Clown*esses are more than jesters; they hold a mirror up to society. They move between the worlds and like to break rules, albeit with a wink. At the same time, clown*esses are contradiction experts by nature, because they know on the one hand that life is far too short to be sad, and on the other hand use their art not only to entertain us but to make oppression and violence visible and attackable.

The artists portrayed in this film, for example, look closely at patriarchal structures and learned social behaviours. When Gözde in her unerring performances questions and satirises the images of women still prevalent in Turkey, this critique is rooted in her own experience – and that is precisely what makes it so funny. Lokke from Germany, on the other hand, emphasises the transformative aspect of clowning that allows them to try out different identities and characters, to refuse being pinned down and to ridicule stereotypes. Jana Rothe’s cogent short portrait presents these and other clownesque attitudes towards the world. It makes you wonder how in the world we ended up sacrificing fun and subversion to rationality in our daily lives.

The name of her village stands for a utopia that has shaped Noam Shuster Eliassi from childhood: Newe Shalom (Hebrew) or Wahat al-Salām (Arabic) roughly translates as “Oasis of Peace.” This small community of 300 people from Jewish and Arab families which was founded in 1969, located in Israel at the border with the West Bank, is a test of solidarity in practice. Thus, Noam, who is Jewish, and her Palestinian friend Ranin become ambassadors of mutual understanding even as children, for example when Hillary Clinton or Jane Fonda come to visit. They seem predestined for a career in the United Nations.
In her comedy show “Coexistence, My Ass!”, which director Amber Fares uses as a leitmotif, Shuster Eliassi strikes a harsher tone. Her career shift from diplomacy to political comedy – in English, Hebrew or Arabic, depending on the audience – shows her as a critic of the Netanyahu government, both before and after the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. Her example also reflects the division in parts of the Israeli left: Shuster Eliassi’s deep pain of having lost loved ones herself is followed by anger about the Gaza war. What is humour able, what is it allowed to do in this situation? Perhaps help us mourn the suffering of two nations and, despite everything, not give up the utopia of peace.

Mies van der Rohe revolutionized architecture with his radically reduced formal language of clear lines and transparency. Claudia Larcher pieces together his building elements – frames, columns, banisters –, makes them rotate around their vertical axes, multiplies and superimposes them until a dizzying compression is achieved which supplants the enclosed space and thus transparency.

Painting, virtual sculptures, technophile hybrids of reality and illusion – Aaron Jablonski has been creating mobile face filters for social media channels since 2018. Sometimes they form a confusing swarm of echoes around a head, sometimes they come as spiky digital punk. His immaterial masks, hovering between fashion and art, conceal as much as they reveal about their wearers.

In 2015 a fire breaks out in the Bucharest club “Colectiv”: 27 dead, 180 injured. But for the survivors of the disaster, the hospitals become death traps, as many die of wounds that are not considered life-threatening. A doctor turns to the press. The research uncovers one of the biggest scandals in Romania’s health care system. This powerful film offers insights into the work of the investigative journalists, lets whistle-blowers speak and gives the survivors a voice.

Jessica Sarah Rinland visits zoological gardens across Argentina to craft a portrait not of a single institution, but rather its underlying concept: an observational, yet still ever-probing exploration of zoo itself. The different types of image and their textures she collects to this end—the silky 16mm that comprises the bulk of the film, the crisp surveillance footage, the grainy black-and-white cameras that capture creatures roving “undisturbed”, the yellowing photographs that pin down Indigenous people and animals alike – perfectly correspond to the varying perspectives she gathers on her subject: a place of imprisonment and colonial legacy, but now also one of everyday routine, conservation and even tenderness.
For all the ambivalence of its central theme, this is, like all of Rinland’s work, a film of extraordinary tactility: Human hands that clean, catalogue and caress, leathery trunks and furry fingers that reach between iron bars in search of comfort, plumage glistening in the sun. Jean Piaget coined the term collective monologue to refer to the developmental phase in which the child believes nature is created for them alone and can be controlled as such. It is so strangely moving to see control give way to care.

A Malay fairy tale tells of Sang Kancil, the wily mouse deer that crosses a river by persuading the crocodiles in it to form a bridge for him. Inspired by this story, Zhang Xu Zhan, one of Taiwan’s most distinguished young artists, in his latest stop-motion animation depicts the crossing of the river as a breakneck shaman dance in the deep jungle where acrobatic skill replaces cunning. Spurred on by drummers on the bank, guided by ringing bells, the costumed creature, half human, half animal, leaps from crocodile back to crocodile back, always in danger of losing more than feathers.

Despite the overwhelming complexity of the animated scenery, the hand-made papier-mâché figures recall the seductive power of traditional Javanese Wayang shadow theatre. Its fixed backdrops are transformed here into an extremely fluid world of continuous transformation and metamorphosis reflected in oddly shaped mirror shards, giving us an idea of what it would be like to see through compound eyes.

No images of value but “confused material.” For decades, footage secretly filmed in August 1968 in Prague was hidden in archives under this label. Evald Schorm recovered the illegal material and composed it to the beat of Tchaikovsky recordings, in keeping with its expressive nature. The film could finally be publicly shown in 1990.

