Following a quarrel with the DEFA, the Sorbian animation and documentary filmmaker Jan Hempel established the independent IWT-Film studio in Dresden. Commissioned by the German Book Traders’ Association, these impressions of the 1977 International Book Art Exhibition were created there. Referencing Leipzig’s century-old tradition as a book city, the film presents production companies, publishers and, last but not least, the IBA itself.

In this work, too, the technique of working directly on the film strip by scratching and painting proves to be beautiful and timeless. The sound, created by analogue interventions on the optical soundtrack of the material is charming, jaunty and organic. Two abstract creature shapes fall for each other in the darkness, come together and fade into the distance.

The original title of this film can be roughly translated as “A Nameless Life” and there is really no other way to sum up the story. We will never learn the protagonist’s real name, but in the one hundred lonely years that we accompany him for 90 minutes of cinema, we see ever new facets of him. The film opens with a seemingly innocent montage of taxi rides in 1994. But as nonchalantly as the scenes are strung together here, it is important to pay attention to the subtleties if you want to stay on top of things during the ensuing century-long trip. The journey begins in the northern Japanese province and takes us through the J-pop world of Tokyo’s hip Harajuku district to a post-apocalyptic future where Fernand Léger and Stanley Kubrick shake hands.
Ryuya Suzuki is considered an outsider in contemporary Japanese animation. He is the sole author, director, animator, editor, and musician here. “Jinsei” is entirely his vision, a film about life and death, fate and rebellion, about power and powerlessness, unsparing and emotional. The 2D animation is imaginative, surprising, usually minimalist, always irritating, occasionally contemplative and then explosive. A hellish ride through human abysses, produced with so much attention to detail that new spaces open up every time you watch it.

A train rattles in the distance, a heron stalks through the water, children practice gymnastics on the promenade. A couple is on its way to the opposite bank, hopping from stone to stone. One of the stones is shaped like a turtle, symbolising wisdom. An elderly man sings beneath a concrete bridge, his voice echoing. Moving snapshots of the Kamogawa, the wild duck river in Kyoto, develop a captivating rhythm that is easy to get lost in. The men, women and children seem absorbed in their activities and themselves. Like the fisherman who is downright surprised by the fat fish on his line. Sometimes the camera also peeks into the houses behind the embankment. An elderly couple make fabrics with fancy patterns in a workshop, the regular clacking of their loom has a soothing quality. The images are full of cheerful serenity.

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.

Iridescent waves, geometrical gardens and spiral-shaped sand dunes can be found in the microscopic structure of a crystal which this film brings to the screen in extreme enlargement. It portrays the shapes that connect the minuscule and the gigantic across all dimensions, showing us the material of our world – and its intrinsic beauty.

For Namir, the realisation that his beloved mother is not immortal is painful. He had actually intended to make a film with Siham. Now he is mourning in the church with his father Waguih and his children, who seem too young to understand death – and allowing himself to be filmed. “As always, I’m counting on cinema to help me.” He is convinced that cinema can turn tragedy into comedy – and preserve memories that would otherwise fade away.
Namir Abdel Messeeh has already worked through his family’s biography between Egypt and France, their Christian faith and love of cinema in “The Virgin, the Copts and Me” (2011). But it was Siham’s wish that her son finally realise a film with acting stars rather than his own relatives. Instead, Namir Abdel Messeeh recounts his mother’s love, her longing, and her mysteries using the power of cinema. A montage of home videos, family memories and Egyptian film classics by Youssef Chahine makes Siham appear almost “larger than life”.

Only light lifts the outlines of the world from darkness. In cyanotype, light-sensitive material is used to make white drawings materialize on a blue background. Tata Managadze challenges the light-sensitivity of our mind. She uses reflections and mirrors to expose the sensitive, gossamer-thin material of association in ways that make ephemeral memories and emotions visible. The poem at the beginning tells us how soothing and at the same time brutal her protagonist – light – can be. Like children in a playground, we are seduced by and forever searching for the dance of lights. Flower patterns on the dishes in the sink begin to spin when our eyelids grow heavy and sleep is approaching. Everything moves. In the transitory state between waking and dreaming, a different kind of life stirs in the prefabricated building estate: The stars of the restaurant leap from the sign and scratch traces into the wall. Or are these scars that must still heal? Perhaps scars from the Soviet era?
Again and again, well-known fragments are re-assembled. This non-narrative animated documentary takes us on a spiral of remembrance to an untraceable origin, building a bridge to our childhood ability to find magic in the most mundane things.

