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

Between 1959 and 1981, the Franco regime had over 33,000 bodies transferred from more than 500 mass graves across Spain to the Valle de los Caídos – a monumental mausoleum erected to glorify the fascist victory. Decades later, relatives are still searching for the remains of their loved ones. Three families follow in the footsteps of the disappeared and encounter bureaucratic, legal and social obstacles that persist to this day. Drawing on director Manuel Correa’s own research as part of Forensic Architecture, a research agency that investigates state and corporate violence, the film reconstructs in meticulous detail what the regime sought to conceal. Digital maps, citizens’ archives, official documents and new forensic technologies reveal what remained hidden for decades. The result is a topography of terror that visualises the extent of systematic violence and brings to light the history buried beneath fascist monumentalism.

Seggen Mikael

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

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

The roles at the École nationale d’administration pénitentiaire, ÉNAP for short, are clearly allocated: the trainee prison officers on the one side, the teaching staff on the other. Guillaume Massart’s film maintains this separation in aesthetic terms too. Usually captured from the perspective of the pupils, “Detention” provides a look at a curriculum that is not for the fainthearted: how does one command the prisoners’ respect and obedience? What mental strains go hand in hand with the job? Can these trainee prison officers actually gain legal advantages in potential conflict situations? Over the film’s two-hour running time, a remarkable effect takes hold: as the pupils’ critical voices gradually fall silent, the prison system appears ever more questionable from the audience’s perspective. Can even a “proper” training lead to the abuse of power if this is not explicitly addressed and problematised? How does a uniform shape a person? Having spent a total of one year at the school for “Detention” and undergoing the training himself, Massart finds a unique tonality to convey an ambivalence that is both unsettling and claustrophobic.

Carolin Weidner

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

 

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

Keren Kraizer left Israel at 20 to study dance in Belgium, but also to escape her home country and its divisions. A visit to her family at the start of 2023 prompts an unexpected desire to reconnect with where she comes from, a process of considerable ambivalence which she decides to document in a video diary. Plucked from everyday life with a beautifully intuitive grasp for structure and montage, the resulting words and images move back and forth between the personal and the political with an inevitability born of the current state of the nation: a conversation with her mother about the lack of vision for lasting peace; footage of a man being shouted at for waving a Palestinian flag during the protests against Netanyahu’s assaults on the rule of law; the heartbreaking poem in English texted to her by a friend she made on an activist trip to the West Bank who didn’t want to be filmed; the nocturnal chat with her new boyfriend while wandering the streets of Jerusalem about all the tensions boiling under the ground, a chat that turns out to be grimly prophetic. For Kraizer’s diary will soon be overtaken by events beyond her control, and ambivalence will give way to anguish and disbelief. What now? How to contain people’s pain? “We are the ones who walk barefoot on the shreds of hope. We didn’t create war, but we created poems from its ruins.”

James Lattimer

Hands in his pockets and chewing bubble gum – a little big city rebel strolls casually through the streets, accompanied by hazy, sluggish sounds, past graffiti and retro gumball machines. He has perfected his “cool look” and his vanity swells to become a self-portrait. Franz Impler needs only ten seconds to introduce us to someone whose quirky trick amazes and amuses.

André Eckardt

A fluffy pink animal creature pokes its head out of a precisely trimmed green hedge column, singing a euphoric motif, its voice radiating the charm of a vintage synthesizer. Twin creatures with twin voices join from neighbouring hedges, an exhilarating beat resonates. An unhinged anthem with few beats, a brief anarchic moment on this lovely, bright day.

André Eckardt