The well-known illustrator Werner Klemke uses his drawings to teach the youngest bookworms about the value of reading. Taking this as a starting point, Lotte Thiel presents the GDR as a land of books whose capital is Leipzig. Figures and images from the 1971 International Book Art Exhibition underscore the significance accorded to books as a tool for shaping the “socialist personality”.

Commissioned by the German Book Traders’ Association, Lotte Thiel follows the preparations for the 1971 International Book Art Exhibition, prominently supported on screen and on the soundtrack. The tradition of this fair is recalled, from its predecessor BUGRA 1914 to the first IBA in 1927 and the subsequent events that took place every five to six years starting in 1959. Award-winning illustrations can be viewed in detail.

On 4 September 1970, a group of Vietnam veterans set out on a long march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Their goal: to convince the local population along the way of the injustice that has been going on in Vietnam for years. They did this not just with speeches by the wayside, but with shocking, unannounced and publicly performed re-enactments. Complete with uniforms and plastic machine guns, supported by extras, they thus draw attention to their own war crimes in Indochina. Both camera and tape recorder stay close to all this, capturing the reactions of passers-by and city residents. Solidarity on the one hand, vicious insults on the other. A deep divide runs through the “home front”.

Sarajevo–Rimini. This route once took ten-year-old Mirela to safety from the Bosnian War in 1992, when she was evacuated to Italy by a United Nations convoy along with a group of other orphans. Their stay was to be temporary, but no one came to pick her up. So Mirela began a new life on the Adriatic coast. As an adult, she returns to her homeland in search of a mother whom she last saw as a four-year-old, a journey accompanied by many questions: Why was she among the few who were sent to exile? Would it have been better to have stayed in Sarajevo, free of guilt? Mirela finds no clear answers. But from the traces she gathers and the threads that cross in her life, “Dom” weaves a sensitive meditation about identity and belonging.

Originally intended as an anti-drug public service announcement for local television, this 60-second film instead takes us on a trippy ride through Day-Glo colours and pop-art visuals, all melting into each other with the help of the Scanimate video synthesizer. Although one of her earliest films, it was also one of Pat Lehman’s most successful, going on to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

This visual symphony unfolds according to the principles of swarm behaviour. Digitally created clouds of dots organically flow into each other. Everything lives, breathes, is sensual and tactile, feels soft and harmonious. A warm, light sound carpet flows around the constantly moving landscape. An allusion to the cyclical nature of our life.

Barbara Sykes, a master craftswoman of electronic visuals, manages to wrangle the abstract into the familiar. Bending and warping the raw colours and shapes of the Sandin Image Processor, she creates a series of images that seem to emanate from some ancient subconscious. Mixed together tightly with its percussive soundtrack, the film is a vibrant experiment in visual music.

“The past is an endless cookie.” The past is omnipresent in this fabulously original family portrait. We feel it in the very first minutes, when filmmaker Seth from Toronto calls his half-brother Pete, who is a member of the Indigenous Cree people: The globe on which the distance between the two is visualised snips away the little sign “Dominion of Canada” to reveal the world Shamattawa underneath – the name of the First Nations community where Pete lives. The past is still present because of the injuries the Cree suffer(ed) from the white majority, including police violence and land grabbing. Nonetheless, humour is the Scrivers’ defining stylistic tool – from subtle jokes to self-irony to the detailed, lovingly surreal look of all the characters which they bestow even on racist police officers.
The brothers initially wanted to tell seven stories. At the end there are hundreds – because every sound recording is interrupted by the daily life of an extended family, every anecdote leads to the next. No matter whether the subject is building a teepee, supermarket shopping or butchering animals. This never-ending family chronicle, which also proposes a special chronicle of Canada, was produced over nine years. The result is a distinctive cookie one can chew on for a long time.

An abstract video artwork that explores the fleeting nature of colours, textures and shapes. The images are reminiscent of the rough surface of a damp cave wall on which the light of a distant torch is refracted. Time loses meaning, shadowy crystal structures emerge and fade. An opalescent colour apparition tries to assert itself in this space.