The vultures are circling over the Cevennes, the south-eastern part of the French Massif Central. They are part of the holistic cycle of becoming and passing away which shepherdess Nathalie seeks to come closer to. Because the vultures are gnawing at the remains of her beloved animals. She considers herself responsible not only for their lives, but also for their death. Elsa Maury’s film is an unequivocal testimony to what it means to wield the fatal knife oneself.

The sounds made by a ewe when a lamb is born seem almost human. And when a little later the newborn turns out to be unwilling to live it seems as if one could detect pain in the mother’s eyes. The shepherdess Nathalie’s empathic look at her flock was transferred directly to the viewer. Each animal here has its own name, each has a biography that Nathalie knows by heart. And it’s ultimately up to her to finally decide when the end of a sheep is near. In diary-like sequences we learn about her feelings, take part in a difficult process of development which results in new self-confidence, perhaps even new wisdom. Elsa Maury shows a perennial school of killing and death. She leaves the events uncommented, but achieves an intensity through images and editing that stays with us for a long time.

How brutal is it when your own language casts you out of your home because it has been turned into the language of crimes against other people? In her autobiographical animation, Irina Rubina analyses why Russian can no longer be the language of security for her and why German – historically riddled with guilt and therefore insecure – does not offer a new home yet. The stark factuality of the director as narrator is enormously unsettling because it describes the irreversibility of this emotional state precisely.
On the visual level, dark spots eat into idealised images of home, until the planes become deadlocked in abstraction. The pictures were created on a so-called pinscreen. Reliefs can be “painted” and animated by the pins’ shadows on this screen on which around 200,000 pins are arranged in lines. The alternation of light and shadow and their immediate proximity lend drastic expression to the inner turmoil and ambivalence.

The Western culture of self-optimisation is based on the idea that one can control all aspects of life. This VR experience subjects us to a psychological experiment, confronting us with feelings such as frustration, helplessness, stress, rage and grief to show: Control is an illusion. Step by step, we are led from physical activation to contemplative perception.

Lebanese filmmaker Dima El-Horr moved to Paris several years ago. Among the friends who stayed at home is the artist Sirvat Fazlian, whom she regularly visits in Beirut until the failed revolution of 2019, the COVID lockdown, the devastating port explosion and finally the dramatic economic crisis put a temporary end to their meetings. So the director decides to give her conversations with Siro a cinematic form.

Ever since the death of her husband, the well-known Armenian actor Berj Fazlian, Siro has lived alone in a flat filled with souvenirs and devoted most of her time to music and painting. In this film, footage from the years before 2019 blends with recorded phone calls between Siro and Dima and recent scenes from Paris, coming together in a densely woven portrait of life in exile. While snow falls in Paris, Siro talks about warm days on the Mediterranean coast and sings Armenian songs. She rails against the permanent crisis in Lebanon, but her nature is not affected. For one thing, Siro personifies the legendary Lebanese resilience. Yet for the filmmaker she represents that part of the heart that people in exile leave behind. So almost inevitably, “Conversations with Siro” becomes the director’s dialogue with herself.

Michèle Bokanowski’s sounds have been a distinct part of Patrick Bokanowski’s film images since 1972. The origin of her soundtracks often lies in noises that are quite unlike music. Thus, she uses the clacking of billiard balls to describe people working on a field in the distance. Between tape loops and electronic devices, the composer talks about her craft of shaping sonorous material.

Spitting ponies, a cursed TV reporter and a hairy giant who is lovingly combed by his brunette girlfriend while she develops inexplicable fears about her own foot. This will later literally be shot off – the foot, not the boyfriend! A faceless man is also there – acting in alliance with the ponies. This colourful, ominous animated thriller made in analogue cut-out technique addresses states of anxiety, masochistic fights and media criticism. Perhaps.

Summer, dust, a burning sun. It is stock car race season, a loud, aggressive show that leaves only smashed carcasses of cars in the end. After each lap, the dents are worked over with heavy hammer blows before the damaged racing cars are sent back on the smoky track. The audience are standing at the edge of the sand pit and can’t get enough of the pile-ups.
From off screen, the director gives a matter-of-fact account of the violent relationship in which she got caught up at the age of 18 and from which she only managed to free herself two years later. She analyses precisely what happened to her back then, using the dented, destroyed vehicles as a powerful metaphor for her injured body. The interplay of images and words is spot-on – like precisely placed knife stabs.

Made at the start of the pandemic, Lee Anne Schmitt’s most recent short contrasts the tranquillity of nature with a sense of underlying dread at the state of the world, even if the former is hardly immune from the latter. The lush leaves, lithe stems and blooms of all shapes and colours seen through frames both round and rectangular feel in perfect harmony with the gentle clang of the wind chimes, until Schmitt’s voice interrupts the calm to tell of how they decided to pack the car and leave. The recurring shot of a forest, with clouds slowly billowing forth in the gap between the trees. Fog or smoke? “Nothing’s where it’s supposed to be”.