Boi tries to be quiet, but the glasses are shaking in his hand. You must not disturb Papa! Because when Papa is disturbed, the angry man in him wakes up and beats his beloved Mama. In “Angry Man”, there is no hiding from the violence that creeps into every fibre of daily life in the form of nervous anticipation or paralysing panic. Yet despite his fear, Boi does the only right thing: He goes to get help. But Killi’s film is not just the story of a brave boy who breaks the spiral of domestic violence: Her work radiates empathy in every direction, including even the father. Because he has a monster inside him – a drawn one that grows and creeps before it pushes its way out, where it erupts as a cut-out angry man. He needs help, too. “Angry Man”, the adaptation of a picture book by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus, conveys in a humanistic and credible manner that people can free themselves and change. All without a romanticising happy end.
Marie Ketzscher
Contains mentions of physical violence, mental health conditions
It looks like business as usual deep in the jungle – until one night a lantern lights up and magically attracts countless insects. They fall into a strange trance; even the bat family wake up. While the adults use the bright commotion to hunt, the young bat saves a glowworm, a fly and a moth. The next night, the dangerous light returns. The small bat is determined to try to save her new friends from its spell. A small adventure about friendship and mutual help.
Lina Dinkla
What is left when everything fades away? An old photographer tries to reconstruct people and events by means of old photographs, but they keep slipping away from him, vanishing in the dark, washed away by the waves. In his 2D animated film, rendered in black and white, Anton Dyakov not only shows how memories are lost, but also how they sometimes haunt and overwhelm us – for example in the shape of a disturbing archive fragment of blurred war photos. “Black Box” deals with loss and grief from a personal, yet universal perspective, while referencing the culture of remembrance in the digital age which is increasingly managing – or seeking to manage – without the haptic assurance of a printed photo.
Marie Ketzscher
Camille, a very small girl, and the Chameleon who is afraid of heights are inseparable and love to play hide-and-seek in the forest. Camille loves to literally call the tune with her whistling. But one day she becomes too cocky and gives Chameleon an idea that will upset everything. Now they are lost in the green thicket. Can they get over their pride and find each other again?
Lina Dinkla
Sam, a grumpy raccoon, must share a prison cell with Bob, a loveable, but somewhat slow-witted manatee. Their chaotic prison break gradually reveals Sam’s soft core, while Bob remains unfailingly loyal to Sam. Will they manage to escape? Suddenly, that no longer matters so much, since together they have already experienced something much better: solidarity. A cute plasticine animation you will absolutely love.
Lina Dinkla
The Europe-wide protests against Chile’s military dictatorship were expressed not only by political activism, but by a host of artistic actions. The colourful aesthetics of the Unidad Popular’s street art, popularised by the Ramona Parra Brigades, became a visual trademark. Based on this model, the Brigada Pablo Neruda, for example, whose members included well-known Chilean artists exiled in Paris like José Balmes, Gracia Barrios and Guillermo Núñez, realised a 60-metre-long mural on the fringes of documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. Its creation was documented in Franz Lehmkuhl’s film “Chilenische Wandmalerei” (1977–80), screened in Leipzig in 1980. In his agitation film “Chile lebt”, co-produced with Michael Börner, the Chilean journalist and filmmaker Juan Forch uses pictures of the Brigada Pablo Neruda to express what keeps hope in his homeland alive: international solidarity. In 1979, Forch returned to Chile from exile in the GDR.
Florian Wüst
Pesticides wipe out the insects, the oil spills into the ocean, the forests burn: In 1994, director Laila Rakvåg let a bird fly over and through the ecological, human-made hotspots that plague us even today to a far worse extent. Sometimes the bird is able to land in beautiful natural surroundings, but the rest is never permanent, paradise is always on the brink of the next hellish transformation. The further the bird flies, the more human its features become: It becomes a baby that is then actually born – and carries the memories of the bird in its newly opened eyes. We are inseparably linked to nature; what we do to it, we do to ourselves: Rakvåg’s film is an activist plea for more empathy with our planet and a change of thinking, told from the perspective of an expectant mother.
Marie Ketzscher
