What is left when everything fades away? An old photographer tries to reconstruct people and events by means of old photographs, but they keep slipping away from him, vanishing in the dark, washed away by the waves. In his 2D animated film, rendered in black and white, Anton Dyakov not only shows how memories are lost, but also how they sometimes haunt and overwhelm us – for example in the shape of a disturbing archive fragment of blurred war photos. “Black Box” deals with loss and grief from a personal, yet universal perspective, while referencing the culture of remembrance in the digital age which is increasingly managing – or seeking to manage – without the haptic assurance of a printed photo.

Marie Ketzscher

Pesticides wipe out the insects, the oil spills into the ocean, the forests burn: In 1994, director Laila Rakvåg let a bird fly over and through the ecological, human-made hotspots that plague us even today to a far worse extent. Sometimes the bird is able to land in beautiful natural surroundings, but the rest is never permanent, paradise is always on the brink of the next hellish transformation. The further the bird flies, the more human its features become: It becomes a baby that is then actually born – and carries the memories of the bird in its newly opened eyes. We are inseparably linked to nature; what we do to it, we do to ourselves: Rakvåg’s film is an activist plea for more empathy with our planet and a change of thinking, told from the perspective of an expectant mother.

Marie Ketzscher

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

Dramas that many children have to endure play out in silence and hiding: The girl cuddling her dog because her own mother is staggering about with a glass of red wine, probably pregnant again. The boy as a toy ball caught between his aggressive parents who rain their arguments down on him with hacking beaks. Another girl who balances a dangerously wobbling seesaw with her family members on it. With her intimate cut-out animation, Marianne Bundgaard Nielsen metaphorically leafs through the family albums and shows the stories hidden by the staged photos. The adults are dreary puppets, sometimes fading drawings, addressing suicides within the family. The children, on the other hand, are much more lively figures with big accusing eyes, small read hearts and sometimes even coloured butterfly wings. You have to let them flutter and fly instead of unloading so much of your own misery on them.

Marie Ketzscher

The baseball as an omen. While people watch spellbound as the leather ball flies through the air, maybe even losing themselves in this entertaining pastime in front of the television set or in the stadium, a worried bird is watching. Because the flying ball is gradually turning into the globe, which the bird now tries to protect with its own feathers in a makeshift nest. Originally conceived as a submission for an MTV competition, Killi has already found her important life themes with this debut film: the use of multiplane cut-out animation and the great empathy with which she articulates her bond with nature and the environment. For her, “The Glass Ball”, visually inspired by Eastern European masters like Yuri Norstein, is a reminder of the fragility of our earth to this day.

Marie Ketzscher