Cristobal, a young fisherman at work outside the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, shares his insights: Fishing is harder than working out. Also, he and the sea are connected by a progressing disease. At night he perceives what can only be grasped from the boat: the chemicals flowing into the water, the smell, the red lights of the steel mill. “Men of Salt” tells of a dilemma: What if you identify with an ecosystem that’s ceaselessly being abused?

“Beware of everything, especially men”, Zelma was told as a rule of thumb for a successful life as a woman. But when you meet the greatest love of all, and it happens to Zelma several times, biochemistry takes over and all advice is forgotten. In an animated musical, Signe Baumane’s protagonist dances her way through promising romantic beginnings, disappointed hopes and failing marriages – only to find out that she had better make the rules herself.

How much does this Zelma have in common with her inventor? Did Signe Baumane, too, meet a Sergey once and was so overwhelmed by noradrenaline, serotonin and dopamine that she simply failed to hear his condescending tone? In any case, the native Latvian and New Yorker by choice is known for using taboos and questionable notions of desirable and permitted, therefore “proper” femininity as a source of friction for her stories. For a long time, she remained faithful to the short form, until she presented her first feature-length animation in 2014 with “Rocks in My Pockets” – also at DOK Leipzig. She follows it up with “My Love Affair with Marriage” – not just in terms of length, but also in terms of the ironic, entertaining and yet serious exploration of the roles that biology and unexamined retold myths assign to women.