Who is the clever mind behind “AIVA”, the absolutely incredible AI novelty that everyone talks about and wants to have? An avatar with a female voice, unfolding in two dimensions like a pattern, praises their successful multi-million-pound project. Answers are not provided, just another ghastly feedback loop of artificiality.

We have probably all thought about the influence of digital logic and algorithms on our perception of the world at some point. This equally humorous and profound short film takes the interactive online tour service “Google Street View” as a starting point for an investigation of where the reality mapped by fifteen automatic cameras and the one perceived by human senses drift apart – and what the consequences are.
The “Accidental Animals” that happened to come across the lenses of Google cars defy the claim that every area, however remote, is reproduced as realistically as possible. Instead, their appearance in the frame produces unintentionally funny situations. Like glitches in the matrix, they remind us that we are watching only a patchy series of snapshots. Before we “drop” into a random place on the map, before we arrive to look around, the animals are already there. The fact that Google’s technology blurs many of those bird, dog and pig faces – like ours – to protect personality rights furnishes the directors with the perfect excuse for a provocative question: How is it that in this respect the algorithm acts more ethically than the humans who programmed it?

The truth is hidden behind blurs, but the allure of secrecy fades as the clarity increases. A woman in love ventures out of her cocoon to go out into the mundane world of “dead language.” Accompanied by a restless musical motif by Marian Mentrup, “Achill” boldly balances on the thin line between two universes – with raw, intimate drawings, shimmering stones and overpainted video sequences.

Maya Steinberg is a secular Israeli. Her father, however, had a late religious awakening. He will not appear in her film. Instead, the young director approaches his faith and her lack of understanding for it through a visit to the gravesite of rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in Galilee, where she spends a few weeks, observing believers, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, and wondering: Is there a place here for women? And can there be a place for queer women?

Every day the shoes from the shoe rack have new adventures. Today, the rubber boots Buddel and Torf tell the other shoes about their experience on a rainy day with a huge dark puddle in the playground, and what trick the unicorn rubber boots Chunk and Tuva used to take away their fear of getting thoroughly dirty … Episode three of the popular KiKA series.

A day at the zoo, the orangutan sits in his cage and dreams of his life in the jungle when a girl comes by and brightens his dull afternoon. Her father doesn’t notice anything because he is on his mobile and laptop all the time to do important business. So important that the orangutan has to intervene, and a chain of event changes everything.

AIVA is an artist, animated by algorithms. But above all she is the soberingly limited male tech vision of what more diversity in the arts could look like. In her paintings AIVA prefers the vertical, to some acclaim. A naive and cliché-ridden “art documentary” lets us participate in her work. Precisely observed, with sparse gestures and trenchant wit, Veneta Androva reflects a current status quo in her computer-animated future fiction.

AIVA is an artist animated by algorithms. But first and foremost, she is the tech vision of male IT commitment to more diversity in the arts. Which is why AIVA prefers the “portrait” format in her paintings. An “art documentary” lets us share her creative process and fulfils every stereotype at hand. With unerring wit, Veneta Androva mirrors actual conditions in her computer animated science fiction.

Where the sandy beach of the Salton Sea, the biggest lake in California, begins to crunch harder, it does not even consist of sand any more: Millions of dead fish, plants and insects pile up on the shore to form a highly toxic substance. This is how Derek explains it, a member of a Cahuilla tribe that managed to escape an attempted genocide in the 19th century to the Salton Sea and now sees itself as a protective force for the once flourishing but increasingly deserted area and its outcasts.
Derek is one of the many locals whose trails Lukas Marxt and Vanja Smiljanić calmly follow, gliding with them through the desolate landscapes. In the process, they pick up slivers of nuclear history time and again: During the Second World War, the area was a test site for the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The experiments continued through the Cold War; the armed forces are still training here. The film finds its starting point and end two states away: The nuclear devices were sent on their way from Wendover, Utah. The local Airfield Museum pays tribute to their development. Once, the camera performs an almost weightless dance around a model of the Hiroshima bomb “Little Boy” on display there, to the sounds of the indestructible World War classic “We’ll Meet Again.”

