After years on the high seas, a pirate returns home to his mum. She still loves him unconditionally, just like the day he was born. And that’s despite all the many irritations – he hasn’t been in touch for years, and now has a nose ring and is full of tattoos. And he also carries secrets with him on his return, concealed in the heavy suitcase he brings to the house while coughing up blood. With a gentle pastel colour palette and distinctively animated characters, Alexandre Siqueira tells the story of what it means when a mother is forced to watch her adult child die. Siqueira’s focus also lies on the general intimacy between mothers and children which is sometimes challenged: the pirate tattoos that take some getting used to can also be seen as symbolic of other life decisions that are foreign to a mother at first. Sometimes acceptance also implies letting go.

Marie Ketzscher

Chinese expat artist Viv Li ends up in Berlin during the pandemic. Her inquisitive attempts to enter the city’s queer subculture sound different when she tries to tell her Maoist-influenced relatives in Beijing about her experiences – the film smoothly navigates between cultures, in search of where the boundaries of adaptability lie and where individual identity starts. Yet Li is never interested in playing one world off against the other, choosing instead to approach both of them with frankness and a healthy dose of humour and playfulness. She places songs by Trio and Juliane Werding over impressions of Chinese sights, stages the escape from Beijing’s tightly-knit surveillance network as a virtuoso gangster ballet and has Mao rise up from behind a mountain range to ask with fatherly concern: “Are you okay?”

Felix Mende