Three children and their families have fled from crisis areas and found a new home in Germany. What are their wishes for the future, their dreams? The conversations with the three were turned into animated children’s drawings. We see a schoolkid’s life from their perspective.
Sheila died of hay dust in the lungs, and the family-owned farm somehow died along with the horse. After it was sold, the narrator visits it digitally on 3D online maps. But even the most detailed view reveals nothing about the grave of the three-legged farm cat. Using animation and image processing, he reclaims the remembered place of his childhood and youth.
Just hold your breath. Perhaps this helps as much against the pain of parting as the stinging nettles of one’s childhood. Sheila died of hay dust in her lungs and it seems as if the family farm died with the horse, too. After its sale, the laconic narrator pays digital visits via 3D online maps. But even the most detailed view says nothing about the grave of the three-legged farm cat. Using animation and image manipulation, he reclaims the remembered place.
At home in the uncanny: Startled, a woman turns on the light, hesitates, listens and goes to the door, full of dark forebodings … In this montage of similar scenes from Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, the various actresses merge into a meta-protagonist who experiences the same horror over and over again: She is trapped in her home and in her classic movie role.
Rose and Rolf in the still-young FRG. He, 13 years her senior, was in the Second World War. She, who wants to have many children, accepts his proposal and leaves school. Rose watches Super 8 home movies from the fifties, sixties and seventies with her granddaughter Annika Mayer, the director of “Home Sweet Home”: her two boys in short leather pants, a home with a manicured front garden, dad coming home from work, mom cooking soup with sausage links. Rose does not recognise herself in these ideal images of the German economic miracle. This pretty young woman is a stranger to her.
Annika begins to ask questions. Together with her grandmother, she starts to look for traces of domestic violence in the latter’s marriage, which is invisible in the films. But Rose’s open narratives gradually make her experiences tangible. What biographical abysses may lurk behind Rolf’s proud smile? Judiciously deployed slow motion effects dissect the apparent domestic happiness. Atonal and hyperrealistic sounds lie under the distorted soundtrack. The birds sing all too happily, the idyll suddenly seems deceptive.
Everyone in Leipzig is familiar with the Hotel Astoria, which has stood vacant since 1996. This film takes a look back to the time when the hotel was the hotspot of the trade fair city, where professionals, politicians and guests from all over the world were entertained with the greatest possible GDR pomp. But the Stasi also came and went in the hotel. The story of an exciting chapter in the city’s history is told with archive material, staff reports, and the distinctive animations by Falk Schuster.
The term hysteresis soberly describes a processual behaviour where the previous history affects the result as much as new changes. Robert Seidel enters analogue drawings, performance footage of the queer dancer Tsuki and pluck sounds and drones by Oval into a feedback system that reorganises time and movement in a multicoloured and sensual organic tableau.
Ayala Shoshana Guy tries to grasp the ephemeral: She interweaves her grandfather Jancsi’s story, remembered only in fragments, who left Vienna with his brother Bandi to escape the Nazi regime, with her own inner images, thus questioning them in a way. A ship to Palestine turns into an all-inclusive cruise liner, the vague becomes concrete only to fade away again. Cautious and bold in equal measure, the granddaughter enters shadowy terrain.
Lamine recently moved from Germany to Senegal with his family. His parents have bought some land and are now starting a farm. There’s always a lot to do and Lamine helps out after school. The fish have to be fed and the plants in the garden watered. But the afternoons are too hot to work, so it’s off to the beach with his new friend.
“Grrr, I’m a tiger!” Vanja and his big sister turn the flat into a jungle. Then Thea gets a visitor. Three can also play hide-and-seek, suggests Vanja. He runs into the courtyard, where there are dark corners, creepy shadows and strange noises. To overcome his fear, he turns himself into the dangerous tiger again – and discovers that even the big ones are scared sometimes.
A woman’s voice shouts and whispers her wishes, depending on how she feels and what she wants. Her cartoonishly reduced and exaggerated body dances compromise out of the world. Straight, zig-zag or in sweeping curves, on we go through the hustle and bustle of life. Anne Isensee formulates an enthusiastic wake-up call for self-determination and lust for life.
When the artist duo Karnapke and Johnson are separated by Covid-19 in the middle of a project, the result is a correspondence about the constant change we live in. The VR experience based on this is a walk-in meditation: about reality, about normality and about the signs that distinguish the rule from the exception, visualized in a space made of countless particles.
Once again Kurt Tetzlaff portrays Alexander, who in 1990 works as a nurse and is active in the “Action Reconciliation”. The sense of departure of the autumn of 1989 slowly gives way to disappointments about the outcome of the People’s Chamber elections in 1990, the currency reform and the Unification Treaty. The political and social changes took place at a rapid pace that many found hard to follow. The sense of community that carried people through 1989 is fading. “Now it’s every man for himself”, Alexander states. He has no use for capitalism: “I feel just as lied to and cheated as before.” Resignation spreads.
During a ramble through the forest we see video colour fringes break through the shadows of the canopy. Rolls of thunder and birdsong spread as a deep red pixel moss carpet. Ambient sounds creep up from the distance to filter the visual world. Hallucinogenic data errors drag like scrapers across a discarded layer of paint. The forest becomes a cathedral for the eyes and ears.
What does it mean to make an animated film accessible to people with impaired vision? Can audio description convey what’s happening on the screen and what is, especially in animated film, often entirely a product of the imagination? Anne Isensee (Golden Dove for “Megatrick” in 2017) tackles these complex questions with a light touch, humour and verbal wit. She pulls off the feat of producing a concentrated cinematic investigation into the multi-layered quality of (all) perception.
A city crossing: Many things happen, one after the other, at the same time and sometimes inexplicable. Even in animated images reduced almost to symbols there is a lot to discover at this place. A speaker describes what is happening in words for people with visual impairments, but she increasingly questions the meaningfulness and translatability of what she sees.
