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 …

Petra looks back on an eventful day: Together with other kids she went on a paperchase, solved a few small tasks and coordinated with her assigned partner. There were some adventures, but also a classroom situation set up in a meadow where one’s knowledge of the local flora was tested. In the end, they all boarded sailing boats and glided off into an atmospheric evening. A protocol in letters, accurately drawn up at the Potsdam Pioneer House, serves as the framework for one of the first completed films of the newly founded German Academy of Film Art in Babelsberg.

Echoes, filters and rhythmic montage turn sound fragments into an audio piece about a seemingly wilful music box. Philippe Arthuys – a film composer for luminaries like Rivette and Godard and a filmmaker himself – varies the tempo from stuttering to quietly breathing, making sound particles emerge suddenly from the depths of space and disappear again. A cinematic mini-drama for the ears.

12-year-old Nikita and his family have been staying in an underground station in Kharkiv for weeks. The place promises protection from Russian attacks, but there is not much distraction down here. The glaring lights and provisionally furnished carriages create a surreal to dreary atmosphere, pets roam the aisles, an aging musician plays songs on his guitar.

Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík condense the first months of the war in Ukraine into an oppressive but not hopeless narrative, because the station is also a place of encounters. Niki soon meets Vika, who is his age and who coaxes the lethargic boy out of his shell. Together they roam the underworld, but while Vika is permitted to go to the surface at least once in a while, Niki’s radius of movement ends at the stairs on which sunlight falls occasionally. And yet an outside exists which the two directors make visible by Super 8 shots scattered in between. They show a damaged Kharkiv: destroyed vehicles, a charred bed, provisionally protected monuments. “Photophobia” is a hybrid, introspective film that manages to find something like tender romance in an unreal situation.

Peter Mettler sets out to look for northern lights with photographer Andreas Züst and a small film crew. In order to be able to capture this miracle of nature on film in the first place, the team has built a special camera that has to withstand the extreme climate conditions. On location, they patiently surrender to the state of waiting. They are in the border region between the geographical north and the populated south. The formal structure of the film, on the other hand, shifts between trance-like essay and analytical research trip. And the filmmaker is left with the fundamental question of whether the experience of this spectacular natural phenomenon can be filmed at all.

Why do we see certain colours even when they aren’t there? Chinese director Tang Han meticulously analyses the 100 Yuan bill, which carries a portrait of Mao Zedong, and finds that – despite official representations and general perception – the note is pink rather than red. In a serious tone and colourful, merry images she also casually upsets any number of other entrenched notions about digitalization, globalization, capitalism and gender.

An investigative examination of the colour spaces of the 100 Yuan note reveals a paradigm shift. Officially declared by the central bank to be red, the note bearing the portrait of Mao is, physically speaking, actually pink. This has consequences for China’s political narrative, as Tang Han’s uncompromisingly precise and refreshingly clever cinematic experimental setup illustrates.

A lady, presumably from the FRG, takes an excursion on the narrow-gauge railway. Her astonishment at finding the line operated by Young Pioneers is evident. “It’s unbelievable” how she is asked for her ticket with childlike gravity. This film was produced at the active and extremely productive “Iskra” pioneer film studio at the 31st Secondary School in Leipzig-Probstheida.

Eva Dzhyshyashvili shows us a family that lives in the mountains following their daily rituals. At first glance, it’s a simple, quiet life unbothered by the outer world. However, as the picture is revealed, we see that the grandfather was wounded in the east of Ukraine and listen to countless conversations about this war. The feeling that there is nowhere to hide from military aggression is starkly evident. But the ending provides a sliver of hope.

How do you grow up on a planet that is being destroyed by humanity? This film looks for answers to this urgent question and introduces us to Bo and Luca. The close friends are enthusiastic climate activists, connected by their commitment. We follow the two teenagers for four years on their contradictory and surprising path to adulthood.

Microplastics are everywhere: in the air, the soil, and the water. In this “surreal eco-fiction,” plastic and the environment live in peaceful coexistence. They invent a comforting world in which we merge with plastics to become hybrid creatures, endowed with a new identity and DNA. In the plastisphere we become the material that unites us all – if only it were finally allowed to re-shape us.

If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.

Lancit deeply involves his family in his fantasies, letting them become demons and lurch through the living room together. The documentation of his own diabetes also allows us a look at a modern Paris family life with two small children and a partner who usually plays along sympathetically with her husband’s carryings-on. Lancit’s approach deliberately transgresses borders, opens body, soul and front door. The result is a humorous and occasionally disturbing self-testimony.

A cinematic family constellation in which the audience is guided through a seemingly random conglomeration of private photos, video recordings, notes, thoughts, sounds and texts. Narrative strands crystallise, only to be discarded, taken up again and finally left standing in their ambiguity. A film about the big questions of life, love, family, relationships, death and good food. No more, and certainly no less.

The days in the hospital are boring, the monotony only interrupted by parents’ visits. Listlessly, the girl lies in bed, staring out of the window for hours. But one day she gets a very special present. She slowly recovers and her injuries heal … This story, animated in soft, bright colours, shows that faith can help us get better.

A film about men and games, somewhere in the Mediterranean, directed by a Slovenian master of the playful, somewhere between speculative and pseudo-documentary form. Oily bodies in a wrestling match, hooking fingers, a wheel of cheese rolled through a village – all these are archaic occupations of the utmost importance. The filmmaker meticulously captures the events until he is overcome by a major creative block. From now on, he will experience his surroundings as part of the game. Childhood memories and the footage of the unfinished film project merge seamlessly into an ode to the absurdity of the gesture.

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.