Sardinia, 1940. The harmless term “horsing around” takes on a very serious and ultimately tragic meaning for 14-year-old Michele and his 11-year-old friend Ventura. When they learn that the peasants have sold their best horses for serious money to the state and thus to the military for the approaching war, the two boys take a decision that is as naïve as it is intuitive: They free the herd in a daring nighttime operation. Their happiness is short-lived. Betrayed by a villager, they are caught on the way home and Ventura is shot dead. A senseless death? Or a sign of special bravery, as the ambiguous Sardinian film title suggests?
Director Giovanni Columbu, a Sardinian himself, has dedicated his late animation debut to his grandmother who once told him the story. He took the liberty of adapting it with brushstrokes on paper, his style drawing primarily on the charms of historical painting schools, animation techniques and cinema genres. Columbu’s associative visual language, marked by shades of black, white, and grey, is animated by impulsive hatchings, countless dots, and generous elisions. The soundtrack, too, sets rather sparse nuances – subtle illustrations that draw on Sardinian cultural traditions while opening a space for universal metaphors.

An oily liquid oozes across the frame. Wafting windows in the black mass draw the eye to the levels below. Everything is in motion. Hypnotic music enhances the viscosity of the soft body until we believe that we see a “Liquid Light Show” from the 1960s. But these are the dark revenants of psychedelic hippie visuals that put us into a black trance.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Tehran and other major cities seem far away from the place where Sara lives. But in her rural community in northwestern Iran, the protagonist of this film advocates the same feminist values in a practical, everyday way. Again and again, we are reminded by the images that her father once taught her to ride a motorbike – to the disapproval of the whole village. A small favour with big consequences: For Sara, it paved a way outside patriarchal marriage. Mobile on two wheels, she works as a midwife and has delivered many girls for whom she now wants to fight: At the start of the film and in middle age, Sara decides to be the first woman in the history of her community to run for the local council. A step which earns her enthusiastic support on the one hand; on the other, she must endure open hostilities and an interrogation by the moral enforcers of the Islamic Republic. In “Cutting Through Rocks”, Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni capture these power structures and their individual impact as precisely as the gestures of solidarity and self-determination.

A tinted nitrate fragment of the company film “A. Gutberlet & Co., Leipzig-Mölkau, Spezialfabrik für Falzmaschinen und Faden-Buchheftmaschinen, gegründet 1901“ (specialist in the manufacture of folding machines and thread book stitching machines, established 1901) was an exceptional find. It could be restored in its original colour tones by analogue methods in 2024 and then digitised. Combined with the dupe negative of another version, it now offers insights into the factory halls and the work on the machines.

When the woman in curlers opens the door, Papa is blown away: Like a breath of air, a storm or tornado, he is blown in and back out. Even in his own apartment he is ungraspable: He grows and shrinks, becomes fragile or threatening, knocks everything down. And then he literally flies away, hurling eggs at passers-by. Caught in all this is his daughter, who at first can only helplessly stand by and who finds it increasingly difficult to visit him – the steps grow higher, the floor turns into chewing gum. Finally, she looks up at the sky and sees him hover there.
What to do when one’s father suffers from mental illness? How to deal with it when the responsibility (of care) switches sides so early in life? Jelena Milunović explores this, using bold, very tender and not always obvious parables. She sets strong colour accents: The depressed episodes are in claustrophobic black and white, the ecstatic highs are colourful free-hand drawings. And the red balloon, which briefly appears in the beginning as a metaphorical vehicle of hope, might point the way to bringing the two of them back together.

Is it not unlimited freedom, the most radical form of self-realisation, to exist in every conceivable setting as a flying mythical creature, a sad mouse or a furry figure with an extended naked spine as a tail? In her film, Monika Masłoń moves through different spaces as an avatar, exploring the subject of touching and being touched on VR platforms. Anything our phantasy can imagine can be created from pixels here. The limits of existence can be extended infinitely by a click. But what about human – or avatarian – closeness? Can an emotional signal like shaking hands be simulated in this VR world, despite the complete absence of physical bodies? When I see my avatar being touched, can my body memory suggest that I feel this tactile event even though there is no other physical body?
Masłoń examines these questions with a delicate sense of humour and in exchanges with other avatars. But then we enter a VR space that feels more intimate: She has taken us on a personal date. How does the impossibility of physical touch in a long-distance relationship differ from that in VR? Can a VR date create more physical presence and still the longing for the beloved person better than other forms of communication?

