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 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 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

“… What news is real? … Everyone decides for themselves.” These disillusioned lines from Veneta Androva’s fictionalised 3D animated documentary about targeted disinformation campaigns resonate. They are spoken by a share4pay user – a real-life Bulgarian platform where you can make “News Sites” sprout like mushrooms with a few clicks in order to earn money with social shares. Their content: alleged gender ideology and racist migration narratives. Androva uses the documentary form to reduce the authenticity suggested by these news sites to absurdity; her pixelated interview partners speak with AI-generated voices, a mushroom creature recites real clickbait headlines (“Romania Shows How to Treat the Gender Plague From the West”), complete with language model analysis. The effect is as eery as the message: the circulation of fake news remains unchecked; containment is virtually impossible.

Marie Ketzscher

Two friends at a café chat about love, partnership, children and hot guys. They fantasise about a magical string instrument that could help with finding a partner and starting a family. Unfortunately, the idea is not so straightforward to implement in reality and having their wishes granted requires creativity and openness for alternative options. With great authenticity, wit and charming visual design, this film invites us to be inspired by the conversation between these two very different and yet so similar characters and find our way to greater openness and tolerance.

Franka Sachse