The ghost of a former lover lives under Olivia’s bed. Barbara invents fantastic stories to cope with Mauricio’s rejection. Mauricio sinks into the ground with remorse. Ramón develops a deep affection for a talking houseplant that bears Olivia’s features.
This film approaches its thematic core in circles as we are invited to ponder the complexity of human relationships from different perspectives. The twists of glances and emotions of the characters entangled in this round dance are not only reflected in the episodic, cleverly intertwined dramaturgy, but also in the visual design. “Olivia & the Clouds” explores a rich garden of artistic techniques. Figures and places we first encounter as drawings go through transformations and reappear as cardboard collages, watercolours or oil paintings. A multilayered narrative of attraction and revulsion unfolds, revealing new facets of form and content with every change of style. Music light as clouds, brilliant sound design, vibrant colours and not least the occasional digressions towards experimental film enchant us and carry us deep into this surreal story that couldn’t be closer to life.

A tired sun creeps across the horizon for the last time. A cold wind is already blowing over the lake. The migrant birds depart for warmer climes and leave the Nordic natural paradise. Heavy snow showers cover the land with a white coat. The animals condemned to stay – fragile creatures of delicate porcelain – cling to branches, looking for shelter. None of them will escape the frosty grip of the spreading winter. They are observed by a tiny girl, also made of wafer-thin, translucent white ceramics, who is the only one left in the freezing landscape in the end.
Anu-Laura Tuttelberg’s symbolic story is touchingly beautiful and at the same time full of inspiring irritations, because she makes her art run up against the reality of nature. She did not animate her puppets in a warm studio but exposed them to the elements, on location in northern Estonia and an island in the Norwegian Sea. In her film, cruel forces, disturbing fragility and the renewing force of the cold meet – ambivalently and elegantly.

“There was a body that didn’t want to be human. It didn’t know it belonged to someone. To me.” María Cristina Pérez González opens her film with these poetic and cryptic words, diving deep into the visually powerful, hand-painted animation. Associative rather than narrative, the sad voice pulls us into a maelstrom of remembered fragments that all revolve around the protagonist’s body: A voluminous shape that sometimes eats itself with loathing, stretches until it fills the frame or cowers like a pea – in the blackness of the fluid, generous brushstrokes, but above all in its own fleshy self.
There is the estranged sister who once called the feet of this body ugly. The good friend who disappeared without a farewell. The father who once said that all unhappy women grow fat. And most of all there is this nameless figure that lives in her belly and feeds her depression with a cute grin. As so often in life, the only path to contentment is reconciliation. With the sister, of course, but above all with her own body which does not fit into narrow social norms – but is the only one she has. And with which she can dance, jump, and even laugh quite splendidly once she understands that it is not a monster to be fought.

There is no return to paradise. There is a rupture between now and then, the realisation that this place no longer exists. Our protagonist, too, must learn this when she lifts the green of the map beneath her like a blanket to crawl under it with a tomato in her hand – back to Sarajevo, to Yugoslavia. Initially, the strangeness of the return flight with its obligatory tomato juice is as nostalgically exciting as the smiley stickers that are everywhere. But by the time she reaches her parents’ home, the past catches up with her completely: In the corridor of the deserted flat, bullet holes cast cones of light on old family photos and when she opens the fridge, the sight of a single tomato suddenly triggers memories of bombs and explosions.
Matea Radic finds haunting and original images to visualise her own traumatic experience of the Bosnian War and its confusing entanglement with her haptic and sensual childhood memories – complete with Dadaistic advertisements for Šipad furniture and Bosnian melodies. Her generous and yet spare animation style brings out the childlike wonder of her protagonist beautifully. She stalks through the world with scraped knees in a babydoll dress. And she learns that it is sometimes okay not to stick a smiley on things but perhaps a band-aid.

