Flocks of starlings are circling above the retirement home. These impressive natural spectacles are called murmurations because from a distance they sound like collective murmuring. Not everyone hears or sees them, but the old man notices. Sometimes the starlings send a single twittering messenger to his window. Often, the birds are more present to him than his fellow humans, more present than the old demented fellow resident who regularly waters a still life of flowers, more present than his neighbours in the amateur choir. And then it happens: The old man finds a first feather in his hair, then a second, then several. Soon he grows a beak so that instead of singing he can only caw.
The last phase of life we witness here is lovingly animated: The puppet animation was created with gauze bandages, a beautiful approach to the vulnerability that comes with aging. The farewell to life shown here is devoid of pathos, not even that over-produced grief we know from many narratives of dying. Even the retirement home is a completely mundane place, neutrally portrayed. Instead, we follow this feathered farewell as a quiet but growing alienation from the world, a no-longer-belonging. And one day we will all grow the wings that go with it.

“There was a body that didn’t want to be human. It didn’t know it belonged to someone. To me.” María Cristina Pérez González opens her film with these poetic and cryptic words, diving deep into the visually powerful, hand-painted animation. Associative rather than narrative, the sad voice pulls us into a maelstrom of remembered fragments that all revolve around the protagonist’s body: A voluminous shape that sometimes eats itself with loathing, stretches until it fills the frame or cowers like a pea – in the blackness of the fluid, generous brushstrokes, but above all in its own fleshy self.
There is the estranged sister who once called the feet of this body ugly. The good friend who disappeared without a farewell. The father who once said that all unhappy women grow fat. And most of all there is this nameless figure that lives in her belly and feeds her depression with a cute grin. As so often in life, the only path to contentment is reconciliation. With the sister, of course, but above all with her own body which does not fit into narrow social norms – but is the only one she has. And with which she can dance, jump, and even laugh quite splendidly once she understands that it is not a monster to be fought.

There is no return to paradise. There is a rupture between now and then, the realisation that this place no longer exists. Our protagonist, too, must learn this when she lifts the green of the map beneath her like a blanket to crawl under it with a tomato in her hand – back to Sarajevo, to Yugoslavia. Initially, the strangeness of the return flight with its obligatory tomato juice is as nostalgically exciting as the smiley stickers that are everywhere. But by the time she reaches her parents’ home, the past catches up with her completely: In the corridor of the deserted flat, bullet holes cast cones of light on old family photos and when she opens the fridge, the sight of a single tomato suddenly triggers memories of bombs and explosions.
Matea Radic finds haunting and original images to visualise her own traumatic experience of the Bosnian War and its confusing entanglement with her haptic and sensual childhood memories – complete with Dadaistic advertisements for Šipad furniture and Bosnian melodies. Her generous and yet spare animation style brings out the childlike wonder of her protagonist beautifully. She stalks through the world with scraped knees in a babydoll dress. And she learns that it is sometimes okay not to stick a smiley on things but perhaps a band-aid.

How does it feel when your body becomes a different one? Milla Cummings and Geneviève Tremblay explore (peri)menopause with a physical, concrete approach: The menopause they show is a living stop-motion organism, a cave with pulsating walls where a naked elderly woman gently inters her last eggs. From offscreen, a number of mature women recount their experiences – of dry skin, especially in the vaginal area, of rage against the universally asserted sex appeal of aging men, and of the increasing loss of their social visibility.
For every negative aspect, these worldly-wise narrators formulate a counterpoint or constructive course of action in authentic audio recordings. And they also report on the positive sides of this drastic transformation: The energy that the body would have reserved for childbearing along with the eggs is now released for new projects! On screen, a curtain aptly opens to offer a view of a shimmering, glittering foam of possibilities. At the end, our protagonist leaves the cave and climbs the nearest mountain. This film describes more than just arduous passages one has to go through: The “passageways” might just as well be transitions to a new life.

Spending your twilight years alone in a remote forest cabin in the Andes with your faithful four-legged friend – what more could you want? Petra, in any case, seems quite content all alone, chopping wood and listening to the radio. But one day her dog discovers a permafrost body in the snow and literally sinks its teeth into it. The result is that Petra has no choice but to take this accidental find back home.
With gloriously absurd and light-handed twists, Stefania Malacchini and Malu Furche tell a warm-hearted and macabre story of growing old – and of late love, for the frozen body is marvellously easy to unthaw, integrate into daily life, or swing back and forth as a dancing partner. The puppet animation is just as affectionate and detailed, whether it is the resolute grey-headed Petra with her no-nonsense style, her dog, whose hunting instinct and playfulness have comic consequences, or the frozen body itself, this 20th-century hiker who died in the deep snow and sometimes looks as if he was about to come to life and run away fast. Petra enjoys her new happiness. But it could be finite: The police are looking for the missing body …

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.

“Do not attempt to reason with this movie. It is raving mad and makes no sense at all.” Aria Covamonas places this announcement right at the start of this wild cutout animation ride through Chinese and Western history (of philosophy) – and keeps their word. Countless figures appear in seemingly arbitrary order who, with no discernible common thread, condemn to death, argue or flirt – but do it in the most absurd and funny way. At one point, for example, Plato appears, who must be bathed by the elephants because he spent too much time in his cave. But Mao, Mickey Mouse, Nietzsche and Lacan also make appearances. They are all taken from the public domain, as are the Chinese dialogues which issue from their mouths, edited by rhythm; the English subtitles have nothing to do with them.
According to Covamonas, any interpretation is possible – and welcome. Nonetheless, themes begin to emerge: The arbitrary use of violence that characterises every authoritarian regime is lampooned, and so is the absurdity of every canon. But Covamonas, too, is influenced by it: A visual homage to Dadaistic collage art à la Hannah Höch, an acoustic reference to the noise of early sound films, this exuberant treasure-trove of sampled global culture can be thoroughly enjoyed and invites us to discover references while drifting through it.

Grandfather’s hands making pottery, the vertical linearity of a tower, a train crashing into a car – all of these are fragile, newly born film sketches that crowd each other out in a survival game for the filmmaker’s attention. The sceneries fight against each other, intertwine to form new strands, sink into an endless flood of information, shatter in a sea of open browser tabs. With his authentic voice-over and a mesmerising collection of moving images, director Konstantin von Sichart’s alter ego offers us a deep insight into his creative process. Marked by his neurodivergence, he learns before our eyes to cope with his inability to concentrate on one thing – and to weave meaning from these strands, remain true to his film idea. But how can this ever result in a film?
Toxically coloured images, naively drawn and finely crafted, AI-generated, filmed from a monitor, collaged, worked-on – a wealth of tools and aesthetic approaches translates the described mental overload into the language of design. The film thus becomes more than a self-reflection of modern filmmaking: It is the portrait of a new generation – caught between the compulsion to take everything in and have a position on everything and the urge to stand still or even run away.