In an attempt to come to terms with the greatest act of violence that can happen in a father-son relationship, the cinematic first-person narrator initially comes to some logical conclusions: The Chinese once invented gunpowder, which can be used in the form of fireworks to drive out an evil spirit. Fireworks are a precursor of film animation; therefore, animation serves the same purpose. Intense brushstrokes and the material structure of the animated drawings, repeated runs through the sequences and the impressive interplay between visual and acoustic abstraction and figuration, in order to find an expression for the unspeakable, powerfully convey the emotional turmoil. However, the laborious process of drawing the single frames for this animation also creates an unwanted intimacy between the narrator and his evil spirit. Drawing from a personal story of trauma, Juan Camilo González develops an incredibly well-designed experimental setup, which, in its failure, brings back the horror all the more violently.

André Eckardt

Anton Cla builds on a documentary film project by his artist friend Charles Dhondt about dysphasia, a language processing disorder: The colourful and protean picture of a man sitting quietly on a chair and yet radiating unbridled energy keeps flickering in Cubist style. The viewer’s gaze approaches the man’s head, and the more it does so, the wilder the colours and shapes become until at last they form a whirlpool of drawers. A world of its own, complex and creative, that has trouble taking in the outside world and is hard to convey to the outside.

André Eckardt

Since the Kosovo War over 25 years ago, Mitrovica has been a city divided along ethnic lines. The north is primarily inhabited by Serbs, the south is Albanian. Everywhere in the city, there are impressive, yet dreary ruins with blossoming cherry trees before them: the war and the division it caused are at once omnipresent and invisible. In his poetic experimental film, Marko Grba Singh captures this paradox in static shots. With no dialogue, but featuring two wonderful poems by Latif Berisha and Aida Šečić Nezirević, the film conveys the experience of saying goodbye to one’s own mother and painful, enduring loss in general – with trilingual subtitles reflecting the geographical divide: Serbian at the top, Albanian at the bottom, and English in between. Right in the middle of it all, left alone with the historical and urban heritage of their mothers and fathers, are two young people who seem lost, standing alone in the landscape. It makes no difference in which part of the city one might now place them.

Marie Ketzscher