“The past is an endless cookie.” The past is omnipresent in this fabulously original family portrait. We feel it in the very first minutes, when filmmaker Seth from Toronto calls his half-brother Pete, who is a member of the Indigenous Cree people: The globe on which the distance between the two is visualised snips away the little sign “Dominion of Canada” to reveal the world Shamattawa underneath – the name of the First Nations community where Pete lives. The past is still present because of the injuries the Cree suffer(ed) from the white majority, including police violence and land grabbing. Nonetheless, humour is the Scrivers’ defining stylistic tool – from subtle jokes to self-irony to the detailed, lovingly surreal look of all the characters which they bestow even on racist police officers.
The brothers initially wanted to tell seven stories. At the end there are hundreds – because every sound recording is interrupted by the daily life of an extended family, every anecdote leads to the next. No matter whether the subject is building a teepee, supermarket shopping or butchering animals. This never-ending family chronicle, which also proposes a special chronicle of Canada, was produced over nine years. The result is a distinctive cookie one can chew on for a long time.

“Can we be moved by the disappearance of rhinos if we have never experienced the feeling of a butterfly walking on our hand?” Marcel Barelli asks not without pathos, but hitting the mark, in his animated manifesto. He is quoting Daniel Pauly’s Shifting Baseline Syndrome Theory: We humans always measure normality by our own experience and not by historical changes and therefore tend to accept environmental destruction. This is not the only allusion in Barelli’s compact three-minute-film: He references the “sixth extinction”, the current human-caused extinction of the species, and the hourglass symbol of the Extinction Rebellion movement. His film, however, which should definitely be understood as a call for active resistance, embeds these reflections artistically.
With his evaporating water animation on paper, Barelli has chosen a simple and consistent animation technique whose ephemeral character perfectly captures species extinction and oblivion. Archive material is added. Unlike the “Cinétracts” pamphlet films from 1968 that he admires, but just as forceful, he has chosen a contemporary, personal approach. He touchingly weaves his theses into his own biography: Family pictures point to a time when Barelli himself “played with dinosaurs and ate chicken”.

When the woman in curlers opens the door, Papa is blown away: Like a breath of air, a storm or tornado, he is blown in and back out. Even in his own apartment he is ungraspable: He grows and shrinks, becomes fragile or threatening, knocks everything down. And then he literally flies away, hurling eggs at passers-by. Caught in all this is his daughter, who at first can only helplessly stand by and who finds it increasingly difficult to visit him – the steps grow higher, the floor turns into chewing gum. Finally, she looks up at the sky and sees him hover there.
What to do when one’s father suffers from mental illness? How to deal with it when the responsibility (of care) switches sides so early in life? Jelena Milunović explores this, using bold, very tender and not always obvious parables. She sets strong colour accents: The depressed episodes are in claustrophobic black and white, the ecstatic highs are colourful free-hand drawings. And the red balloon, which briefly appears in the beginning as a metaphorical vehicle of hope, might point the way to bringing the two of them back together.

Is it not unlimited freedom, the most radical form of self-realisation, to exist in every conceivable setting as a flying mythical creature, a sad mouse or a furry figure with an extended naked spine as a tail? In her film, Monika Masłoń moves through different spaces as an avatar, exploring the subject of touching and being touched on VR platforms. Anything our phantasy can imagine can be created from pixels here. The limits of existence can be extended infinitely by a click. But what about human – or avatarian – closeness? Can an emotional signal like shaking hands be simulated in this VR world, despite the complete absence of physical bodies? When I see my avatar being touched, can my body memory suggest that I feel this tactile event even though there is no other physical body?
Masłoń examines these questions with a delicate sense of humour and in exchanges with other avatars. But then we enter a VR space that feels more intimate: She has taken us on a personal date. How does the impossibility of physical touch in a long-distance relationship differ from that in VR? Can a VR date create more physical presence and still the longing for the beloved person better than other forms of communication?

