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

Aren’t psychiatrists also dependent on their patients? For Chris Sullivan, there’s no doubt about it: he certainly is, particularly when it comes to long, intensive treatment programmes that require a lot of empathy. For his black-and-white feature-length film, he therefore chose a radical narrative approach in which treatment room and mental condition constantly merge in associative fashion, meaning we don’t know exactly where we are. It’s only the central points of reference which are defined: a long-standing patient of Dr. Durwood Richards, Rosemary Hamm is both his research object and the subject of his book. She suffers from schizophrenia and is therefore sometimes convinced that she lives on a Soviet space station in the 1960s during the Cold War. She also has one-on-one conversations with a large buffalo there (who speaks with the voice of Boris Karloff, who played the legendary role of Frankenstein’s monster in the 1931 film). Sullivan repeatedly makes the thin line separating Rosemary’s imagined worlds (animation) and the reality of the therapy sessions (live action) tangible – sometimes the animated patient stays seated in the room, sometimes she reluctantly slips of out her rotoscoped shell. In all these realms, whether fictional or real, the themes also overlap, orbiting doctor and patient like satellites: loss, love and above all forgiveness.

Marie Ketzscher

There’s a marvellous view of Sokhumi from the roof – and it’s also possible to see the beautiful girl moving into the house across the way with her dog. In Mamuka Tkeshelashvili’s wistful, poetic stop-motion short film, the 13-year-old protagonist is enjoying a carefree summer on the football pitch and at the beach, above all when the girl is also there. But these days of innocence are soon over once he sees her fleeing pell-mell and planes shooting over the city. Mamuka Tkeshelashvili’s puppet and cutout animation remembers the 1993 Sokhumi massacre, in which Abkhazian separatists murdered up to an estimated 7000 Georgian civilians. Yet Tkeshelashvili only hints at the violence, concentrating primarily on the positive memories of the place and the feelings of longing from exile – the girl’s red hair flying in the wind or the beautiful, lovingly fashioned miniature buildings that tell of Sokhumi’s former charm.

Marie Ketzscher