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

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

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

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

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

The elephant is dead! But who or what has it on their conscience? Staged as a blend of ecological whodunit and fleetfooted documentary, Krishnamurthy’s animated film brings two different perspectives together. There is the wise voice of the Matti tree, which, like the Indigenous Soliga community, has found its own traditions and rituals for dealing with nature. And then there is the academic, discursive voice which conveys insights in the form of a butterfly. They also each have their own approaches to presenting their ideas about what really happened to the elephant: the Matti tree sings its pearls of wisdom which are visualised by way of drawings and timelapse; the butterfly prefers to make the most recent scientific developments visible as a stop motion sequence in the laboratory. The two of them slowly get closer to each other – for only together will they catch the murderer.

Marie Ketzscher

What starts as affectionate cuddling, hugging and strokes soon morphs into uneasy closeness and ultimately panic. The shift takes place gradually. Some gentle tickling marks the point where a boundary is approached, which is soon crossed. The playful exchange between these two fluffy characters transforms inexorably into a free for all that’s no longer funny. The puppet design, the precise animation, the lighting and the camerawork make intimacy tangible in all its facets, from pleasant to repulsive. A film that gets under the skin.

Franka Sachse

At the Kikomera home for girls, the mood is relaxed. Everyone is looking forward to the holidays. Babura is feverishly awaiting her trip to the hairdresser, but her plans are scuppered by her friend Njuki, who attracts chaos like a magnet. Director Maria Byoma also took on the role of screenwriter, animator and producer for this film and has created a humorous, energetic study for a future series in which African stories of striking visual identities will be told with creative freedom and local voices.

Franka Sachse

At once animal and human, past and future: in its very first minutes, Sun Xun’s epically constructed animated film already opens up a visually exuberant narrative universe in which philosophical observations and an oppressive social satire merge in excitingly associative fashion. The director worked with hundreds of animators for more than ten years to bring “Magic Atlas” to the big screen – by way of woodcut animation, ink drawings, contemporary painting and Persian miniatures, while deliberately avoiding rotoscoping and other techniques not based in analogue image-making. Magic and escapism are urgently needed, for the fictional coal empire of Luocha imagined by Sun Xun is ultimately a totalitarian dictatorship whose inhabitants are kept in check by camera mosquitos and collectively-ordered amnesia. And magicians end up in prison, because flying – or even letting your imagination run wild – is considered suspicious in Luocha. When one magician comes across the orphan boy Xiao Zhi, magic (mental) possibilities emerge to escape this captivity – or is it voluntary surveillance? Reincarnation becomes an opportunity for liberation here in suitably vivid fashion.

Marie Ketzscher

Charel the bachelor is the odd man out in a small village community of simple-minded oddballs. They grumpily let him now that he does not live up to the manly character of his name anyway. A careless moment with the beloved fish of his otherwise hard-hearted mother catapults him from the outsider position into the centre of an unfortunate chain of events. Full of good intentions and hopes of recognition, he poaches his way through the biblical story and returns with a heavenly child. Not part of his plan: The village does not see him as a divine messenger but as the Horned One. “Melk” portrays its Bruegel-like, robust characters precisely, down to the smallest facial twitch and squeaky voice, subtly interweaving the absurd and the everyday and plundering art history shamelessly yet skilfully to distort a peasant play into a folk horror tale. It’s for films like this that animation was invented.

André Eckardt

In an appeal to a lost friend, a first-person narrator raves about their shared future after the friend returns: fancy cars, big guns and submissive women. The fantasy soars like a bird over the Sierra, a digitally modulated landscape whose holes and glitches show that there is something basically wrong here. Game over, the playfulness turns deadly serious, the friend is in the hands of drug cartel killers. Fictional but close to reality, the film associatively assembles pop-cultural audio, video and gaming material from the internet to describe the intoxicated fascination with a perversely fetishised, violence-glorifying winner mentality. This idolisation comes up against a dead end on a web portal showing real video recordings of bestial brutality. Disarmingly clear and incredibly poignant, Oscar Asán analyses how ruthlessly a cartel divides the people of Culiacán into murderers and murder victims.

André Eckardt

What do someone’s possessions tell us about them? Sometimes the entire story of a life. That’s at least how it is for Marcel Barelli, who inherited everything in the house of his beloved Nonna after her passing. Barelli combines stop motion animation and his own video material to create a highly personal description of a person: among other things, we see knitting and sewing stuff, before the grandmother is already stuffing a sock in the very next image; she didn’t like throwing things away and always mended everything. But the objects also reveal the gaps: didn’t she love children? Where did all the toys end up? Barelli is aware of the overwhelmingly emotional power of memory which objects can unleash. Yet he also finds comfort and strength in them at the same time, such as when he finds his grandmother’s blood donor certificate, which doesn’t just reveal something about her everyday life, but also about her values. Values which are worth connecting with.

Marie Ketzscher