How does it feel when your body becomes a different one? Milla Cummings and Geneviève Tremblay explore (peri)menopause with a physical, concrete approach: The menopause they show is a living stop-motion organism, a cave with pulsating walls where a naked elderly woman gently inters her last eggs. From offscreen, a number of mature women recount their experiences – of dry skin, especially in the vaginal area, of rage against the universally asserted sex appeal of aging men, and of the increasing loss of their social visibility.
For every negative aspect, these worldly-wise narrators formulate a counterpoint or constructive course of action in authentic audio recordings. And they also report on the positive sides of this drastic transformation: The energy that the body would have reserved for childbearing along with the eggs is now released for new projects! On screen, a curtain aptly opens to offer a view of a shimmering, glittering foam of possibilities. At the end, our protagonist leaves the cave and climbs the nearest mountain. This film describes more than just arduous passages one has to go through: The “passageways” might just as well be transitions to a new life.

It’s Hungary in the early 1990s and Ákos, Petya and Laci, too, are young and need the money. The Iron Curtain has fallen, Europe lies at the friends’ feet, but train tickets to Stockholm, Paris, Berlin or Madrid are almost unaffordable for ordinary people. Far from losing courage, the three develop a clever method to enjoy the new freedom to travel: They forge the official tickets, still handwritten on carbon copy forms, bleaching the carbon ink out with sanitiser, ironing the paper smooth and dry, getting some stamps, researching the operating procedures of the national railway, studying timetables, prices and routes and filling in the boxes on the forms again. And off they go. But that is not the end of the story. A feeling of blind infatuation sets a business idea in motion. How about making these very special tickets available to others in need? One becomes ten, 150 soon become 1,000 – until a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities begins.
László Csáki’s scintillating gangster comedy is loaded with contemporary history. His excellent montage of drawn fiction, authentic film documents and memoirs broadens our view of the suspended years of social upheaval in his Hungarian homeland.

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 …

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.

The two main characters of this film seem made for each other. They literally fit together, merge into each other, melt into a colourful, psychedelic, swirling whole. They function together, until one of them disconnects. The madness of this riot of colours turns into a dark nightmare when the one left behind re-absorbs the other by force. Against her will, the renegade must now be sewn to her partner. The once flourishing relationship degenerates into an irritating visual and audio chaos of aggressively twitching drawings and shattered sounds. Impaled on a gnarly tree, the couple’s bodies decay. As they are dying away, darkness turns into light and fresh blossoms open on the pale bones.

Inspired by the estate of a Romanian photographer in which 5,000 glass plate negatives from the 1930s to the 1950s survived undiscovered for a long time, a touching love story evolves. In 1939, Anna Florea meets the young soldier Jean Mihail in her home village in Bukovina. A moonshine kiss seals their affection. But all too soon, Jean is ordered to the frontline. His passionate letters keep the connection alive. But when Anna must flee the site, the contact breaks off.
Their great love is fragile, damaged by war and time – just like the old studio and everyday photographs this animated documentary uses to illustrate optimism and impending loss. Anna Florea herself narrates the film: in retrospect, at the age of 91. Her warm and gentle voice reanimates the memories seemingly stored in these pictures. Those “frozen” on the photographic plates begin to move, are made to glow in oil-on-glass overpaintings, blossom and take us with them into the past.

The inhabitants of a village witness an unusual event. The religious figures that surround them come alive and leave their accustomed places. The statues step down from shrines and niches, from altars and pedestals. They turn their backs on the village. Nobody knows where they are heading and why they are departing.

Most of the people are frozen in religious adoration, but some of them overpower a statue of the Virgin Mary and smash it on the ground. The fragments of the broken statue, however, live on, and are still heading away. A young girl – born boneless and unable to move without help – manages to make contact with one of the departing statues.

Dreamy animated images in detailed henna painting and atmospheric watercolours dominate a young Spanish artist’s moving journey of discovery. In a small bookshop in India, Inés comes across the feminist-utopian science fiction story “Sultana’s Dream.” It is about the terrible revenge on men, the bookseller explains. In the slim volume she wrote in 1905, Rokeya Hossain describes the fantasy realm of Ladyland – a land in which women are self-determined and live in peace, in which they run all government affairs and all forms of education are open to them. And the men? Their place in Ladyland, the bookseller continues, is where they belong: locked up at home.

