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

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

Shrieks, laughter, the roar of music and fairground rides hurtling along at breakneck speed – a brief electric crackle and the cacophony of a hot summer night at the fun fair dies away. The ensuing silence is broken by a toy radio squawking from a dustbin. It takes the chance offered by the brief moment of the blackout to tell of waves of emotion it picked up, of secret love affairs and dreams in which the staff, characters and a single visitor in the shadow of the usual high-spirited entertainment bustle lose themselves. As in her previous films, Maria Dakszewicz once more detects, with remarkable sensitivity and precise observation, a place in the emotional hangover area of the spectacle. A place where there are no distractions and genuine dreams are allowed to grow and die. Much here remains vague, the insignificant becomes significant. Precisely sketched, assembled and with elisions, dissolves and distortions in the images, sounds and words, the director depicts a moment’s pause before the electricity comes back on and excess is back in full swing.

André Eckardt