Driven by the barking of the voracious rented apartment, an aged ballet dancer makes his way through a permanently rain-drenched wasteland to his monotonous job. The protagonist makes graceful movements to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and seems briefly fulfilled. But the audience? Pearls before cows! Priit Tender’s caustic, surreal stop motion animation is a free association inspired by a poem by Andres Ehin about a grueling, gluttonous daily routine that’s gone to the dogs.

The stag in the bedroom painting vigorously stomps on the grass and the father wakes up. His wife and baby are still asleep. In worn-out boxer shorts that reveal one lost-looking testicle, he begins his daily battle with the electric metre which only closes its snapping jaws when it is fed enough banknotes. Mykyta Lyskov’s film is a scathing, incredibly funny and deeply sad portrait of the precarious pre-2022 life of a Ukrainian family. He uses anthropomorphic and surrealist exaggeration to bring home their poverty, and countless cultural references to raise questions of belonging and national pride.
In Lyskov’s film, everything stays bleak, as if 1990 was not so long ago: endless canyons of prefabricated buildings, garbage, lack of perspective. No wonder then that the father guards his passport like a veritable treasure and flutters away as a small yellow-blue bird to work in Western Europe. He leaves behind his wife, who ingeniously keeps the greedy electric metre at bay, while the son grows up to become a hooligan. It is absolutely outrageous that this family, sort of re-united around the kitchen table in this hopeless hodgepodge, is forced to watch as a bomb coming out of nowhere demolishes the building opposite. It is fantastic that Lyskov captures this for us with so much exuberant rage.

A tired sun creeps across the horizon for the last time. A cold wind is already blowing over the lake. The migrant birds depart for warmer climes and leave the Nordic natural paradise. Heavy snow showers cover the land with a white coat. The animals condemned to stay – fragile creatures of delicate porcelain – cling to branches, looking for shelter. None of them will escape the frosty grip of the spreading winter. They are observed by a tiny girl, also made of wafer-thin, translucent white ceramics, who is the only one left in the freezing landscape in the end.
Anu-Laura Tuttelberg’s symbolic story is touchingly beautiful and at the same time full of inspiring irritations, because she makes her art run up against the reality of nature. She did not animate her puppets in a warm studio but exposed them to the elements, on location in northern Estonia and an island in the Norwegian Sea. In her film, cruel forces, disturbing fragility and the renewing force of the cold meet – ambivalently and elegantly.

Into a starry sky full of coloured spots! The propellers have been revved up. Accompanied by the drone and roar of the engine, the aircraft takes off. Its mission, to be followed live: compare images, sort out, superimpose, create a visual reality of dots and pixels. A park is requested, but with how many trees? A racy car is dreamt of, but which design is sleek enough? The variables dictated by the pilot determine what appears on the monitor – sculptures of possibilities or morphed set pieces. The tank is filled with millions of continuously flowing images for an infinite number of combinations. But who controls the projected flight path?
Aurelijus Čiupas’s short film essay is a well-considered and not unironic investigation of ethical and philosophical questions. What can and should animation generated by artificial intelligence based on diffusion models do? Pilot Čiupas prescribes “a kind of artificial dementia” to the machine. We can truly watch it come to rest, come to transcendence. The world of images dissolves back into a cosmos of coloured spots.

The day is dwindling, and the world is exhausted. The hour of the great sandman has come. He enchants his clients with grains of slumber while busy helpers fluff up pillows so that everyone who is sleepy may lie softly. At some point, almost everybody is likely to sense that there are more things between night and day than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

In the passing busses and trams, people look out of the windows in disbelief. The reverse shot shows a crowd of protesters. Two dozen people perhaps, some holding signs, one shouting “Putin behind bars!” It is a symbolic image of the pathetic state of the Russian opposition. The year is 2017, the war of aggression against Ukraine is still to come. Over a period of several years, “The Last Relic” portrays people from different opposition groups: a student from the Marxist-Leninist “Left Block,” a teacher with sympathies for Navalny; a digger driver demands the redistribution of resources. These activists lack support, but not courage. One of them has just been released from prison and survived a hunger strike. The others must expect to be prosecuted at any moment.

The setting of this film is the Ural metropolis of Yekaterinburg. The bulk of the population, an insert announces, dreams of a “return to imperial glory.” Estonian director Marianna Kaat, born in 1965, has spent a considerable part of her life in the Soviet empire. She shows the majority society as a uniform crowd at military parades, contrasting it with the individuals of the opposition. Few films offer such insights into the latter’s continuing precarious situation.

Once upon a time there was a young Moroccan man who had a dream, a big dream. And he wanted it to come true, so he thought, somewhere beyond the great sea, perhaps in Estonia. Meanwhile, beyond the sea, perhaps in Estonia, a decadent wedding was being celebrated at the Villa Antropoff. The guests look like Mafia and money-laundering.