Playlist
The earth quakes, ashes fall from the sky, and there's this fire that firefighters don't get to extinguish. The villagers decide to take refuge in the forest. Surronded by wild beasts, a new life begins.
Among other things Anna Vasof´s working method was influenced by precinematic devices stemming from her fascination with the movement of photographic images. These only appear animated given our persistence of vision. Vasof cites the Zoetrope as an example of this phenomenon, a device that filled people of all ages with wonder at fairs of old.
When Time Moves Faster demonstrates Anna Vasof´s unbelievable pleasure in experimentation and simultaneously shares her delight in demonstrating the illusion enabled solely through the medium of cinema. She proceeds similarly in four vivid, separetly titled demonstrative procedures: First, an original action is presented through a performance - the introduction leads to an exciting state of suspense from the start. Vasof spares no effort in converting everyday objects into mechanical constructions necessary for the shooting of her film. We see the artist walking around in shoes to which a roll of paper mounted with photographs is attached; plates painted with images of gear wheels and layered on top of one another in wooden frames are individually smashed to pieces by a hammer; people standing in a circle embody the various phases of walking. My favorite piece is entitled "Travel to the Window". It shows a figure in various phases of swinging printed on curtains swaying back and forth, resulting in a charming animation flooded with light! The viewer has an idea what might happen when the tempo of the sequences accelerates, but it always comes as a surprise how far more complex everything becomes. In the end, our view out the window becomes free and a car passes by: Reality is outside, the illusion is over. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)
Empathy is often a positive emotion, despite the stress it can cause. Here, we experience the ordinary cinematic-dramatic effect of a switch being turned on, then off…
Faced with the threat of blindness, director Manuel von Stürler embarks wholeheartedly on a quest to understand the meaning of visual perception. His Fureur de voir fuels an initiatory journey that immerses us in the universe of vision and seeks to answer the question: What does it mean to SEE?
A group of astronomers go on an expedition to the Moon.
For those who have always wanted to know everything about black holes but never dared to ask...
The film is about an alien boy, Hugo, who's living on a small, far-away planet. One day he gets his first pet as a present – a real scuba diver taken from Earth. His excitement about the diver knows no limits, and in his childlike selfishness he doesn't realize that he's playing his terrible yet cute games with an intelligent human being.
A film made in memory of Bernard Lyot, who was the first, in 1935, to record solar prominences using the coronagraph.
Salt: trace, absence of water, the passage of time, invading epidemic, living cemetery.
Water: manoeuvre, absolute value, fertility, rhizomes, chance.
Cotton: corruption, economic issues, hydrophily, desertification.
The world has become a vast dried out planet, where the growing of cotton, overexploited for economical reasons is the main cause of desertification. A saline desert covers acres of dried-out land where strange salt trees appear.
This phenomenon echoes an even greater ecological disaster, the desertification of the Aral Sea. And man is always responsible...
The day the Americans walked on the moon, all of humanity rejoiced. The French, feeling envious, decided to send someone to the moon. Young Moussa tells us how he was chosen for this particularly unusual journey.
Six families from the same village take the same journey. 3000 km, from Romania to my school. They, who are always imagined to be on the roads, speak to us about the one thing that truly drives them: to one day point to a small square on the map and say, "This is my home."
Close to the rhythm of the music (composed by the group ISAN), parts of the body are enlarged and blurred, complemented by geometric shapes, color fragments, and hand-drawn sequences.
A man is sitting reading the newspaper at a café terrace. As he reaches for his coffee, a terrible fate strikes him.
Dive into the plastisphere by following the adventures of Horsea plasticus, and discover the extent of ocean pollution.
Through a series of chain reactions and loops created in 2D animation, stories unfold before our eyes, between order and chaos, city and nature.
An audio-visualization created from images filmed in the city of Berlin, manipulated and reworked into animation.
A trip towards abstraction, as a hypothesis on how mountains might have been formed.
Mexico - Mariachis, marimbas, and living skeletons. In urban hideouts of this city, small creatures come to life. These creatures are digitally crafted from trash collected from the streets and typical local products. The clicking of their limbs interacts with the soundscapes of Mexico City.
The round-bellied wolf lived with a full belly but entirely empty. One day, by chance, he discovers a hidden talent to finally fill his stomach.
A car drives along the roads of Dakar, amidst all the unusual elements that make up the Senegalese urban landscape.
Blending images of culture and memories of barbarity, Fotograma forms a collection of fragments of a film that must be rewound.
The work of domestic workers represents a real market in Lebanon, segmented according to the national and ethnic origins of the worker, transforming the Lebanese employer into a master and the worker into their property. Director Maher Abi Samra places his camera in the offices of the Al Raed agency. He observes and dissects the components of this system, which is sanctioned by the state.
