In keeping with the inscrutability of their existence, a very special logic seems to be needed to decode symbols from the depths of our soul. Švankmajer uses a kind of home-made dream machine to confront the protagonist with the personal myths that he has carried around subconsciously throughout his life and that even as an adult make him suffer like a helpless kid.

Patrick Bokanowski subjects his own early cine film footage to a magical optical transformation. In the glistening drizzle of electronic sounds and the deep rumbling of drone waves by Michèle Bokanowski, light eruptions, sweeping colours and shadowy apparitions unfold while the original footage shines through. A diary of awake dreaming observation.

She first appeared on stage at the age of eleven with the legendary Krautrock band “Embryo”. Her father, Christian Burchard, founded the band in 1969 and led it until 2016. Today – in her mid-thirties – Marja Burchard is the bandleader in this project, which has become a kind of family for her. But what seems so simple and organic is far from self-evident in an extremely male-dominated sphere, as Rebecca Zehr shows in her precisely observed and designed film.

This strictly and yet lightly composed melange mixes archival footage, psychedelic animation sequences and everyday observations of the normal life of a female musician between organisation and inspiration. With the visual level restricted to black and white and thus deliberately restrained, all the more attention is focused at the sound. The – who wonders? – outstanding score never takes the music for granted but works robustly with our perception. It’s the lucid, calm images and the narrative that is always anchored in the here and now that let this film stay incredibly haptic despite its concentration on our sense of hearing. Rebecca Zehr is not interested in portraying a musical legend, but in showing us what it could look and feel like to not only make music but live in it.

Mount Sinai Hospital in New York is one of the largest and oldest hospitals in the United States. Mati, an aspiring hospital chaplain, works here. She is about to complete her one-year residency in the department of “Spiritual Care,” a branch of palliative medicine. Patients struggling with insecurity, trauma and grief get emotional and spiritual support here. The film follows Mati and her colleagues through 2020 and 2021, the years with the highest number of deaths in the history of the USA. Mati herself must struggle daily to find her balance. Because, as her supervisor puts it, if one’s own bandwidth is used up, there is simply no room left for the tougher things. It is therefore an important part of the work of a counsellor to get support and guidance for oneself.

Luke Lorentzen observes this cosmos with great sensitivity and, despite being so close, with pleasant restraint. The calm camera often keeps its distance, especially in moments of doubt or when observing conflicts in the team. A film unafraid of intimacy that spans a thought-provoking arc: between questions of faith, loss and professional sustainability.

A film commissioned for a school education programme. The goal of this programme is to teach children about their own history and that of their country – especially on the background of the recent wars. The hope is that this knowledge will also be applied to the future, that it will bring colour to the black and white, a smile to the gloom.

In the early 1980s, Poland is in a state of emergency. The country’s democracy movement, represented by the free Solidarność trade union, is to be suppressed. To this end, President Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law on 13 December 1981. In collusion with the Soviet Union a threatening scenario is staged to justify the “stan wojenny”. As a result, Western nations like Great Britain and the USA impose economic sanctions on the Eastern Bloc state. This produces a complex field of tension in which the Polish population are confronted with existential shortages on the one hand but continue their struggle underground on the other – despite curfews, telephone surveillance and a media system controlled by the military.
In his found footage film, Tomasz Wolski brings the explosive, the everyday and the iconic together to provide an insight into a situation that is as absurd as it is dangerous. The extremely dynamic (and musical) montage illustrates the rapid and convoluted succession of events while at the same time intervening through comments, quite often with a notable sense of humour, for example, when Wolski helps a British news correspondent not always on top of events to a bit of retroactive glory: “Most fundamental is the … Hang on, sorry, sorry, could you … Photography and filming will be widely controlled …”

Renata Lučić, both director and protagonist, returns to her hometown to visit her father in a small village in the Croatian part of Slavonia, near the Bosnian border. She has always hated the rural area on the banks of the river Sava, “those endless meadows and gardens,” as she reveals right in the opening sequence. Even as a child she knew that she would leave. Like her older brother, like her mother. And like 124,667 other women who “went West” after the war, usually to Germany or Austria, to work – and never to return.
She now hangs out in the almost abandoned and womanless village with her estranged father Tomislav and his best friend Joso. The men follow their routines, working in the forest or eating river fish they caught themselves. Emotional closeness and intimacy gradually form in at first seemingly trivial conversations and despite initial misunderstandings and distinctly different world views. The film project, which started as the story of an emigration, gradually turns into a sensitive study of loneliness, human relationships, friendship and love; about the beauty of the little things that leads to larger insights – not just for Renata.