Fascinated by the literary “painting” of this place and its inventor, Inés sets out in the footsteps of the writer and teacher Hossain, who championed education and equal rights for Indian girls and women as early as the beginning of the 20th century. The trip takes the Spaniard across contemporary India. Her companions are the dreams of Ladyland – and the utterly different realities of the lives of the women she meets on her journey.

Barcelona, 1991. Juanjo has to repeat the last school year. His new teacher seats him in the last row next to Miquel, who is not exactly happy about this. The two have to write an essay together on the same afternoon. A disagreeable task that is gradually forgotten as they discover that they share a great passion: music!

Juanjo comes from sheltered circumstances, his family pamper him. Miquel is the son of a single mother who could hardly manage to take care of his two siblings without his support. Heavy Metal becomes the refuge and central node of their friendship. Screeching guitars and screamed vocals – with a few remarkable exceptions – are the soundtrack of this exciting but warm-hearted and gentle story that allows a glimpse into the souls of two teenage boys. The film’s visual design is consistently pared down – to the point of leaving out whole sections of the background and character portrayal. The directors’ poignant use of distinctive striking visual elements takes us ingeniously into the world of the two friends. A wonderful journey into a time of changes, insights and growth.

The winter’s night draws its last breaths in the milky amber glow of the street lights. Snowflakes trickle down, the camera slowly circles a small guardroom in a driveway. Night after night, this lonely island is occupied by: Nobody. As a security guard in the cold, he guarantees the safety of the warm homes and their owners. He passes the time with a recalcitrant oil radiator, a calendar girl on a green meadow and his meandering thoughts. His security logs serve as a seismograph of reflections on life and nightly rounds of the square. Nobody is wrapped in a shell of coolness grown over a long time, which makes it hard for him to react to a rare smile the way he would like to in his heart.
Nadia Hallgren and Jamie-James Medina condense an autobiographical short story by artist and musician Willis Earl Beal aka “Nobody”. The actor Michael K. Williams, who died in 2021, lent his voice to this inner monologue and gives it a sleepy, melodious sound. In this very cinematic, melancholy piece in a state of limbo, casual observations open a philosophical cosmos. But every time the journey of the mind crashes on the tarmac of the carpark in front of the block of flats.

Poland, 1981. Six friends squeeze into an old car that is far too small and set out for the Polish Baltic coast, fuelled by their longing for freedom. The further they come, the clearer the decrepit state of their country emerges. The pension where they spend the night has nothing that could be served for breakfast. Food and fuel are also in short supply elsewhere. There is a shortage of everything. The only thing one can buy anytime and anywhere is booze, which is plentiful. Just like the country, the car also falls apart piece by piece. But the trip continues, past demonstrating crowds, tanks, barricades and armed policemen.
Singing, laughing and carefree, Leszek and his companions finally make it to the sea. Is this the end of their journey? Or should they join the hundreds of thousands who have already left Poland? The borders of the frame, at least, are open. The sparse, fragmented graphic elements on the empty white background hardly seem an incentive to stay. There is no obstacle that could keep the friends from setting off for new shores.

Into a starry sky full of coloured spots! The propellers have been revved up. Accompanied by the drone and roar of the engine, the aircraft takes off. Its mission, to be followed live: compare images, sort out, superimpose, create a visual reality of dots and pixels. A park is requested, but with how many trees? A racy car is dreamt of, but which design is sleek enough? The variables dictated by the pilot determine what appears on the monitor – sculptures of possibilities or morphed set pieces. The tank is filled with millions of continuously flowing images for an infinite number of combinations. But who controls the projected flight path?
Aurelijus Čiupas’s short film essay is a well-considered and not unironic investigation of ethical and philosophical questions. What can and should animation generated by artificial intelligence based on diffusion models do? Pilot Čiupas prescribes “a kind of artificial dementia” to the machine. We can truly watch it come to rest, come to transcendence. The world of images dissolves back into a cosmos of coloured spots.