“Are you with us or against us?” Nothing less lies in the air, unspoken. No nuances, no discussions, hardly any choice. Did the tired man expect such life decisions after work? Unlikely. He just wanted to chill out and watch mindless television when suddenly an alien world on the screen catches up with him in the comfort of his home: A cult-like community lives next door, their behaviour ape-like, their faith fanatical, determined to convert him. Their flat is decorated with forests and deserts. Anyone who tries to look behind the painted wallpaper, to separate scenery from reality, commits treason and deserves banishment or death. Plato’s Cave Analogy in a radicalised version for the 21st century.
Freedom and truth or stability and a sense of belonging? Is the price of accepting a distorted reality just to be allowed to live too high? And most of all: Is there an alternative worth living? The world outside, behind the window, remains vague, its threats only implied. In this parable about passivity, curiosity and free choice, Alexandre Sousa touches on the urgent questions of our time: questions of isolation, echo chambers and the impossibility for humans to stay unpolitical. Do we even have a chance to resist?

Using rhythmic, ecstatic music and fragments of folk songs, Yasmine Djedje-Fisher-Azoume takes us to the mythic ancestors, goddesses, and guardians of the Bété people on the Ivory Coast – the place where the director’s ancestors came from. In her film study, inspired by traditional wooden sculptures and masks, she transforms these into many-shaped female characters through coal drawings and copper reliefs. Spinning, multi-faced and all-seeing, dancing in fluffy garments, they perform rituals and unfold an infectious choreography. The whole film pulses to this rhythm, so it comes as no surprise when one figure literally releases a stream of creative energy.
This stream is so strong that it extends into the present day – to a modern temple where living goddesses rotate in the endless flow of existence. Unlike the lifelessly arranged displays in European museums, witnesses of colonial violence, Djedje-Fisher-Azoume collects a pantheon here of what she honours and deeply moves. A temple that exists only for those who know their own origins and treat them with respect to derive from them strength for the presence and the future. The whole film, from the tip of its roots to the buds, is pervaded by this power of mystical self-knowledge.

It sprawls, cracks, bursts: The balcony of two flatmates is slowly but steadily overgrown by a red climbing plant with evil-looking tubers. And our flatmates? Sit in the middle, stoically smoking, ignoring the bursting windows behind them. There was a funny rain – but not water.
With this poignant and charged one-take idea and beautifully realistic character design, Stella Hood examines the dilemma of the eternal spectator: Here are two figures who register that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world but simply continue with their daily routines. Who neither get worked up nor wonder nor take action. And whose lethargy is hilarious, not least because it is an uncomfortable reminder of our own inaction. What global crisis could the two be ignoring so nonchalantly? Stella Hood leaves this open, even though the plants make climate change an obvious choice. In any case, a parcel delivery is expected. Have a look downstairs? Sure, “but not today.” “Nah, not today,” the other one replies. “Perhaps tomorrow, we’ll see.”

Sardinia, 1940. The harmless term “horsing around” takes on a very serious and ultimately tragic meaning for 14-year-old Michele and his 11-year-old friend Ventura. When they learn that the peasants have sold their best horses for serious money to the state and thus to the military for the approaching war, the two boys take a decision that is as naïve as it is intuitive: They free the herd in a daring nighttime operation. Their happiness is short-lived. Betrayed by a villager, they are caught on the way home and Ventura is shot dead. A senseless death? Or a sign of special bravery, as the ambiguous Sardinian film title suggests?
Director Giovanni Columbu, a Sardinian himself, has dedicated his late animation debut to his grandmother who once told him the story. He took the liberty of adapting it with brushstrokes on paper, his style drawing primarily on the charms of historical painting schools, animation techniques and cinema genres. Columbu’s associative visual language, marked by shades of black, white, and grey, is animated by impulsive hatchings, countless dots, and generous elisions. The soundtrack, too, sets rather sparse nuances – subtle illustrations that draw on Sardinian cultural traditions while opening a space for universal metaphors.

