Omid and his family came to France from Iran a while ago. He is often made to feel that he doesn’t really belong. Even his daughter keeps correcting his French. When he’s attacked, the knife pierces his heart. No, he doesn’t have a heart, as it turns out in the hospital … An animated black comedy about what one leaves behind in one’s home country.

At home in the uncanny: Startled, a woman turns on the light, hesitates, listens and goes to the door, full of dark forebodings … In this montage of similar scenes from Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, the various actresses merge into a meta-protagonist who experiences the same horror over and over again: She is trapped in her home and in her classic movie role.

Rose and Rolf in the still-young FRG. He, 13 years her senior, was in the Second World War. She, who wants to have many children, accepts his proposal and leaves school. Rose watches Super 8 home movies from the fifties, sixties and seventies with her granddaughter Annika Mayer, the director of “Home Sweet Home”: her two boys in short leather pants, a home with a manicured front garden, dad coming home from work, mom cooking soup with sausage links. Rose does not recognise herself in these ideal images of the German economic miracle. This pretty young woman is a stranger to her.

Annika begins to ask questions. Together with her grandmother, she starts to look for traces of domestic violence in the latter’s marriage, which is invisible in the films. But Rose’s open narratives gradually make her experiences tangible. What biographical abysses may lurk behind Rolf’s proud smile? Judiciously deployed slow motion effects dissect the apparent domestic happiness. Atonal and hyperrealistic sounds lie under the distorted soundtrack. The birds sing all too happily, the idyll suddenly seems deceptive.

A sunny day in the winter forest. Piglet dashes across the frozen brooks and lakes on ice skates. Piglet’s friend the cow also attempts a few pirouettes. When a big fish with spiky teeth knocks against the ice, the two run away in fright and lose a skate in the process. They finally gather the courage to go back and realise that the creature in the lake has only peaceful intentions.

Everyone in Leipzig is familiar with the Hotel Astoria, which has stood vacant since 1996. This film takes a look back to the time when the hotel was the hotspot of the trade fair city, where professionals, politicians and guests from all over the world were entertained with the greatest possible GDR pomp. But the Stasi also came and went in the hotel. The story of an exciting chapter in the city’s history is told with archive material, staff reports, and the distinctive animations by Falk Schuster.

The dew drips promisingly from the leaves. Ayla wakes up in a beautifully flowering, lush landscape. A new mountain range arises in the distance. The summits: a smiling woman’s head. Ayla sets out towards it. The hills are the supportive nipples, the downy hair on the forearms is the grass she tenderly strokes with her fingers. When she sees a small dense forest on the horizon, she knows where she must go to find the ultimate fulfilment.
Luma Flôres shows Ayla’s self-exploration as an exquisite sensual and tender journey in intense colours. The discovery of her own body and lust are intertwined with the discovery of another, also female body. The intense sensuality remains metaphorical but vivid to the end – for example, when Ayla discovers her lover’s lap as a natural fountain in which she first dips her fingers and then her whole head and body. When the two are at last united in the water and sleep with each other, the animation changes from concrete representation to abstraction – which in turn bursts in the sky like fireworks. Flôres resolves her metaphorical dance only in the final moments of the film: The two women kiss, drift on the water. The fine art of love, but also the simplest, most natural thing in the world.

A device that can create the illusion of movement can be built by coupling the speed of a rotating disc to the recording frame rate of a camera. This so-called phonotrope is a contemporary version of the phenakistiscope. In her how-to video, Tess Martin explains how this technique works and how it was used in her film “Orbit.”

In a fantastic sphere somewhere between animation, live-action film and performance, a tale of Hun Tun, King of Chaos, unfolds. Hun Tun cheers you on, Hun Tun drives you forward, Hun Tun keeps you awake. He gives you strength for countless hours of overtime and endless leisure activities. But in return, Hun Tun robs you of your sleep and transforms you.
Fragments of everyday life – cups, bottle caps, pill packages – speak of sleepless nights and complete exhaustion, of wanting to sleep and being unable to. Superimpositions of elegantly animated, delicate sand elements introduce rhythm and texture. Danced narrative moments in expressive costumes bring lightness and at the same time convey intense moods, with a precise overarching sound design weaving the various levels into a gripping reflection on a very personal conflict.

The Phenakistiscope in 3D: Guido Devadder has created a sculpture that shows the ghostly march of silently screaming people across a landscape of stretched-out arms and grasping hands in small animation loops. To Kaitlin McSweeney’s enchanting vocals and the beat of an old machine, he tells the dark fairytale of the constant cycle of desire and greed.

Beer is out in Prague … well, actually only at a food stall away from the touristy Old Town. But that doesn’t make the death rattle of the spigot less dramatic for Hurikán, a regular who spends his days and much of his nights at these haunts of lost souls. With a crush on the stall manager, Hurikán takes matters into his own hands. Things get rolling, just like the empty barrel he wants to have filled. An epic parkour begins, starting with small mocking gestures and rapidly expanding into a breakneck chase through the drowsy but steep side streets of Prague’s Žižkov neighbourhood.
With brilliant timing and tongue-in-cheek humour, Jan Saska weaves typical genre elements from comics and action movies together, all revolving around a guy whose life is not easy. This time he needs luck if he does not want to die of thirst.

In Norse mythology there are numerous sagas about water creatures that lure sailors out to sea. This VR experience takes us on a meditative journey to this mythical reality. While the world around us is dissolving, voices draw us into a lost underwater universe in which the boundaries between reality, fantasy, humans and nature fade.

When their parents go in search of berries and honey, the little brown bears stay in the meadow with the sheep. They don’t want to go to bed yet, no matter how lovely the lullaby sounds. Romping through the landscape, they get entangled in a ball of yarn, only to fall asleep peacefully in the end … A “cuddly” animated film based on a Latvian lullaby.

In collaboration with the mycologist and activist Giuliana Furci a VR experience was created that actually contains a whole universe. Hardly anyone knows the world of fungi, though it surrounds and shapes us. We shrink to the size of a hypha, communicate with tree-roots, transform toxins into valuable nutrients and become part of a nearly endless but invisible network carrying our earth.

The term hysteresis soberly describes a processual behaviour where the previous history affects the result as much as new changes. Robert Seidel enters analogue drawings, performance footage of the queer dancer Tsuki and pluck sounds and drones by Oval into a feedback system that reorganises time and movement in a multicoloured and sensual organic tableau.

Emanations of a nightmare. Drawings of fragile girls’ bodies from which the silhouettes of massive men emerge devouring each other. Obsessive images from the inner perspective of a nude dancer during her performance. Shreds of acoustic memories of sexual abuse. And always recurring: the rapist in a hat, the forever unerasable unreal reality.

Two siblings are sitting peacefully at a table and drawing. There is a swimming hedgehog in the sister’s picture. The brother wonders whether this would work in real life. He goes into the garden, grabs a hedgehog and throws him into the pool to test this. Not funny at all, thinks the hedgehog. But before he scurries back to his pile of leaves, he comes up with a wet surprise …