A cyborg of a film, the work is a living interaction of computer graphics and nature. Shaped in real time by weather patterns, the film’s rhythm and sequencing is tied with planetary data from over forty locations around the world. In the spirit of geomantic practice, this truly magical experience is about listening and reacting to Earth’s stories.

In the 1970s, the free spirits of the Clara Mosch artist group from Karl-Marx-Stadt declared the GDR a happening zone. A poetic film portrait about the power of art.

The work of Berlin-based filmmaker and artist Jack Wolf is based primarily on investigative research into conflict and environmental issues as well as migration. He also operates in political and social epicentres using state-of-the-art technology and innovative hardware. In this short film he ties all these strands together succinctly and precisely. “I Don’t Think I’m Alone in This” was shot with a time-of-flight camera, which is used in 3D technology and designed to give machines, in the broadest sense, human perception. So visually everything is about data flow, numbers, and transformation. In terms of content, the fate of a young man who fled from Damascus to Beirut as a child ten years ago becomes palpable.
Speaking from the offscreen of a cramped room that is both safe haven and cage, Amjad Bahloul talks about the past. About how wonderful it was to meet all the people in the street, play football, interact with the real world, a blessing. A blessing in the cursed loneliness of a foreign country, as it turned out for Amjad, were Facebook, YouTube, and the like – his only means of social contact. “This lightens the burden,” he says. And now they could help him and other refugees find their way home, because the Syrian regime has fallen. He learned about it from a post …

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.

In 1929, the German Book Traders’ Association declared 22 March, the anniversary of Goethe’s death, the “Day of the Book”. To boost general awareness of the date, the politically versatile educational filmmaker Hans Cürlis was commissioned to produce this silent signature spot. Through cross-fades, the imagined worlds of a variety of readers – young or old, workers or intellectuals – merge with the stylised realities of their lives.

The Gebrüder Brehmer company produced wire stitching and folding machines and was one of the largest of its kind in Germany with up to 1,000 employees. Even in the early days of the medium, the company used film to promote its goods and cultivate its reputation. This image film presents the factory in Plagwitz and special folding machines, for example the “¾-Automatic Sheet Feeder”.

Karla is a dreamer, Karla is charismatic, and Karla is trans. She grows up with her parents in the small Mexican town of Tepoztlán. She loves to wear make-up and dress up. But sometimes, when the world is too much for her, she hides in her room for hours. Fortunately, Karla has friends and a family who support, often understand and sometimes challenge her.
Trans filmmaker Kani Lapuerta followed the daily life and transition of his protagonist over a period of eight years. The result is a colourful, playful and political coming-of-age story told from a trans perspective. Together, Karla and Kani create a cinematic space where their fantasy is as important as their identity – and where both flow into each other. The title of the film refers to a possible gender-neutral form of the Spanish term “niños” that also includes non-binary, trans and gender-fluid children. “Niñxs” is a touching, encouraging film about childhood, creativity and self-empowerment – and a compelling plea for a world in which everyone is simply allowed to be themselves.

Like many artists of his time, Walter Ruttmann discovered film as a medium of experimentation with revolutionary forms of expression. He gave up easel painting in 1918 and acquired the first German patent for an animation stand in 1920, thus creating the technical prerequisites for his “Opus” series: abstract elements of painterly gestures and cardboard moved by stop-motion.

This film grows somewhere between “forever” and “no longer”, between infinity and constraint, between absoluteness and concreteness. Everything is set in a square format, the original or pixel shape. But this square seems to be like a mirror facing another mirror, a self-referential optical illusion of infinity – with more than a grain of salt. We experience the humorous negotiation of an eternal issue of dispute among visual artists: Can a mathematically calculated vector line, scalable ad infinitum, inspire the same feelings in the beholder as a finite, imperfectly drawn line of pixels? Is the former not the visual equivalent of the neo-liberal illusion of infinite growth – shiny, but sickening? Could the mysterious pixelated moth resolve this eternal dispute? It guards the “Vectorial Superlooper” to ensure that this marvellous invention does not fall into the wrong hands.
Jon Frickey spans an arc from our absurd, finite existence to the technological inventions that shape our sense of style, our taste, and thus our life. His film is a tongue-in-cheek declaration of love to the technology and aesthetics of the past 60 years: to pixel art, video games, television series, vector monitors – and, of course, to pixels and vectors themselves.

The figure 21 in the title of Hans Richter’s film is not necessarily indicative of the date of origin of this milestone in abstract moving images, which has been lost in the mists of history. The fact that “Rhythmus 21” was screened at the matinee “The Absolute Film” in Berlin in 1925, however, is documented. Rectangles move through space on fixed paths, growing and shrinking to create an illusion of depth.