The discrepancy between a bleak, dreary provincial town and an imaginative woman in her prime who longs for adventure bursts forth as a stirringly animated cri de coeur. Maria Dakszewicz’s protagonist immerses herself so deeply in a Bollywood film that in her imagination she becomes the main character of the colourful and divinely joyous love story. This makes her return to the empty, cold “reality bar” all the more painful – with its annoying neighbours, depressing weather and the mocking slogans for self-improvement on advertising boards and in women’s magazines.
A high-proof cocktail of tragicomedy, garnished with enormous power, humour, love, physicality and melancholy. The last brushstroke is the equivalent of the unattainable, shimmering figure of the Bollywood sultan in the Bar Croquette reality – which also brings a kind of contentment, albeit of a quite different nature … With this film, Dakszewicz creates a distinctive, original and wild aesthetic: The clay figure, still warm from fingerprints, blends seamlessly into ink drawings –incongruous at first glance and yet as harmoniously fused as dreamt sensuality with an Indian sultan in the grey Polish province.

A man throws off the shackles of slavery, lays the traditional Kente cloth aside, puts on a business suit – and starts to walk towards the future. Or towards what he thinks is the future, because this is not a pleasant walk: To the cheers of the people, the man pushes into the backroom of an Asian restaurant where he flogs plots of land, moves to the next backroom, money case in hand, to bribe the pastor and ultimately ends up on stage to give a state-supporting speech as President – against corruption, of course. The career of our nameless protagonist – whose sunglasses-covered face, interestingly, we get to see only in the limelight – takes him right through the streets of an African metropolis, past protests being suppressed, through a dilapidated infrastructure, criminal gangs, and even natural disasters.
Nobody has thrown off the shackles of slavery in Francis Yushau Brown’s relentlessly critical film. Instead, a few individuals have chained themselves to nepotism and keep the rest of the population poor and backwards. His film is a 3D indictment brimming with rage, including of the Western and Far Eastern (neo) colonizers. And far above hover the enraged gods, waiting for the people to put an end to this situation at last.

Contemplating your naked body, drenched in tomato sauce, on a frozen pizza – that is the epitome of alienated wage work. Especially if it is the mass product whose quality has to be checked hundreds of times a day at the assembly line. Is it this alienation, the multiple daily consumption of precisely this meal or simply the absence of significant human relationships that make Frankie feel terminally ill and ready to say goodbye to an existence he feels is worthless and empty? Nobody cares, until his body transforms into a wild planet where evolution happens in fast-forward mode: the genesis of life, miniature Frankies performing absurd penis dances, cannibalism, Darwinism, mutual destruction, the eradication of other species – and finally the Frankie planet itself burning out.
Levi Stoops makes us laugh out loud – and yet we feel the bitter taste of self-destruction on our tongue. Will Frankie have the courage to risk a change of life after this apocalyptic experience? Or does the system have him so firmly in its claws that wholesome nature documentaries of exotic flowers are comfort enough – instead of cooking shows where the stone-baked pizzas are tossed into the air with verve?

When Marc confesses his love to his girlfriend Hélène, all she answers is “Later!” The timing of his confession could not be worse, as there is a whole other dimension to Hélène’s reply. Both belong to a group of activists who have just burned their mobile phones and tackled the ultimate important questions in the forest. Questions of fear, power, courage, loyalty, and doubts. Following this, they attack a rich and influential retired couple in their posh mansion, representing those guilty of the dilemma of this world in their eyes. The armed attack ends in a bloodbath. In the midst of the shootout, though, Hélène is struck with a strange kind of paralysis and soon afterwards sucked into the surrealistic maelstrom of a fatal second chance.
Canadian director and writer Félix Dufour-Laperrière says, he writes “with colours in mind, with transformations, dreamlike sequences, mental images that take shape on screen.” Hand-drawn templates unfold in a powerful symbolic 2D animation of flowing figures and silhouettes that neither shrinks from aggressively formulated messages nor from the exuberant magic of the format.

