In 1973, General Pinochet, with the support of the US secret service, staged a coup against the democratically elected Marxist-Socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende. Pinochet’s military junta murdered and tortured their way across the country. Juan Forch, Santiago-born journalist and filmmaker, managed to escape the terror via Mexico to the GDR and continued his opposition work from here until his return in 1979: as a director at the DEFA Studio for Animation Film in Dresden. With silhouette film specialist Jörg Herrmann he realised this animated agitation miniature, in which the dictator and his allies dance to the caustic artist’s tune – and to organ music.

In September 1992, four tower blocks in the town of Mantes-la-Jolie, not far from Paris, were demolished. They were part of the Val Fourré district, which was celebrated as a flagship social housing project in the 1960s, as archive footage reminds us at the beginning of the film. But filmmaker Dominique Cabrera, who grew up in a similar housing project herself, is not concerned with urban planning or architectural failures. Instead, she is interested in the residents’ memories: remembrances of the poor and the wealthy living together, of insidious but persistent decline, but above all of the beautiful things that make up a life, the variety, the emotions, the personal happiness.

Jessica Sarah Rinland visits zoological gardens across Argentina to craft a portrait not of a single institution, but rather its underlying concept: an observational, yet still ever-probing exploration of zoo itself. The different types of image and their textures she collects to this end—the silky 16mm that comprises the bulk of the film, the crisp surveillance footage, the grainy black-and-white cameras that capture creatures roving “undisturbed”, the yellowing photographs that pin down Indigenous people and animals alike – perfectly correspond to the varying perspectives she gathers on her subject: a place of imprisonment and colonial legacy, but now also one of everyday routine, conservation and even tenderness.
For all the ambivalence of its central theme, this is, like all of Rinland’s work, a film of extraordinary tactility: Human hands that clean, catalogue and caress, leathery trunks and furry fingers that reach between iron bars in search of comfort, plumage glistening in the sun. Jean Piaget coined the term collective monologue to refer to the developmental phase in which the child believes nature is created for them alone and can be controlled as such. It is so strangely moving to see control give way to care.

How brutal is it when your own language casts you out of your home because it has been turned into the language of crimes against other people? In her autobiographical animation, Irina Rubina analyses why Russian can no longer be the language of security for her and why German – historically riddled with guilt and therefore insecure – does not offer a new home yet. The stark factuality of the director as narrator is enormously unsettling because it describes the irreversibility of this emotional state precisely.
On the visual level, dark spots eat into idealised images of home, until the planes become deadlocked in abstraction. The pictures were created on a so-called pinscreen. Reliefs can be “painted” and animated by the pins’ shadows on this screen on which around 200,000 pins are arranged in lines. The alternation of light and shadow and their immediate proximity lend drastic expression to the inner turmoil and ambivalence.

Summer, dust, a burning sun. It is stock car race season, a loud, aggressive show that leaves only smashed carcasses of cars in the end. After each lap, the dents are worked over with heavy hammer blows before the damaged racing cars are sent back on the smoky track. The audience are standing at the edge of the sand pit and can’t get enough of the pile-ups.
From off screen, the director gives a matter-of-fact account of the violent relationship in which she got caught up at the age of 18 and from which she only managed to free herself two years later. She analyses precisely what happened to her back then, using the dented, destroyed vehicles as a powerful metaphor for her injured body. The interplay of images and words is spot-on – like precisely placed knife stabs.

Poland, 1981. Six friends squeeze into an old car that is far too small and set out for the Polish Baltic coast, fuelled by their longing for freedom. The further they come, the clearer the decrepit state of their country emerges. The pension where they spend the night has nothing that could be served for breakfast. Food and fuel are also in short supply elsewhere. There is a shortage of everything. The only thing one can buy anytime and anywhere is booze, which is plentiful. Just like the country, the car also falls apart piece by piece. But the trip continues, past demonstrating crowds, tanks, barricades and armed policemen.
Singing, laughing and carefree, Leszek and his companions finally make it to the sea. Is this the end of their journey? Or should they join the hundreds of thousands who have already left Poland? The borders of the frame, at least, are open. The sparse, fragmented graphic elements on the empty white background hardly seem an incentive to stay. There is no obstacle that could keep the friends from setting off for new shores.