It’s hard to imagine a more thorough, trenchant and disturbingly compelling account of how the US arrived at its current state than Lee Anne Schmitt’s formidable fourth feature. Her starting point is personal: Her father worked for infamous American chemical company the Olin Corporation, the dolls he used to send her from his business trips forming one of the film’s leitmotifs. While wreaking environmental havoc across the nation, Olin also birthed its own foundation, whose deep pockets helped the racist, classist neoconservative movement gain the necessary traction. Sites of significance, archive material, intertitle quotes, shots of salient literature and snatches of domesticity: the building blocks of a comprehensive political takedown.

“Can we be moved by the disappearance of rhinos if we have never experienced the feeling of a butterfly walking on our hand?” Marcel Barelli asks not without pathos, but hitting the mark, in his animated manifesto. He is quoting Daniel Pauly’s Shifting Baseline Syndrome Theory: We humans always measure normality by our own experience and not by historical changes and therefore tend to accept environmental destruction. This is not the only allusion in Barelli’s compact three-minute-film: He references the “sixth extinction”, the current human-caused extinction of the species, and the hourglass symbol of the Extinction Rebellion movement. His film, however, which should definitely be understood as a call for active resistance, embeds these reflections artistically.
With his evaporating water animation on paper, Barelli has chosen a simple and consistent animation technique whose ephemeral character perfectly captures species extinction and oblivion. Archive material is added. Unlike the “Cinétracts” pamphlet films from 1968 that he admires, but just as forceful, he has chosen a contemporary, personal approach. He touchingly weaves his theses into his own biography: Family pictures point to a time when Barelli himself “played with dinosaurs and ate chicken”.

A tinted nitrate fragment of the company film “A. Gutberlet & Co., Leipzig-Mölkau, Spezialfabrik für Falzmaschinen und Faden-Buchheftmaschinen, gegründet 1901“ (specialist in the manufacture of folding machines and thread book stitching machines, established 1901) was an exceptional find. It could be restored in its original colour tones by analogue methods in 2024 and then digitised. Combined with the dupe negative of another version, it now offers insights into the factory halls and the work on the machines.

Fanta is 14 years old and lives in Conakry, the capital of Guinea in West Africa. Besides school and her household chores, she spends every free minute training at the acrobatics circus. One day, the return of the country’s big star is announced. Balla Moussa Bangoura, founder of the Amoukanama Circus Company, is returning from an international tour and now plans to rehearse a new show with his troupe. Training gets harder, because only the best will be in it at the end.
Of course, Fanta is determined to give everything to be one of the few girls travelling the country with Balla Moussa Bangoura. Every day, she is torn between caring for her sick mother, housework, schoolwork and what she thinks she loves best. Supported by her family on the one hand, striving to fulfil all expectations on the other, Fanta begins to doubt: What does she really want? Marjolijn Prins delivers the atmospherically dense portrait of an extraordinary girl, connected by rousing musical numbers, spectacular acrobatics and dream-like acting sequences.

Video artist and physics graduate Dan Sandin takes the viewer on a short tour of the Sandin Image Processor (IP), a modular video synthesizer that he invented. What starts as a serious technical introduction to the synthesizer slowly spaces out into a visual experiment in colour and effects, as Dan Sandin, wearing what appears to be a Catholic cardinal’s hat, tries to remain focused.

When the woman in curlers opens the door, Papa is blown away: Like a breath of air, a storm or tornado, he is blown in and back out. Even in his own apartment he is ungraspable: He grows and shrinks, becomes fragile or threatening, knocks everything down. And then he literally flies away, hurling eggs at passers-by. Caught in all this is his daughter, who at first can only helplessly stand by and who finds it increasingly difficult to visit him – the steps grow higher, the floor turns into chewing gum. Finally, she looks up at the sky and sees him hover there.
What to do when one’s father suffers from mental illness? How to deal with it when the responsibility (of care) switches sides so early in life? Jelena Milunović explores this, using bold, very tender and not always obvious parables. She sets strong colour accents: The depressed episodes are in claustrophobic black and white, the ecstatic highs are colourful free-hand drawings. And the red balloon, which briefly appears in the beginning as a metaphorical vehicle of hope, might point the way to bringing the two of them back together.

The flowing movement of a mountain landscape shrouded in orange fog is disturbed. The regular wafting stops, the landscape structures crumble. The atmospheric sound becomes a shrill screech. “For Tashi” describes the physical and emotional turmoil of a woman after the loss of her unborn child, seeking resonance with the viewers, hoping for comfort.