How much black humour does it take to defy the horror? “The Masturbator – The Adventures of Edgar Hilsenrath” delves into the radical world of the writer and Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath – one of the first who dared to face the trauma with grotesque wit and unrestrained laughter. In a mixture of animation and historical archive material, the film follows Hilsenrath’s alter ego from his novel “Fuck America”: a penniless, sex-obsessed writer in 1950s New York who is desperately trying to publish his memories of the ghetto under the title “The Masturbator”. Writing becomes an obsession, a provocation and an act of survival. Born in Leipzig in 1926, Hilsenrath’s path took him through Nazi Germany, Bukovina and a Transnistrian ghetto via Palestine and France to America and back to Europe. A journey through places of loss, hope and disappointment. A journey through a century in which the ghosts of fascism keep returning. Burlesque animations collide with raw, real-life images. This friction gives rise to the portrait of an artist whose books are international successes but who fell into obscurity in Germany. “The Masturbator” combines biography, memory and the present to create a film that is as unsettling as it is liberating, about the power of satire and the necessity to speak out against forgetting.

Ola Staszel

An institutional portrait in the form of an elegy: after more than sixty years, the fate of the Les Lilas maternity clinic already seems sealed. Having not worked in a profitable enough manner, this private institution is now to have the subsidies it relies on withdrawn. Alain Kassanda’s film accompanies the clinic’s last flicker of resistance, showing heated internal meetings and the public protests aimed at saving it. The interactions between the purple-uniformed staff and their patients come to the fore at the same time: offering caring guidance across the entire birth process, precisely explaining the specifics of an imminent abortion or advising a young couple confronted with an unplanned pregnancy. Everyday life in the Maternité des Lilas is both eventful and moving. And it can look back on a long tradition: deeply anchored in the second wave of the women’s movement, the clinic made history for its progressive approach. Everyone was supposed be able to give birth in the way they saw fit, the patriarchy was banished from the delivery room and operating theatre – “mon corps, mon choix”. This inconspicuous place retained this forward-looking approach to the last. Alain Kassanda’s lament is far from maudlin. It is the unsentimental depiction of a loss only justifiable on paper.

Carolin Weidner

The miracle of birth in close-up. Třeštíková’s first observational documentary marks the starting point of a long-term study that is to last 37 years and culminate in the film “Private Universe”. Her distinctive style is already evident in this intimate miniature – the portrait of a young woman preparing for motherhood emerges in just a few scenes. Třeštíková won the 1975 Golden Dove in Leipzig for “The Miracle”.

Lina Dinkla

Jimena is in her twenties, a young woman who goes by the nickname La Pichi and grew up on the edge of Buenos Aires close to the port, the other side of the invisible line that separates centre from periphery. These are not mere descriptions, but rather how she tells it herself – her garrulousness knows no bounds, which makes her the perfect storyteller. Like a Scheherazade porteña, La Pichi tells a new story each night and there are so many it’s easy to lose count. With their extravagant titles, her stories of relationships, family, body issues and class might seem like tall tales, but they are all plucked from her everyday reality, the same reality lived on the fringes that we see in velvety nocturnal images during and in between her voiceover monologues, which are narrated with an infectious enthusiasm and humour that belies their ambivalent undercurrents: the tale of the boyfriend who didn’t want to be seen with her, the tale of the transvestite-loving grandmother who cooked glorious food she wasn’t supposed to eat, the tale of the father with vitiligo who at one point was no longer there. Yet this is no narrative of hardship and suffering, but rather one of irrepressible, inspirational joy, for what can be more empowering than being given space to chronicle your own biography on your own terms? As La Pichi herself says, “I wasn’t one word, I was many.”

James Lattimer

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

A dark room is so much more than it first seems. With patience and curiosity, it will come to life. In between four walls is a Cuban household, filled with objects passed down over generations that hold memories of the hands that kept them. As one walks through the room and interacts with its objects, the space begins to come alive. Visitors will take their own time and make their own way through the quiet evidence of a lived-in space, uncovering hidden moments waiting to be found.

Over the course of the piece, a clock runs a day in fast forward, and the room shape-shifts from the 1980s to 1990s and onwards, slowly, steadily, almost unnoticed. Time moves differently here. It is a piece that lives in the in-between, in the narrow space that treads the line of physical and virtual and in the cracks that separate days, years and decades. And it is precisely this in-betweenness that cultivates portals and the possibility of walking through a door and into a past waiting to be touched.

Dana Melaver

How does the graphic gesture in animated film manifest itself, what specific eco-system are we talking about when we refer to line and movement? Aline Helmcke invites us to think about drawing for film and simultaneously celebrates the sensual act of drawing: whether with light or sand-like material or classic drawing tools, on paper or blank film, in associative scribbles or structuring lines. And so lines turn into insects, a whole flock of dots, a pattern of lines, an industrial landscape … only to dissolve back into lines once more. Fleetingly, imagery and meaning emerge from simple elements. The intuition of the drawing process and the planning exercise of drawn animation, the restlessly wondering human eye and the unrelenting camera eye freezing time, they all whir around each other in this intelligent and luscious cinematic essay.

André Eckardt

“Are we still in normal life or is this emergency life?” asks Tom, one of the protagonists. A flood separates a life in two – one before and one after. In this work we encounter people affected by the 2022 floods in eastern Australia, as they recall the moments in which everything changed. Described through miniature rooms, the piece recreates lost objects and spaces, rooms formed of memories. Beautifully and consciously crafted, the piece invokes a creative approach that radiates care, for participating collaborators, for audiences, and in the making process.

The project, centered on a virtual reality experience and including augmented reality components as well as workshops, was created in collaboration with people affected by the flooding. As the project continues to grow, it becomes a living archive of restoration, reviving lost objects. Like ducklings reappearing after a flood, life – albeit changed – does go on.

Dana Melaver

Minneapolis has become a battlefield: clouds of poisonous green billow over the wintry streets, there are wounded people, screams, vehicles that resemble tanks. Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller capture the work of the immigration authority ICE and its paramilitary operations from different perspectives and combine them into a horror film. Parts of the population organise themselves in order to stand up against and protocol the illegal actions of the perpetrators, most of them in masks. Gradually, a network of gigantic dimension is revealed, which extends to the kidnapping of minors, secret scouting trips and a steady stream of deportation flights. “They’re Here” is a genre-fluid documentary dystopia, whose darkness is only heightened by the score by Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails).

Carolin Weidner

In the beginning was the sea. In her poetic and quiet experimental film, Karolina Malwina Gruschka thinks about her relationship with water, interweaving biographical memories of learning how to swim and a primal sense of physical trust with reflections on climate change. The realisation that her own body, composed of 50 % water, has a lot to do with the water covering the globe, is reflected on the visual level, too: Gruschka converts found footage material and her own holiday pictures to a colour depth of 1 bit, which creates an exclusively black and white visual field where the private and documented nature are no longer distinguishable. The images ripple like water, gradually changing from distant blurs to concrete documentary observations of calving glaciers, thus achieving a meditative effect: if we all perish in the end, we will at least all be reunited in the water.

Marie Ketzscher