At first there’s nothing but clouds. A cock crows, sheep bells ring, a herd of cows begins to move. The sounds seem to come from another age. When the morning mist clears, we recognize the outlines of an abandoned village. Decayed huts, broken fences, crooked roofs. The film looks like an oil painting, a still life painted in sometimes delicate, sometimes broad brushstrokes, bathed in different lights with the shifting times of day and changing its mood.

Nothing is left of the Lithuanian village of Ablinga. Destroyed by Wehrmacht soldiers in 1941, a forest of sculptures was erected in 1972 to commemorate those who once lived here. Larger than life, the carved wooden monuments rise to the sky. In national poet Justinas Marcinkevičius’s poem they wake up again, share some last secrets and become connecting links on a timeline that knows violence and dreams of peace. Dagnija Osite-Krüger’s montage is bold, playful and sometimes brutal, her concern credible and strong. Within a few minutes, “Ablinga” puts a spell on us, becoming a monument to German guilt and the memory of the murdered ones.

Who is the clever mind behind “AIVA”, the absolutely incredible AI novelty that everyone talks about and wants to have? An avatar with a female voice, unfolding in two dimensions like a pattern, praises their successful multi-million-pound project. Answers are not provided, just another ghastly feedback loop of artificiality.

Single frames from a direct animation appear on the screen in staggered repetition. The shapes painted, printed and scratched on 35mm material evolve, with minimal time lapses, from one edge of the frame to the other. A trace is left, telling of time itself and asking: When exactly is “now”? The past, present and future are spinning in the chaos of moments.

Hand-coloured and from the mind of one of the 20th century’s most innovative abstract filmmakers, “Abstronic” combines abstraction and electronics to produce a playful flow of images reminiscent of an abstract painting in motion. Mary Ellen Bute, who was also a painter, created the film using electronic images generated by a specially designed oscilloscope in combination with traditional animation.

A ship scrapyard in western Cuba. The observing camera follows Raudel and his colleagues who work in what seems like a hermetically sealed microcosm. A homing pigeon strays into the place; the workers contemplate it silently as they smoke. Sometimes they talk about their dreams. Shots are focussed in turns on their bodies and their surroundings. Rhythmic, artfully crafted and authentically produced sounds accompany precise and lucid images, without aestheticizing the harshness of their work.

We have probably all thought about the influence of digital logic and algorithms on our perception of the world at some point. This equally humorous and profound short film takes the interactive online tour service “Google Street View” as a starting point for an investigation of where the reality mapped by fifteen automatic cameras and the one perceived by human senses drift apart – and what the consequences are.
The “Accidental Animals” that happened to come across the lenses of Google cars defy the claim that every area, however remote, is reproduced as realistically as possible. Instead, their appearance in the frame produces unintentionally funny situations. Like glitches in the matrix, they remind us that we are watching only a patchy series of snapshots. Before we “drop” into a random place on the map, before we arrive to look around, the animals are already there. The fact that Google’s technology blurs many of those bird, dog and pig faces – like ours – to protect personality rights furnishes the directors with the perfect excuse for a provocative question: How is it that in this respect the algorithm acts more ethically than the humans who programmed it?

The truth is hidden behind blurs, but the allure of secrecy fades as the clarity increases. A woman in love ventures out of her cocoon to go out into the mundane world of “dead language.” Accompanied by a restless musical motif by Marian Mentrup, “Achill” boldly balances on the thin line between two universes – with raw, intimate drawings, shimmering stones and overpainted video sequences.

The winner of the first golden “Animation Dove”: nine years of war between Greeks and Trojans have gone past. The impulsive Patroclus, comrade in arms and bed mate of the rather battle-weary Achilles, thinks that victory can be achieved by other means. The tragedy takes its course – just as it was passed down in the classical myths but supplemented by what they left unspoken.