Three kids trudge through the snow. One of them sees a falling star and gets to make a wish. But it’s not quite that simple, because the two friends think the childish wish is too short-sighted and selfish in light of global problems. Ninety seconds in bright colours and with cute characters that show briefly and succinctly what goes bitterly wrong when the right thing is no longer right.

André Eckardt

It speaks from the thick smoke, first with one voice, then with two. I already knew you, it says, when you still had no form, I see you. The voice is deep, it regrets its biggest mistake: creating civilisation, which has multiplied, spiralled out of control, become all-encompassing. Christopher Galinos’s atmospherically charged experimental film moves back and forth between a lament and a (bad) dream. We don’t know who we’re supposed to sympathise with here: is it the 3D creature akin to a wooden sculpture whose long hands hold a small ball? Or is it the male figures that come forth upon the shimmering fabric, eventually covering its entire surface? Are we these figures? Galinos confronts us with these questions and ideas about creation myths and releases us again, lost in thought.

Marie Ketzscher

April 2020: The playground is empty and quiet, with a sadly fluttering barrier tape that nobody cares about because everyone is at home in lockdown. Except for a pear-shaped 3D figure which pads searchingly through the gravelly sand on thin legs, in chunky sneakers. It is towing an exhausted balloon with a frozen smile and – chunky sneakers. The dangling balloon hands pat the lonely rule-breaker from above. Franz Impler’s poetic and playfully condensed snapshot lets us empathise with an indescribable, exceptional situation in all its melancholy and absurdity.

André Eckardt

While taking care of her young daughter, the director makes jelly. She reflects on the birth of her child and her own excessive perfectionism, which also extends to her artistic practice. The simple dessert develops into a “zoetrope pudding”. Once she lets go of her need for precision and allows relaxed playfulness into the working process, she succeeds in making a multi-layered cinematic dish. Its ingredients: sugar, silicon, plastic filaments. Kateryna Voznytsia manages many things at once here: to intelligently bridge the gap between contemporary working methods and historical techniques from the early cinema era and sensitively question her role as a mother, woman and filmmaker, all while also maintaining a loving bond with her daughter.

Franka Sachse

A tennis player is driven to despair by his opponent, a devious blue Cheshire cat. After her serve, she uses wicked magic to manipulate the spatial coordinates and establishes the one, ruthless rule: Now the court keeps rotating and with every return the player, long-since destined to lose, crowns himself the invincible opponent. A creative tennis nightmare.

André Eckardt

On the outskirts of the city, the new modern buildings are silent, the highway bridge hisses. Birds circle in the sky. A young man, hidden by a hooded sweater, is driving an e-scooter on a path in the park. Only the gun slung over his shoulder irritates. Anon Cla’s film portrays an atmosphere of high alert while disaster has already struck. Increasingly drastic scenes play out serenely. The soundtrack to this screaming silence is supplied by a high-tech world: highway, tram, indicator sounds, emergency signals. What the sound backdrop rigidly refuses is to provide a loud release that would resolve the tension. The suburban landscape is steeped in a read, theatrical warning light, blurring limit the view. The 3D computer design veils neither the artificiality nor the computer-based deformation of the images. Normality has become a battle zone where the machine matrix already reigns.

André Eckardt

In an attempt to come to terms with the greatest act of violence that can happen in a father-son relationship, the cinematic first-person narrator initially comes to some logical conclusions: The Chinese once invented gunpowder, which can be used in the form of fireworks to drive out an evil spirit. Fireworks are a precursor of film animation; therefore, animation serves the same purpose. Intense brushstrokes and the material structure of the animated drawings, repeated runs through the sequences and the impressive interplay between visual and acoustic abstraction and figuration, in order to find an expression for the unspeakable, powerfully convey the emotional turmoil. However, the laborious process of drawing the single frames for this animation also creates an unwanted intimacy between the narrator and his evil spirit. Drawing from a personal story of trauma, Juan Camilo González develops an incredibly well-designed experimental setup, which, in its failure, brings back the horror all the more violently.

André Eckardt

Anton Cla builds on a documentary film project by his artist friend Charles Dhondt about dysphasia, a language processing disorder: The colourful and protean picture of a man sitting quietly on a chair and yet radiating unbridled energy keeps flickering in Cubist style. The viewer’s gaze approaches the man’s head, and the more it does so, the wilder the colours and shapes become until at last they form a whirlpool of drawers. A world of its own, complex and creative, that has trouble taking in the outside world and is hard to convey to the outside.

André Eckardt

An empty room floats weightlessly in the dark. Its three walls glow, displaying abstract movements. Are they projected inventions or is there a world behind them? At least this quiet, disquieting in-between place, this empty stage, offers time to dream: A ride “no brakes downhill” (Tin Fingers) that passes a flight of stairs, a petrol station, a panorama window. Anton Cla designs a mystically charged architecture of the imaginary, whose statics are calculated from light, sound, movement and the manipulation of time.

André Eckardt

 

The legacy: grandfather’s collection of bird’s eggs. 4,500 graceful, fragile works of art created by nature; speckled, elongated, pastel-coloured … An orderly confined enclosure of uniform boxes houses the preserved cocoons of the stolen, thwarted offspring of birds of prey and non-predatory birds, from Norway to South Africa. With the legacy comes the story of the collector: Josef Schreiber from Vorarlberg, Central Europe – a middle-class, white, male biography of the 20th century in which order was lost, slipped, had to be reimagined, both on the grand scale and on the smallest private level. Claudia Larcher’s extraordinary essay film is an unflustered tale of restlessness. Personal photos, views of collection pieces and small AI-generated miniatures are overlaid by electronic sounds that seem to communicate with the algorithms of the shell patterns, and a spoken line of thought that traces, sorts and keeps together almost 100 years of change with breathtaking clarity.

André Eckardt

Somewhere between fascination and shock we slowly begin to make out what is moving here as a grey, overgrown mass. A bodyless head sings in a salmon-red universe. The voice is borrowed from Shaun Ryder, the lead singer of the Happy Mondays, whose already drawling rap is slowed down to an unreal slow motion here. The song quoted, “Tart, Tart”, is about a tragic, lonely death. A small, effective experiment using the Face Cap software.

André Eckardt

A visit to the place of one’s childhood, where love and hope seem to have made off long ago and mining parades, booze-ups and helpless adolescent rebellion with techno music around the campfire have become ritualized. With an unerring gift for observation and structure, Fidel Sievering and Bennet Staack convey the worn-out quality and smell of a Rhenish town that used to live on mining and where successful structural change refuses to move in. Here, time stood still a long time ago. The people move awkwardly through the narrow streets and corridors, like digital puppets with glitchy motor functions. The only ray of light is the old, discarded plans for the future of the place that are unearthed from a sealed mineshaft as a test of courage. Working with sometimes off-kilter scenes and sounds, found audio-testimonies and an uncompromising digital design, “Glaube, Sitte, Heimat” speaks honestly about decorative wall plates and suppressed pain, but also about an unshakeable belief in the “New Dream”.

André Eckardt