Line, surface, colour, light, movement, time. Animated films are capable of creating an almost endless wealth of interpretations, transformations and reinventions of inner and outer realities from just a few primary materials. In this competition, international animation filmmakers demonstrate the narrative and technical innovativeness of their art, in both pointed short and feature-length formats.
Anne (36) lives in Halle (Saale) and her life is in chaos. An apartment full of moving boxes, a yapping dog. She tells her mother on the phone that the electricity is about to be cut off again. Sometimes her daughter Leonie (14) drops by. Like her mother, she is at risk of slipping into drug addiction. Anne has already lost custody of her two younger children, too. The camera stays purely observational, captures loose scenes from the life of a woman who wants to take responsibility again. The film does not look for psychological explanations but shows Anne as she is. On her drives through the prefabricated housing estate, she seems isolated from her surroundings. Mother and daughter grow closer over an ice cream in a public square. Anne’s visit to her mother provides support but creates pressure, too. We grow ever closer to Anne, sharing her wish that she can become a role model for her daughter.
Anke Leweke
Contains mentions of addiction, death, drug-use
Contains mentions of mental health conditions, murder
Photosensitivity warning: Contains flashes of light that may trigger seizures for people with visual sensitivities.
“We don’t fit together”, one of them says of the “motley crew” tending a garden plot in a pre-fab estate in Schwerin. At first, everyone “muddles through” alone: Omar from Syria, who struggles with being voiceless in a foreign land. Manfred, a widower who thinks of his wife every day and looks after everyone. Kateryna from Ukraine, who tries to paint over the war with colourful pictures. Fawze, who lost his homeland three times. Ronny, Wiebke and Max, who are trying to make a fresh start after a life of drugs and violence. Sabine, whose laughter and mischief flare up briefly and vanish again. Petra, who cannot afford to go to a concert after a lifetime of hard work. Richard, who hangs up mirrors not to be alone. Abdul from Afghanistan, master of okra. They communicate with their hands, feet and “russki jasyk”, swap tips on the right way to plant garlic and on tools, soon sit together under the chestnut tree, singing, fighting for the project … And from her balcony Mrs. Müller recites Goethe, following it up with a peace poem. DEFA veteran Dieter Schumann and his cinematographer Michael Kockot achieve what was once the origin and virtue of documentary film: giving the unheard a voice through precise observation, a voice based on closeness, trust and respect. The neighbourhood garden is a site of “small miracles”. One of them is this film.
Grit Lemke
Contains depictions of drug-use, nudity, physical violence
„A little flame that lit up and inspired people to tell different stories about the GDR.” This is how a protagonist describes the 1977 book “Guten Morgen, du Schöne” (Good morning, beautiful) by the writer Maxie Wander, a collection of records in which a wide variety of women talk about themselves. One of the most successful books in the GDR and one of the most influential in German literary history: It affected generations of women (and men!) and encouraged them to question their own lives – ample reason for the director to let a few of the women look back on the book and their lives today. It is about equal rights and emancipation, life plans and rebellion, dreams and failure, love and sexuality, mothers and fathers, men and women, happiness and loneliness, death and, above all, the hunger for life. With respect and great tenderness, Susanne Schüle films faces and bodies on which time has left its mark. Age and beauty, fragility and strength. On the visual level, the stories are subtly commented on by amateur footage: bodies marching in step to the ideologies, Hitler salutes and mass rallies. Again and again contrasted with naked bodies, the wild and non-conformist life beyond the dictatorships. War, peeling potatoes, kisses, children. This is how it was. This is how it is. In the end, the monologues of the past lead up to a contemporary dialogue between the sexes and generations. A flame.
Grit Lemke
Free entry
Free entry
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
Contains mentions of death
