Animals have no “LGBTQIA*”, they simply are and do, practicing gender, sexuality and family constellations according to desire and necessity. There is still a lot to discover here, as Marcel Barelli reports. He went stalking, observing and listening closely. Briskly animated and wittily narrated, he tells of fantastic zoological caprices and miraculous relationships.

Standing in the water in fishing gear, catching fish and taking in the rugged winter landscape. What at first sounds like a dream for outdoor fans is part of the working routine of prison inmates in the East Slovakian town of Perín-Chym. Their job is to breed carp, which are primarily consumed at Christmas dinners. Marek Moučka anonymizes the prisoners by erasing their eyes in his artful black and white film. He talks to them about freedom and missed holidays.

Click, frame change, click, frame change. The narrator presents her family in snapshots: the father in his youth, the mother posing in an armchair, siblings, birthdays, excursions, the usual. But the commentary by the daughter looking back adds something profoundly salty, perhaps even poisoned, to the unfolded normalcy. Tiny insults accumulate into sadness. It (almost) doesn’t matter that the family members in question are sloths.

After a long time, a young woman once again holds letters in her hand that her father wrote her fifteen years ago when he was in prison. His words are full of love and affection: Never again were they to be that close, the daughter sums up today. What happened? This is what she tries to answer in a letter to him, writing down what couldn’t be said until now. The complex relationship between father and daughter in the form of a fragmentary animation.