Martin doesn’t dream of a life full of riches. His greatest wish is a 1994 Honda Civic and a driver’s license. He joined his foster family at five months old. At nine, he received a diagnosis of autism, ADHD, and so-called attachment disorder. Then he met Casper, and the two formed a bond born out of their shared love for cars, Trabant jokes, and an understanding of each other’s struggles, shaped by their disabilities and early days spent in an orphanage that affected their self-esteem. Lensed by his brother, director Emil Langballe, with honesty and care, the film follows Martin as he is caught in a spiral of drug addiction and troubles. All the while, he and Casper continue patching up their Honda Civic. A film about ruptures and repairs, of cars and relationships, support systems, and the tenderness of friendship.

Sevara Pan

Nothing but trouble with the elder siblings! One day, the smallest mouse decides to stop running after the three ruffians and to go hiking. She wants to climb the high mountain. While the ascent is already laborious, going down proves almost harder … When mist rolls in, the joy of seeing her family again is even greater.

Lina Dinkla

The two friends Pingu and Bear push their bicycle up a mountain, passing through forests, meadows and deserts. They brave ice storms and have to cross fields of lava. After this long, seemingly endless journey they finally reach the highest peak. They gather all their courage for the best descent ever.

Lina Dinkla

During the Unidad Popular election campaign in 1970, the Ramona Parra Brigades mobilised young activists across the country. They painted political messages on facades and walls using brushes and buckets of paint. In “Brigada Ramona Parra” (1970), Álvaro Ramírez – who continued to work as a filmmaker in exile in the GDR – documents the sometimes daring work of one of these groups. Leonardo Céspedes’ “Pintando con el pueblo” in turn shows the new direction of Chilean cultural politics under Salvador Allende. Artists and art students create a huge mural in front of the presidential palace, La Moneda, in Santiago, under the eyes of passers-by. The site becomes a stage for a rally organized by the Unidad Popular.The film ends with a speech by Allende about art as “an art for all the people”. The 16mm distribution print held by the Arsenal archive is probably the only surviving copy of “Pintando con el pueblo”. It was digitised for this retrospective.

Florian Wüst

A distant wood thrush is singing against the pitch-black backdrop of the image. A fly acoustically approaches with a massive, bass-heavy hum, abruptly stopped in its flight by the sound of a crash. Sounds so familiar that we are usually not even aware of them provided the main sonic material for the renowned sound designer Claude Beaugrand. His long-standing artist friend, filmmaker Pierre Hébert, dedicated his five animated fugues to him. Field recordings like those of the bird and insect derive their vitality from their recognisability through repetition, as well as from their ephemeral nature, with its random inflections and variations. Hébert forms a sonic body through stretching, echo loops and granulated sounds. And he scratches directly onto the film material, working against the physical resistance of the emulsion. Each “brushstroke” created this way has an unpredictable, intuitive element. Each powerful or tender graphic gesture radiates vitality. Just as the thrush and the fly meet acoustically, abstract bundles of lines flutter nervously on the surface of the screen and into its depth, circling the pared-down silhouette of a human being in free fall. Intertitles lyrically describe a pain that must be expressed but for which there are no direct words. “Prelude and Fugues – The Wood Thrush” is an indescribable experience of choreographed sounds, an inner cinema born of the delicate essence of animation and the irresistible enticement to listen intently.

André Eckardt

Dramas that many children have to endure play out in silence and hiding: The girl cuddling her dog because her own mother is staggering about with a glass of red wine, probably pregnant again. The boy as a toy ball caught between his aggressive parents who rain their arguments down on him with hacking beaks. Another girl who balances a dangerously wobbling seesaw with her family members on it. With her intimate cut-out animation, Marianne Bundgaard Nielsen metaphorically leafs through the family albums and shows the stories hidden by the staged photos. The adults are dreary puppets, sometimes fading drawings, addressing suicides within the family. The children, on the other hand, are much more lively figures with big accusing eyes, small read hearts and sometimes even coloured butterfly wings. You have to let them flutter and fly instead of unloading so much of your own misery on them.

Marie Ketzscher