In rural Ethiopia the staff of a health centre are fighting maternal mortality. They tirelessly appeal to women to give birth in the clinic. But reservations are strong, and so are the practical obstacles. How are heavily pregnant women supposed to arrive in time when the ambulance comes hours later or not at all? Against medical advice, Hulu Ager decides to give birth at home, assisted by a traditional midwife.

With palpable familiarity, the film crew captures moments of intimate communion between Hulu Ager, the midwives and other women. On the margins of the central conflict, the many challenges they face in a patriarchal society emerge. The debates are most lively under the hood dryer at the hairdresser’s: She doesn’t enjoy sex because of her circumcision, the medical professional Welela reports. “Sometimes you have to prepare yourself for sex,” another customer advises. Sometimes it helps to get drunk. But the perky hairdresser is sure: Bad sex is grounds for divorce. The women share their desires and woes with each other, experience solidarity and gather courage for small and great acts of departure and resistance. Men are relegated to the role of extras, if at all.

Theo Montoya draws on casting outtakes, melancholy observations of daily life and decadent party impressions from his friends to create a morbid and yet tender portrait of a young, queer generation in Colombia. In a country marked by violence and repression they can hardly imagine their future, but maintain a close, almost loving relationship with death.

This was meant to be a fiction film: a ghost story in which the dead no longer find cemetery space and consequently coexist with the living, including having sexual relationships – which the state rigorously forbids and persecutes. A clandestine nocturnal subculture emerges where erotic desires for which daylight means annihilation can be acted out. A week after Montoya found his leading actor for the project, the latter died of a heroin overdose. More deaths among his friends follow. They are the ghosts haunting the film that was ultimately made. It retains its dystopian character, but the dangers it portrays are quite real: For these young people, they are part of everyday life in Medellín, which is still deep in the shadow of Pablo Escobar and where the search for pleasure and human warmth takes one through labyrinthine abysses.

Partly rhetorical, partly ironic and partly profound, the film deals with the Germans’ strange, three-hundred-year-old relationship to their stereotypical ideas of America’s native population. This includes the question of how the audience themselves feel about this ominous object of fascination. The backdrop and starting point of a floating journey through the history of various stereotypes are the ruins of the former U.S. embassy in East Berlin, where an exhibition on the subject took place in 1986.

Art is often in the unseen, and in this AR project art is in the motion. Motion is what brings together the changing characters, drawn by exhibition visitors and updated daily. By bringing anyone and everyone’s artwork to the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, this piece challenges the notion of authorship in the art space. Come draw!

Classical music is great, says ten-year-old Arshan. He lives with his family on a ranch in California, helps to feed the cows and does household chores. But he uses every spare minute to train his voice. Arshan’s big dream is to become an opera singer. When performers for an opera production are sought in town, he anxiously goes to the casting.

This detailed and sober look at the issue of nuclear power begins where Germany is currently standing: with shutting it off. It’s precisely because the film is anything but alarmist that the alarming aspect of the situation becomes clear. The nuclear nightmare is not over; a safe final nuclear waste repository is not in sight. And yet, boosted by the coal phase-out, many people seem to see “clean” nuclear energy as an option again. The terror of climate change trumps the terror of the nuclear worst case scenario. A zero sum game.

Carsten Rau succeeds masterfully in calmly probing the heated controversy. He talks to people who live with and off nuclear power. Engineer, scientist or innkeeper, he very deliberately frames them all with the same mixture of seriousness and nonchalance. The story is told without dramatisation, but with stunningly “beautiful” images that make the fascination with this technology quite comprehensible. When hip French nuclear engineers finally try to join the front line of climate protesters, we realise how false the talk of an “unavoidable option” is and always has been. The portrait of a society emerges that walked into a blind alley with open eyes and is slowly coming to realise that with every step it takes it is moving further away from the exit.

Anyone interned in the Nazi Jewish transit and collection camp Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands faced death: The trains left to Auschwitz from here, to Sobibór. In 1944, the camp commander ordered the prisoner and cameraman Rudolf Breslauer, who was murdered shortly afterwards, to film the camp, presumably as visual evidence of his own “work performance”. Harun Farocki, West German doyen of essayistic image criticism, used the surviving silent material to compose an equally silent sequence analysis commented only in title cards. It is surgery on the hidden narrative, not open heart surgery.