The collaborative artistic work of Menno de Noojer (son), Paul de Noojer (father) and Françoise de Noojer (mother), which oscillated between photography and experimental film, spanned almost fifty years. Rather than allowing posterity to label, categorise and, as the case may be, mothball their work, the three realised a final film together just before Paul de Noojer died, when he was already seriously ill. A last joint film as an exuberant self-homage, in which they combine experimental-documentary storytelling, performance, pixilation and stop motion, funny and sad moments, pathos and trash, a joy of putting on costumes and vulnerable nudity. With “Heaven is Blue? #2”, the Noojers celebrate life as a total work of art in which all processes of becoming human and all symptoms of decline have their place and death is a natural part of the whole.

Marie Ketzscher

1995. It is the sixth summer since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Artists live, love and work on a farm in East Germany. They film each other with a video camera. They have seen the world, have wondered and learned, became homesick and returned. To where there was space. Fruit hangs from the trees, sparrows chirp, sculptures in the garden. Time and again the camera captures a young woman, her open gaze, her focus. The material which has become fragile today vibrates, gets stuck, freezes. Unperturbed, the narrative evokes the paean of summer, which will not be followed by a seventh for one of them. A white light shines into the present.

Jan Künemund

Losing your hair through chemotherapy is a painful experience for many people, not least because a bald head displays one’s new vulnerability so blatantly. But Maja Arnekleiv, the daughter of Norwegian animation director Anita Killi, turns the steps of the transformation – the original mum’s hair, the near-baldness, the new growth which is so different from the pre-chemo hair – into a tribute to resilience, love and family solidarity even in difficult times of illness. In a pixilation documentary produced over a period of two years, she captures in 755 single frames (selected from more than 3,000) how she and her siblings comb, blow-dry, style, braid and spray Anita Killi’s hair, while Killi always has her eyes firmly on the viewers. Sometimes laughing, sometimes serious, always loving. In 2017, Marja Arnekleiv won the Golden Dove for this tender, very touching film which celebrates the mother of four, whatever she looks like.

Marie Ketzscher