“Apparently, it had to happen to me before I learned it was ‘normal’.” This statement by a protagonist sums up how our society deals with stillborn children or children who die young: Star children are omnipresent (one in four mothers has lost a child) and yet absent. We lack the vocabulary, the sensitivity, and the tranquillity to enable parents to mourn.
Remo Rauscher’s animated documentary confronts us with this inability, letting twenty people in mourning or who deal with mourning speak: Thinking out loud, struggling for words, regarding the pain from different perspectives, discovering dignity and strength in it and helping us to overcome the taboo. They object to being an “error in the system”, to accepting the speechlessness. In Rauscher’s film, the darkness is ambivalent and palpable on all levels: It is absorbing and caring. It is generous and gives us moments of beauty, humility, and hope. The 2D animations in muted colours on a dark background are always abstract, sketchy, and restrained – an expression of tact and respect. They draw attention to themselves only once in a while, while the voices are given a lot of space and can unfold without fear. This film opens a space to mourn that society is unable to offer yet.

Examples from a DIY book about Op Art patterns form the basis of this hypnotic film. The images seem to move by themselves in front of our eyes. Their flowing and shimmering is driven by colour changes and cross-fades until the boundaries between actual and imagined movement become blurred. It is not only the soundtrack and title that herald the mischievous spirit of this work.

We are travelling back in time to the early 19th century on the south coast of England. This is where Mary Anning lives, a 12-year-old girl who is inquisitive, persistent and fascinated by fossils. She spends every free minute at the beach to look for the fossilised remains of long extinct animal species in the strata of her hometown’s coastal cliffs. Her father, too, is an enthusiast and earns a little extra for his family by selling fossils. When he disappears after the collapse of a cliff, Mary’s life is shaken. All that her father leaves behind is a mysterious drawing whose meaning Mary only gradually makes out. She is determined to uncover the secret together with unexpected allies. An entertaining and warm-hearted biopic about one of the first female palaeontologists.

In 1929, the German Book Traders’ Association declared 22 March, the anniversary of Goethe’s death, the “Day of the Book”. To boost general awareness of the date, the politically versatile educational filmmaker Hans Cürlis was commissioned to produce this silent signature spot. Through cross-fades, the imagined worlds of a variety of readers – young or old, workers or intellectuals – merge with the stylised realities of their lives.

The Gebrüder Brehmer company produced wire stitching and folding machines and was one of the largest of its kind in Germany with up to 1,000 employees. Even in the early days of the medium, the company used film to promote its goods and cultivate its reputation. This image film presents the factory in Plagwitz and special folding machines, for example the “¾-Automatic Sheet Feeder”.

Three years before the Watergate affair brought down Richard Nixon, de Antonio exposed the President as a charlatan in this cruel and funny material montage. From an interview in the “Minutes” of the 1972 Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche: Question – “In each of your films, you expose a major American institution […]. Which did you choose for ‘Millhouse’?” De Antonio’s answer – “Nothing less than the traditional political process as a whole. The film is by no means a personal attack on Nixon. To expose a political opponent, all you need to do is rent a hall for him. The film attacks the American system, the credibility of this system, by turning on the perfect symbol of this system, the President.”

Using the Scanimate video synthesizer, da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa del Giocondo embarks on a surreal journey through real and artificial landscapes. In doing so, Toshio Matsumoto projects a kind of fantasy world of electronic images, exploding colour and movement onto his subject, animating Mona Lisa into a shimmering psychedelic vision accompanied by an abstract electronic soundtrack.

A brilliant and highly poetic collection of tiny moving image moments which offers aesthetic delights through cleverly chosen camera angles, framing, lighting, montage and the materials used. This archive of trifles remains silent. The eyes begin to hear, the sound is generated in the mind. Simply enchanting.