff of Zanesville, Ohio, got an agitated phone call: the animals that eccentric Terry Thompson was legally keeping on his ranch were roaming the county. Red alert! That night, a heavily armed police force killed more than 56 bears, tigers, wolves, leopards and lions. Thompson had opened the cages, shot himself and offered his body as food to the animals. So far, so good, so American.
British media artist Ramon Bloomberg has turned this bizarre incident into a Brechtian story. Bloomberg combines Brecht’s play “The Yes Sayer” about traditional custom and formalised law with the American settler’s anarchical logic of freedom which fights every kind of state influence as an infringement on individual freedom: I am the lord of my animals, my land, my house, my family. End of story!
Bloomberg translates epic theatre into the language of film in the age of Play Station games. Real live shots are combined with images from the police car’s video camera, Google Earth data mining sequences and computer animated re-enactments. We hear minutes and statements of everyone involved as well as a comment taking the form of an (antique) chorus, the voice of the law, the neighbour and the animal. The only voice we don’t hear is Terry Thompson’s. His motives remain a big secret.
Matthias Heeder
Honorary Mention in the International Competition Animated Film 2014
British media artist Ramon Bloomberg has turned this bizarre incident into a Brechtian story. Bloomberg combines Brecht’s play “The Yes Sayer” about traditional custom and formalised law with the American settler’s anarchical logic of freedom which fights every kind of state influence as an infringement on individual freedom: I am the lord of my animals, my land, my house, my family. End of story!
Bloomberg translates epic theatre into the language of film in the age of Play Station games. Real live shots are combined with images from the police car’s video camera, Google Earth data mining sequences and computer animated re-enactments. We hear minutes and statements of everyone involved as well as a comment taking the form of an (antique) chorus, the voice of the law, the neighbour and the animal. The only voice we don’t hear is Terry Thompson’s. His motives remain a big secret.
Matthias Heeder
Honorary Mention in the International Competition Animated Film 2014
The Predicate and the Poppy
Animadoc
France
2013
24 minutes
subtitles:
English
When knights parade up and down, unknown flying objects whirl through the air and the room suddenly turns into an impenetrable maze, we are in the classroom of an ordinary school on the outskirts of Paris. That’s roughly how five young teachers experience their first days on the job. And since words can hardly express what’s going on at a school, Jeanne Paturle and Cécile Rousset resort to a rich arsenal of animation techniques to translate this mixture of desperation, anarchy and chaos into images. Photo collages, cut out animation, plasticine and classic cartoon animation make historic personalities rise from the history books, reconstruct the Big Bang and make numbers begin to dance. The film literally explodes! But it aims at more and, above all, refuses to lament the dreadful state of education. Only when the teachers themselves become students, understanding the alphabet of the street and the key to every single student, can the nightmare of school perhaps turn into a space of freedom.
Cornelia Klauß
Cornelia Klauß
Innocence is no guarantee of freedom. Three cases that are exemplary (not only) of the US system of justice: Edward Baker, sentenced to 24 years for murder, James Landano and Joyce Anne Brown, both sentenced to life for capital offences. There are hundreds of innocently condemned prisoners like them in the States – including death row inmates who have been waiting for their execution for years. James McCloskey and his “Centurion Ministries” organisation have taken up the task of re-opening cases, questioning trials, getting new results through DNS analysis, and even identifying those as murderers who once accused an innocent person of their own crime.
How a wrongfully imprisoned person who feels abandoned by justice, lawyers, families, and friends reflects this injustice is hard to put in words. So director Sheila M. Sofian has conjured up an inferno of expressive animations painted on glass, abstract re-enactments, and surrealist details, which condenses into a passionate appeal to politicians to abolish prejudgements and racial discrimination. “If they’re not doing time for this, then surely for something else.” This statement by a cop encapsulates the cynicism that’s part of the system.
Cornelia Klauß
How a wrongfully imprisoned person who feels abandoned by justice, lawyers, families, and friends reflects this injustice is hard to put in words. So director Sheila M. Sofian has conjured up an inferno of expressive animations painted on glass, abstract re-enactments, and surrealist details, which condenses into a passionate appeal to politicians to abolish prejudgements and racial discrimination. “If they’re not doing time for this, then surely for something else.” This statement by a cop encapsulates the cynicism that’s part of the system.
Cornelia Klauß
