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

At once animal and human, past and future: in its very first minutes, Sun Xu’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 Xu 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