The term “Horror Vacui”, or the fear of empty space, is used as a metaphor of the fear of the uncertain future that causes feelings of anxiety and loneliness.
The term “Horror Vacui”, or the fear of empty space, is used as a metaphor for the fear of the uncertain future that causes feelings of anxiety and loneliness. With its one-take sequences and free-associative editing style this meditative film sends out a warning of the growing hyper-militarisation of the world we live in, and what it causes to the human psyche. Due to the space and time of the events taking place in the film being blurred, it can all happen everywhere at any time in this globalised world.
Animals coming from Eastern Europe for the Italian meat industry used to be transported to the towns in Northeast Italy, and only one animal managed to come in and out alive.
Animals coming from Eastern Europe for the Italian food/meat industry used to be transported to the towns along the state border in Northeast Italy. In those conveyor-belt spaces of death, only one animal managed to come in and out alive.
An unpleasant examination by a meticulous doctor leads to a supposedly inevitable medical intervention that leaves the young patient scarred in body and soul.
She knew this day would come and the choice she'd have to make. But as it finally comes, Maya cannot wrap her head around it. A mole – it's so small, so insignificant, just a mark... How can it be so hard to part from it? Can Maya ever feel whole again when a bit of her is taken away?
The breasts are in place, the feathers are smoothed, off to the date! Her daughter does not comprehend the ritual of desire yet … Erotically crude, with pointed beaks in the conflicts.
Leipzig, 1989. A young punk, detained in a mental hospital, longs to be close to her boyfriend. A doomed love story in the midst of the collapse of the GDR.
Leipzig, 1989. Margarethe, a young punk opposed to the East German regime, is detained in a psychiatric hospital. She dreams of breaking out to join the man she loves – a punk musician named Heinrich. Though the regime's days may well be numbered, the Stasi informants are more present than ever.
People wonder about the disappearance of the moon. Meanwhile, a bull escapes from his herd and takes a poetic trip through the night – with a surprising finale.
A bull flees from his herd. The moon goes missing from the sky. The bull runs across this new moonless world, looking for its limit. Instead, he finds different people and their many endeavours, and in them, discovers their limitlessness. He learns of his own penchant for poetry and finds a way to transform his quest.
A property of chaos is the emergence of pattern. Independent of scale. Paradeigma is the sample of the pattern. We witness a grounded figure which, due to the fear of free fall and discomfort from the rain, closed itself in an enchanted square and can no longer leave. Protagonist manifestation is a repeating sample of a self-similar pattern.
…“ - Well, Adeimantus, has our state now grown to its full size? - Perhaps. - Then, where in it shall we find justice or injustice? If they have come in with one of the elements we have been considering, can you say which one? - I have no idea, Socrates; unless it be somewhere in people's dealings with one another.”
A consensual union becomes a brutal assimilation that ends in death and a new beginning. Powerfully moving colours and fascinating sounds transport irritating emotions.
In this film, two individuals with strong personalities are ultimately driven to ruin by selfish possessiveness. But in the end, their death, and their rebirth after corruption is just a part of this continuum called natural life, no matter whether their behaviours should be morally criticised or introspected by us.
A religious statue comes alive and unites with a boneless girl. They leave the village together with many other figures that have stepped down from the altars.
One day, all the statues in the area come to life. They leave the roadside shrines and pedestals and calmly set off straight ahead, all in the same direction. They do not even stop for a moment. People watch the phenomenon with growing anxiety. None of them knows where they are going and why. Only a little girl with a boneless body marvels at the procession of the unusual figures with pure fascination. They walk without muscles, although they should not be able to walk. How strange!
In Jirkuff's animation, based on a story by Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016), the parts of a house develop a life of their own. Along with the handrail and the wallpaper, even the white drawing surfaces are affected: Jirkuff's charcoal strokes and the coal dust from Aichinger's text colour them grey (after all, coal is stored in the cellar where the narrating voice ultimately ends up). Here, as previously in Vermessung der Distanz (2019), Susi Jirkuff's interest is not only in the spatiality of the building but also in the (non-) behaviour of fellow humans. No one asks: “Didn't you live next door to us just yesterday?”
The story appeared in 1955 in Stillere Heimat, the literary yearbook of the city of Linz. Aichinger had survived the era of national socialist terror in an apartment near the Vienna Gestapo headquarters. The yearned end of the war did not promise liberation – the same people were sitting in the offices; they talked the same and acted the same. The housing office told the severely depleted family whose close family members had been murdered, a sister and an aunt able to flee to England: “Sleep in hammocks.” Who really cared about such matters back then? And who's really concerned about the living situation of endangered people nowadays? (Andreas Dittrich)
An empty paper depicts a struggle between artistic composition and decomposition as the voice of the narrator-protagonist reminisces about her tumultuous relationship with a former girlfriend.
A Polish fishing village in deceptive winter silence … This expressively designed everyday mosaic of a village community talks of Anka, Jesus, warmth of heart and coldness of feeling.
It grows slowly as an icicle, but one day, it drops and crashes. Anka loves cats. And Jesus. In a winter silence, the lagoon freezes and the unspoken resurfaces like a crack in the ice. A mosaic portrait of a small fisherman's village where human to human, human to animal, animal to animal interdepend on a delicate balance of warm tender care and cold emotional cruelty. An eerie story of loneliness and community narrated with magical realism.
In 2043, humanity launches the spaceship Zoopticon to send a greeting to distant galaxies. An extraterrestrial opera with cheering colours and radiant pop charm in the darkness of space.
Imagine you are the only being in the Universe floating through outer space, all on your own. This is the predicament of the Zoopticon, a spaceship with a face, filled with artefacts of life and culture from Earth. It's also the perspective of five mutated singing animals who don't know of each other's existence – and that they are all on the Zoopticon, just rooms apart. When they finally encounter each other, they realise they are all living souvenirs from a mysterious planet called Earth that have been shot into space as part of a theme park for an interstellar audience. They decide to emancipate themselves.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.