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

Two friends at a café chat about love, partnership, children and hot guys. They fantasise about a magical string instrument that could help with finding a partner and starting a family. Unfortunately, the idea is not so straightforward to implement in reality and having their wishes granted requires creativity and openness for alternative options. With great authenticity, wit and charming visual design, this film invites us to be inspired by the conversation between these two very different and yet so similar characters and find our way to greater openness and tolerance.

Franka Sachse

Aren’t psychiatrists also dependent on their patients? For Chris Sullivan, there’s no doubt about it: he certainly is, particularly when it comes to long, intensive treatment programmes that require a lot of empathy. For his black-and-white feature-length film, he therefore chose a radical narrative approach in which treatment room and mental condition constantly merge in associative fashion, meaning we don’t know exactly where we are. It’s only the central points of reference which are defined: a long-standing patient of Dr. Durwood Richards, Rosemary Hamm is both his research object and the subject of his book. She suffers from schizophrenia and is therefore sometimes convinced that she lives on a Soviet space station in the 1960s during the Cold War. She also has one-on-one conversations with a large buffalo there (who speaks with the voice of Boris Karloff, who played the legendary role of Frankenstein’s monster in the 1931 film). Sullivan repeatedly makes the thin line separating Rosemary’s imagined worlds (animation) and the reality of the therapy sessions (live action) tangible – sometimes the animated patient stays seated in the room, sometimes she reluctantly slips of out her rotoscoped shell. In all these realms, whether fictional or real, the themes also overlap, orbiting doctor and patient like satellites: loss, love and above all forgiveness.

Marie Ketzscher

How does the graphic gesture in animated film manifest itself, what specific eco-system are we talking about when we refer to line and movement? Aline Helmcke invites us to think about drawing for film and simultaneously celebrates the sensual act of drawing: whether with light or sand-like material or classic drawing tools, on paper or blank film, in associative scribbles or structuring lines. And so lines turn into insects, a whole flock of dots, a pattern of lines, an industrial landscape … only to dissolve back into lines once more. Fleetingly, imagery and meaning emerge from simple elements. The intuition of the drawing process and the planning exercise of drawn animation, the restlessly wondering human eye and the unrelenting camera eye freezing time, they all whir around each other in this intelligent and luscious cinematic essay.

André Eckardt

In the beginning was the sea. In her poetic and quiet experimental film, Karolina Malwina Gruschka thinks about her relationship with water, interweaving biographical memories of learning how to swim and a primal sense of physical trust with reflections on climate change. The realisation that her own body, composed of 50 % water, has a lot to do with the water covering the globe, is reflected on the visual level, too: Gruschka converts found footage material and her own holiday pictures to a colour depth of 1 bit, which creates an exclusively black and white visual field where the private and documented nature are no longer distinguishable. The images ripple like water, gradually changing from distant blurs to concrete documentary observations of calving glaciers, thus achieving a meditative effect: if we all perish in the end, we will at least all be reunited in the water.

Marie Ketzscher

In the beginning was the light, then the egg yolk … The yellow form, hungry for life, buoyantly throws itself into the world, stretching, jumping back and forth. The space grows bigger and gains depth; the playing field expands. Drifting curiously to Latin-American rhythms gradually turns into a restless, frantic rush accompanied by hyperventilating breakbeats. The yellow ball is reduced to a narrow, hasty brushstroke racing through the black cosmos, whizzing past turbulent colours and shapes – and vanishing. Using nothing but abstraction, “Tutaro” brings a small personality into the world and follows its path equally tenderly and uncompromisingly.

André Eckardt