Using rhythmic, ecstatic music and fragments of folk songs, Yasmine Djedje-Fisher-Azoume takes us to the mythic ancestors, goddesses, and guardians of the Bété people on the Ivory Coast – the place where the director’s ancestors came from. In her film study, inspired by traditional wooden sculptures and masks, she transforms these into many-shaped female characters through coal drawings and copper reliefs. Spinning, multi-faced and all-seeing, dancing in fluffy garments, they perform rituals and unfold an infectious choreography. The whole film pulses to this rhythm, so it comes as no surprise when one figure literally releases a stream of creative energy.
This stream is so strong that it extends into the present day – to a modern temple where living goddesses rotate in the endless flow of existence. Unlike the lifelessly arranged displays in European museums, witnesses of colonial violence, Djedje-Fisher-Azoume collects a pantheon here of what she honours and deeply moves. A temple that exists only for those who know their own origins and treat them with respect to derive from them strength for the presence and the future. The whole film, from the tip of its roots to the buds, is pervaded by this power of mystical self-knowledge.

What happens in a person permanently trapped in the destructive loneliness of constant self-comparison? How does a person who fools others with neoliberal dreams just so they do not have to give up their own feel? This bittersweet, cheerfully tense musical by Niki Lindroth von Bahr pulls us into the masked nervousness of modern society with humour, singing and dancing.

Helsinki by night. A car driving through rain-soaked streets, hardly a soul in sight. Jani Peltonen uses an old camera test to repurpose the Kaurismäki-like shots for an apocalyptic scenario: The radius of the drive roughly corresponds to the area that would be affected by the shockwave of a nuclear bomb explosion. In a way, Peltonen, who works with split screens in “Equal Dust”, breaks up and rearranges the space-time-continuum. Because the street images are overlaid by the narrative of the pan-European commando exercise “Able Archer 83”, with which NATO simulated a nuclear war in November 1983. An action that not only prompted the Soviet Union to station real warheads in East Germany – the Finnish music scene, too, processed the smouldering fear in hauntingly pathetic contributions to the Eurovision Song Contest. Singer Kojo, for example, warned against closing one’s eyes – and was promptly punished with zero points. “Equal Dust” is a journey back in time to the Cold War and anticipated end of the world, but no less a document of expressive hairdos and a hurtful song competition.

The original title of this film can be roughly translated as “A Nameless Life” and there is really no other way to sum up the story. We will never learn the protagonist’s real name, but in the one hundred lonely years that we accompany him for 90 minutes of cinema, we see ever new facets of him. The film opens with a seemingly innocent montage of taxi rides in 1994. But as nonchalantly as the scenes are strung together here, it is important to pay attention to the subtleties if you want to stay on top of things during the ensuing century-long trip. The journey begins in the northern Japanese province and takes us through the J-pop world of Tokyo’s hip Harajuku district to a post-apocalyptic future where Fernand Léger and Stanley Kubrick shake hands.
Ryuya Suzuki is considered an outsider in contemporary Japanese animation. He is the sole author, director, animator, editor, and musician here. “Jinsei” is entirely his vision, a film about life and death, fate and rebellion, about power and powerlessness, unsparing and emotional. The 2D animation is imaginative, surprising, usually minimalist, always irritating, occasionally contemplative and then explosive. A hellish ride through human abysses, produced with so much attention to detail that new spaces open up every time you watch it.

A train rattles in the distance, a heron stalks through the water, children practice gymnastics on the promenade. A couple is on its way to the opposite bank, hopping from stone to stone. One of the stones is shaped like a turtle, symbolising wisdom. An elderly man sings beneath a concrete bridge, his voice echoing. Moving snapshots of the Kamogawa, the wild duck river in Kyoto, develop a captivating rhythm that is easy to get lost in. The men, women and children seem absorbed in their activities and themselves. Like the fisherman who is downright surprised by the fat fish on his line. Sometimes the camera also peeks into the houses behind the embankment. An elderly couple make fabrics with fancy patterns in a workshop, the regular clacking of their loom has a soothing quality. The images are full of cheerful serenity.

The figures in this experimental short film for cinema greenhorns seem to be spinning on a turntable. Houses, plants, birds, and a face pass before our eyes. To a lively tune, blossoms unfold, eggs and chicks fly, the sun goes up and down, until everything starts all over again. A small, tongue-in-cheek story that also tells of the early days of animation.

An empty zoo, a mattress shop, a gas station – in all these strange non-places, pigeons, snails and moles sing of their own worries, problems and crises, unable to perceive the world collapsing around them … An accident in the labs of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, extinguishes the last glimmer of hope, thanks to Niki Lindroth von Bahr.