“Apparently, it had to happen to me before I learned it was ‘normal’.” This statement by a protagonist sums up how our society deals with stillborn children or children who die young: Star children are omnipresent (one in four mothers has lost a child) and yet absent. We lack the vocabulary, the sensitivity, and the tranquillity to enable parents to mourn.
Remo Rauscher’s animated documentary confronts us with this inability, letting twenty people in mourning or who deal with mourning speak: Thinking out loud, struggling for words, regarding the pain from different perspectives, discovering dignity and strength in it and helping us to overcome the taboo. They object to being an “error in the system”, to accepting the speechlessness. In Rauscher’s film, the darkness is ambivalent and palpable on all levels: It is absorbing and caring. It is generous and gives us moments of beauty, humility, and hope. The 2D animations in muted colours on a dark background are always abstract, sketchy, and restrained – an expression of tact and respect. They draw attention to themselves only once in a while, while the voices are given a lot of space and can unfold without fear. This film opens a space to mourn that society is unable to offer yet.

There is no return to paradise. There is a rupture between now and then, the realisation that this place no longer exists. Our protagonist, too, must learn this when she lifts the green of the map beneath her like a blanket to crawl under it with a tomato in her hand – back to Sarajevo, to Yugoslavia. Initially, the strangeness of the return flight with its obligatory tomato juice is as nostalgically exciting as the smiley stickers that are everywhere. But by the time she reaches her parents’ home, the past catches up with her completely: In the corridor of the deserted flat, bullet holes cast cones of light on old family photos and when she opens the fridge, the sight of a single tomato suddenly triggers memories of bombs and explosions.
Matea Radic finds haunting and original images to visualise her own traumatic experience of the Bosnian War and its confusing entanglement with her haptic and sensual childhood memories – complete with Dadaistic advertisements for Šipad furniture and Bosnian melodies. Her generous and yet spare animation style brings out the childlike wonder of her protagonist beautifully. She stalks through the world with scraped knees in a babydoll dress. And she learns that it is sometimes okay not to stick a smiley on things but perhaps a band-aid.

How does it feel when your body becomes a different one? Milla Cummings and Geneviève Tremblay explore (peri)menopause with a physical, concrete approach: The menopause they show is a living stop-motion organism, a cave with pulsating walls where a naked elderly woman gently inters her last eggs. From offscreen, a number of mature women recount their experiences – of dry skin, especially in the vaginal area, of rage against the universally asserted sex appeal of aging men, and of the increasing loss of their social visibility.
For every negative aspect, these worldly-wise narrators formulate a counterpoint or constructive course of action in authentic audio recordings. And they also report on the positive sides of this drastic transformation: The energy that the body would have reserved for childbearing along with the eggs is now released for new projects! On screen, a curtain aptly opens to offer a view of a shimmering, glittering foam of possibilities. At the end, our protagonist leaves the cave and climbs the nearest mountain. This film describes more than just arduous passages one has to go through: The “passageways” might just as well be transitions to a new life.

The film opens with the obvious: The problem of the AI’s lack of physicality – it cannot play ping pong with director Tianji Yu. But would it be conceivable for Yu to arrange to play ping pong with a former friend and playmate who now votes for Trump? Do his political otherness and physical absence make this friend as immaterial as the AI? Is this absence insurmountable – both the AI’s and the friend’s?
A ping pong conversation evolves during which the director’s deep memories and honest reflections turn the superficial and banal AI into an actual surrogate partner. A partner that enables a slow rapprochement to the lost friendship and triggers reflections about humans as political beings. The artificiality of the AI is unpeeled layer by layer. Yu visually stimulates us to penetrate to the core of things through the poetically captivating layers of the visual design as we start with documentary footage alienated by a distorting mirror and transition to a moving painting of simple, semi-realistic 3D animations that unfold as if behind a brushstroke filter.

A student in Incheon leads a solitary existence, sending off essays late at night, leaving her cramped apartment to smoke out on the street, scrolling through old ads on the internet. When she clicks on an MPEG file that happens to be on her USB stick, a conversation with her grandparents blares forth, recounting their life in the same neighbourhood where she now lives. Once released, their voices won’t stay quiet, creeping into her daily routine and her dreams. As they talk of prejudice against North Korean refugees, taking cardboard from the US military base to build a makeshift house overnight or making malt taffy to earn a living, their endeavours come to life in stop-motion sequences that appear, like them, to belong to a different era. But this is just one of many different visual ideas and animation techniques on display, including hand-drawn sequences of various kinds, scanned-in images that recreate the neighbourhood in cannily imperfect 3D, real photographs and live-action scenes that even show the people behind the voices at one point. History never stays silent; here we see all its overlapping layers.