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

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

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