After studying at the German Academy of Film Art Potsdam-Babelsberg, Karlheinz Mund made this documentary tour of Jewish cemeteries in Berlin. The gravestones preserve the names of famous and unknown people. They preserve their places of death, where no distinction was made between the famous and the unknown: Auschwitz, Mauthausen. When the West German Short Film Festival invited Mund’s film, the committees in charge enforced one distinction after all: The images of graves defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti taken from the West German press were allowed to remain, footage of the same content filmed in East Berlin had to be removed for the theatrical release in the GDR.

In 1945, the Red Army are advancing on German territory, the Second World War is drawing to an end. Families are still trying to escape to America, but many plans fail. Five-year-old Sophie also loses her father and mother during the flight. They are killed by Nazi officer Scharf and a Soviet soldier named Vasily, with Hitler Youth Beckmann as a witness. The gruesome event takes place in an extremely strange hotel which henceforth will bind the four survivors to its premises in bizarre ways, no matter which rooms of the truly scary building they find themselves in. Up in the lounge, where the new customers arrive one by one, down in the kitchen, where the now grown-up Sophie prepares food, or even in an alcove near the elevator shaft, where Beckmann hides with the rats. The involuntary permanent guests age but never tire of courting Sophie.
Heinrich Sabl has built an excitingly disturbing dollhouse decorated with quotes from reality for the German-Soviet history of guilt and coping. In his first feature-length animated film, on which the director worked for more than twenty years, he sends extraordinary characters on an equally extraordinary visual and acoustic time journey through the war-damaged suites of the 20th century.

Cristobal, a young fisherman at work outside the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, shares his insights: Fishing is harder than working out. Also, he and the sea are connected by a progressing disease. At night he perceives what can only be grasped from the boat: the chemicals flowing into the water, the smell, the red lights of the steel mill. “Men of Salt” tells of a dilemma: What if you identify with an ecosystem that’s ceaselessly being abused?

The black circle becomes a round creature, becomes a worm, becomes a whale, becomes a swimmer, becomes a little deer. Coloured shapes playfully flow in and out of each other and transform. But before you can get dizzy, the little deer winks and runs away. A film that shows that everything is made up of many parts and that ultimately, we are all connected.

A colourful luminous river flows through the black void. Geometrical surfaces dance in small repeating loops around wondrous organic plants. The abstract lines, rectangles and semicircles briefly form animated figures. Tina Turner’s classic in the musical interpretation of Miles Davis and the animated visual world of Irina Rubina and Michelle Brand.

Three years before the Watergate affair brought down Richard Nixon, de Antonio exposed the President as a charlatan in this cruel and funny material montage. From an interview in the “Minutes” of the 1972 Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche: Question – “In each of your films, you expose a major American institution […]. Which did you choose for ‘Millhouse’?” De Antonio’s answer – “Nothing less than the traditional political process as a whole. The film is by no means a personal attack on Nixon. To expose a political opponent, all you need to do is rent a hall for him. The film attacks the American system, the credibility of this system, by turning on the perfect symbol of this system, the President.”

A feeling of fear spreads: In an apartment building, the stairs follow no logic, men get lost with a wardrobe, everyone is lonely. The surreal threat suddenly becomes real when security agents ring the doorbell: “Csengőfrász”, the symbol for the arbitrary arrest of citizens allegedly hostile to the state from the time of the Hungarian Uprising.

See the Sphinx, Ancient Rome and the Eiffel Tower – all in one day! This 360° film is a visit to a miniature park and to the work of the Creator who builds it. By toying with our sense of scale, “Minitourism” engages with ideas of world-building and virtual reality as a medium. Both playful and contemplative, it invites us to consider the ways we build our world.

More than twenty years have passed since the death of Catalan architect Enric Miralles. He left iconic traces with his buildings, not just in and around Barcelona – the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh is also based on his designs. Maria Mauti chooses a poetic approach to her impressive protagonist, in eleven variations. They take us from the Igualada cemetery to a community centre in Hostalets de Balenyà, a gym in Huesca or the Torre Marenostrum office skyscraper in Barcelona. The architect’s home with its open and at the same time labyrinthine character is given a major role, becoming the starting point and epicentre of a unique mind.
Maria Mauti carefully scans the still lively architectures, stages them. In Huesca, the smell of a sweating soccer team seems to mingle with the omnipresent cool raw concrete, while a group of Spanish cowboys and cowgirls shake their leather boots in the futuristic community centre. Despite the tragic note that comes from the work of the prematurely deceased, “Miralles” is not without a certain wit. This poised essay which combines personal and theoretical statements achieves a multi-layered quality that is in itself evocative of a Miralles design: airy and dense, abrupt and fluid, always idiosyncratic.

A fly rotates around a lightbulb, a spoon turns in a cup. Everything moves in circles here, including the life of the couple. He looks at his mobile phone, she does the sun salutation. Even her somersaults don’t make him look up. The minimalist black and white animation begins to vibrate. The monotony gets out of rhythm. She imagines him as a fly and chases him. Scenes of a marriage, reflected in the yellow eyes of a gecko.

Somewhere in the eternal ice. All around nothing but snow and pleasant silence. Until a helicopter lands to drop off a group of tourists. A few quick photos are taken and off they go. The uninvited guests leave behind a pile of rubbish – and a small dog who is suddenly quite lost. Four snow hares take heart-warming care of him.

Ginkgo trees are separated by sex; only the female trees bear fruit. Once highly esteemed as natural sources of health, city dwellers today object to their pungent smell and, as gardeners, prefer the less complicated, more fragrant “fruitless” male plants. Tang Han explains with infographics, apt short sound comments and sympathetic objectivity.

There’s probably no other citizen of Gelsenkirchen who has ever mastered Nō singing and playing the Shakuhachi flute as authentically as Uwe Walter. He has lived in the mountain village of Miyama north of Kyoto for three decades and emulates the local residents, whether they earn their living on the fields, breeding cattle or hunting. People tend their gardens, repair fences to keep away the macaques and grow their own rice. Uwe has become perfectly Japanese, at one with his environment.

However well-suited his Ruhr area wit makes him as a figure of identification, the camera keeps a respectful distance, more reserved than Uwe himself. Only at one point does it come touchingly close: When he is forced to say goodbye to an essential part of his past in the interest of the village community. But the real subject of this film is not the German with his greyish blonde curls but rather that very community, portrayed by Rainer Komers in bittersweet polyphony. It emerges in the children’s games, the adults’ pursuits and the old people’s tales, in the summer downpours of the rainy season, the white moon over the nocturnal village and the blood-red leaves of autumn.

Using the Scanimate video synthesizer, da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa del Giocondo embarks on a surreal journey through real and artificial landscapes. In doing so, Toshio Matsumoto projects a kind of fantasy world of electronic images, exploding colour and movement onto his subject, animating Mona Lisa into a shimmering psychedelic vision accompanied by an abstract electronic soundtrack.

In Hamsterland, everybody is 100 percent happy. Their religion is statistics and the perfect employee is young, a team player and stress-resistant. Even the most mindless computer jobs and piece work drudgery are fun, without exception. Until one day something goes wrong after all and the mantras “think positive” and “follow your dreams” are temporarily silenced. An entertaining polemic on hyper capitalist, neoliberal societies that makes you smile.