"Dead Reckoning" is a ride around Vienna's Ringstrasse boulevard and from there to go into the city, to fall, to eat, and finally to end up on the toilet. Death is always there, always in front of us. The film follows the cycle of life, the rhythm of the city. The British-Austrian duo of Susan Young and Paul Wenninger works with animation and stop-motion technology. The filming locations show how Vienna has been influenced by cultures from around the world. An animated skeleton symbolizes the morbid humor of the Viennese and even appears as a grumpy waiter ...
In the city of Merida, Mexico, a group of young urban Maya operate mysterious technological instruments to carry out a kind of archaeological survey of a ruined site. The film prowls the outer limits of science fiction and documentary to deconstruct the imaginary around Mayan culture and identity today.
At night, young Ama and his gang travel through the bush of Boli Bana. Immense and benevolent animals accompany them. They size each other up, search for each other, and tame one another. By day, young Aissita is the focus of the village of Boli Bana. A sorceress has come for a ritual: Aissita is transitioning into adulthood. Through the eyes of these children, the story of a nomadic and mystical world unfolds. A Peul childhood in Burkina Faso.
WEGZAUBERN | spirit away
Video by Betina Kuntzsch
Pictures: 36 laterna magica films from around 1900
Text from the patient records of female artists in the Prinzhorn Collection
Voice: Merrily Jones
Translation: Lucinda Rennison
Waterphone: Joachim Gies
© Betina Kuntzsch 2015
DOK Leipzig 2015 | Goldene Taube | Bester animierter Dokumentarfilm
TRICKY WOMEN Wien 2016 | Special Mention
2FICAE Valencia 2016 | Primer Premio al Mejor Cortometraje de Animación
The issue of fairness arises when two brothers play with plutonium.
In the twentieth century, 5 inventions were dismissed or not be generalized: the durable nylon stocking, the 'Aerotrain', the 'safe cigarette', the water engine and the 'bio-resonance'.
A meditative exploration in a desolate natural environment that appears to emerge from a new world, this film confronts the landscape with music and poetry.
We travel through the glaciers and lava fields of a forming world unspoiled by human activity.
Analytical residues. It all begins whith a mistake. A man spends his whole life expecting a hotline advisor to answer his call. Another makes the earth's circumference in his living room. A group of tourists follows the guide.
Between dream and reality, a woman's consciousness awakens through an inner journey that reflects the world around her.
This film portrays Enzo, a trans FtM (Female to Male). In an intimate atmosphere, he humorously shares his story, his daily life, and the struggles he faces.
How can a person suffering from Alzheimer still tell herself her own life? When words are no longer there, only remain the sensations and the sounds the body remembers. In the community room of an Alzheimer clinic, a music coming from a radio triggers the dancing of an old lady in a wheelchair. Remembering the moves it used to perform, her body brings along a series of sound memories. Entirely drawn and animated from memory, A BIOGRAPHY reconstructs dot by dot this emergence of memory where it is no longer expected, in an effort to keep this body and this life from oblivion.
In 1962, the speleologist Michel Siffre decided to spend two months deep in a cave, without any way to keep track of time. The aim of his isolation was the scientific observation of human rhythm, removed from the alternation of day and night. Outside time, the young man's reason vacillated, his perceptions were modified and he set off on an inner journey in which memories and hallucinations merged.
MERIDIAN PLAIN maps an enigmatic distant landscape excavated from hundreds of thousands of archival still images, forecasting visions of a possible future, transmitted from a mechanical eye.
"With her newest project, the dazzling Meridian Plain, Kraning moves in a slightly different direction, still exploring landscape but this time working from an archive of mechanically captured still images that she laboriously organized and then worked with frame by frame, creating a magisterial portrait of a seemingly otherworldly landscape. It is yet another black-and-white project, and we might consider it not time-lapse so much as space-lapse, wherein spaces collapse and give way to each other. Through her editing, Kraning produces complex visual and almost physical rhythms, moving from staccato pulses and a roiling horizon to hovering and shaking and ultimately disintegration." - Holly Willis
Nature struggles to get its space in a postindustrial scenario, which is controlled by ubiquitous video surveillance cameras. A patrol in an invisibly poisoned environment turns into a transcendent moment.
In an ultra-connected society where electromagnetic waves have invaded almost every space, three people suffering from electromagnetic hypersensitivity talk about survival in a world that seems increasingly inaccessible to them.
I return from a journey to the farthest reaches of childhood, in that land that inexorably disappears into the mists as we travel toward our mature years. This journey, I made it alongside Johannes Dimpflmeier. I've come from afar. Back from a journey to the heart of a man who plays very seriously.
Across the seasons, familiar and wild animals gaze at us beyond any notion of temporality. Immersed in the heart of their "spacetime," open to the world, they send us their thoughts, their very being—living and vacant. Children of nature deprived of language, their world is made of correlations and melodies, while ours is of separation and will. In the face of their deep gazes, what do we experience? In the face of the "silence of beasts," what do we hear?