“The past is an endless cookie.” The past is omnipresent in this fabulously original family portrait. We feel it in the very first minutes, when filmmaker Seth from Toronto calls his half-brother Pete, who is a member of the Indigenous Cree people: The globe on which the distance between the two is visualised snips away the little sign “Dominion of Canada” to reveal the world Shamattawa underneath – the name of the First Nations community where Pete lives. The past is still present because of the injuries the Cree suffer(ed) from the white majority, including police violence and land grabbing. Nonetheless, humour is the Scrivers’ defining stylistic tool – from subtle jokes to self-irony to the detailed, lovingly surreal look of all the characters which they bestow even on racist police officers.
The brothers initially wanted to tell seven stories. At the end there are hundreds – because every sound recording is interrupted by the daily life of an extended family, every anecdote leads to the next. No matter whether the subject is building a teepee, supermarket shopping or butchering animals. This never-ending family chronicle, which also proposes a special chronicle of Canada, was produced over nine years. The result is a distinctive cookie one can chew on for a long time.

“Can we be moved by the disappearance of rhinos if we have never experienced the feeling of a butterfly walking on our hand?” Marcel Barelli asks not without pathos, but hitting the mark, in his animated manifesto. He is quoting Daniel Pauly’s Shifting Baseline Syndrome Theory: We humans always measure normality by our own experience and not by historical changes and therefore tend to accept environmental destruction. This is not the only allusion in Barelli’s compact three-minute-film: He references the “sixth extinction”, the current human-caused extinction of the species, and the hourglass symbol of the Extinction Rebellion movement. His film, however, which should definitely be understood as a call for active resistance, embeds these reflections artistically.
With his evaporating water animation on paper, Barelli has chosen a simple and consistent animation technique whose ephemeral character perfectly captures species extinction and oblivion. Archive material is added. Unlike the “Cinétracts” pamphlet films from 1968 that he admires, but just as forceful, he has chosen a contemporary, personal approach. He touchingly weaves his theses into his own biography: Family pictures point to a time when Barelli himself “played with dinosaurs and ate chicken”.

When the woman in curlers opens the door, Papa is blown away: Like a breath of air, a storm or tornado, he is blown in and back out. Even in his own apartment he is ungraspable: He grows and shrinks, becomes fragile or threatening, knocks everything down. And then he literally flies away, hurling eggs at passers-by. Caught in all this is his daughter, who at first can only helplessly stand by and who finds it increasingly difficult to visit him – the steps grow higher, the floor turns into chewing gum. Finally, she looks up at the sky and sees him hover there.
What to do when one’s father suffers from mental illness? How to deal with it when the responsibility (of care) switches sides so early in life? Jelena Milunović explores this, using bold, very tender and not always obvious parables. She sets strong colour accents: The depressed episodes are in claustrophobic black and white, the ecstatic highs are colourful free-hand drawings. And the red balloon, which briefly appears in the beginning as a metaphorical vehicle of hope, might point the way to bringing the two of them back together.

Is that a belly or a cell that is in visible turmoil? In any case, in Angel Wu’s film the capitalist hamster wheel is a living organism – though it is not quite clear whether we live in it or it in us. When a young factory worker makes a wooden fetish, prays to it, and then eats it, he is physically and visibly consumed with ambition and work mania. Without further ado, the people around the fire turn into a column of factory workers with a number-crunching management, the free-roaming zebra is put into a cage that is quickly shipped off as a container. But Wu does not just stage this development as a simple series of recognisable capitalism markers but also retains the cryptic, haptic quality of her magnificent mixed media reflection on the content level.
Is the fetish an anvil that symbolises human malleability? Does the worker long for something else? Are the delicately drawn insights into the interior of the machine visions of hell or simply an Anthropocene in its final stage? Based on the physical formula “work equals force times distance,” Wu not only combines 2D animation, photography, collage, and drawing – as well as Taiwanese music featuring some unsavoury retching. Rather, she condenses reflections on working life in (Asian) societies and our imprisonment within it.