Alison Kuhn is one of Germany’s most interesting young filmmakers – she is a writer, actress and director and has made a name for herself in recent years with multiple… Read More
Interview with Alison Kuhn
“The short film is not some proof of potential – it stands for itself”
An interview with Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck, head of Berlinale Shorts, together with an overview of events related to short film at the Berlinale, the largest audience festival in the world. Read More
Interview with Thea Sparmeier and Jakob Werner
Thea Sparmeier and Jakob Werner are two of the three directors of the film GLÜCKPFAD (Happy Trail), which premiered at DOK Leipzig in 2021. For Talks’n’Topics, they talk to Sven… Read More
The Film Critique’s Fear of Animation Film
An Interminable Polemic
Wann eigentlich ist der Zeichentrickfilm ins Hintertreffen geraten gegenüber einer Fülle von Animationsfilmen unterschiedlicher Techniken? Man merkt: Wenn ich nun laut über Berührungsängste der Filmkritik mit dem Animationsfilm nachdenke, begebe ich mich auf gefährliches Glatteis. Read More
Nikita Diakur
An Avatar to Combat Fakes
The avatar trembles, barely able to stay up on its legs, then it falls over, its arms flailing. “Attempting a backflip is not safe. You can break your neck, or land on your head, or land badly on your wrists. None of that is nice, so my avatar does the trick,” an emotionless voice explains. The voice is that of animation director Nikita Diakur, distorted using voice cloning software. Yet its dry humour does manage to penetrate even through the manipulative software coils. Read More
Reflecting Diversity: German Shorts Presented at the Locarno Film Festival
Known for its intriguing curatorial choices, Locarno Film Festival does not make an exception at the time of preparing the selection of its Pardi di Domani short film section… Read More
The reel thing – film laboratories between industry and art
It is a world of its own, the world of the film labs – especially when referring to the artist-run or self-governing film labs and not the industrial or commercial… Read More
“We believe in short film”
Interview with Giona Nazzaro and Eddie Bertozzi of Locarno Film Festival
Das Festival von Locarno, eines der wichtigsten internationalen Filmfestivals überhaupt, setzt sich traditionell für den Kurzfilm ein. Mit seinen nationalen und internationalen Kurzfilmwettbewerben, aber auch durch die im Februar online stattfindende Shortsweek. Als Giona Nazzaro 2021 als künstlerischer Leiter angetreten ist, hat er dieses Engagement noch verstärkt. Zusammen mit Eddie Bertozzi, der die Kurzfilm-Sektion Pardi di Domani verantwortet, hat er einen neuen Wettbewerb ins Leben gerufen für Filme bereits etablierter Regisseur*innen: Cordi d’autore. shortfilm.de traf die beiden kurz vor dem diesjährigen Festival zum Gespräch über ihren Begriff vom Kurzfilm und ihre Bemühungen, ihn in das gesamte Festival-Ökosystem einzubinden. Read More
Nervous landscapes.
On the films of Ojoboca.
Ojoboca (Anja Dornieden und Juan David González Monroy) machen zugleich mehr und weniger als „Kurzfilme“. Mehr, weil sie neben Filmen auch Performances und Installationen entwickeln, derzeit an ihrem zweiter Langfilm arbeiten und Texte von einer eigenwilligen Literarizität fast alle ihre Bewegtbildarbeiten begleiten. Read More
“I’m a documentary filmmaker.
My films are the news.”
“Are you afraid you’re not actually here,” asks a resounding voice in Gudrun Krebitz’s latest work “Echodrome” as the water ripples and splashes. There it is again – the ‘you’. A hallmark of Krebitz, a word that is at times a dialogic reassurance of the self, often addressing some metaphorical counterpart, or mostly directed at the potential audience. Read More
Anibar: Festival of Possibilities
Travel Notes from Kosovo
“What’s your name, where do you come from? Thanks for being here.” During the storyboard exhibition at the Kosovan Anibar Animation Festival, the volunteers eagerly seek out human contact… Read More
Svaneti International Film Festival
One of Georgia’s best-known toasts goes something like this: When God was apportioning out the land he had just created, he summoned everyone to a meeting. Georgians, of course,… Read More
Armenian Shorts on the Way to the National Cinema Reinvention
The short film form, a synonym for certain artistic freedom in the presumptively dependent on high budgets film industry, could play a crucial part in the process of reinvention of a national cinema. The ingenuity and aesthetic diversity of the newest Armenian short films caught my eye still in 2021 when I first attended Yerevan’s Golden Apricot International Film Festival. Read More
“… I wish I could do more for you, I wish we could do better for you.” [1]
This year in April, a planned film that was never shot served as a pretext for sentencing the Turkish documentary filmmaker and producer Çiğdem Mater to a prison term of… Read More
Jonatan Schwenk
The Story First, Then the Animation
Enraptured, the two-legged creature picks the blissfully smiling axolotl up from the earth and pops it in its mouth. Sheer joy. Doing so, its hands – filigree stick-puppet hands – initially reach out tentatively then greedily for the tasty stop-motion being. In Jonatan Schwenk’s ZOON, over and again we encounter so many nuances and animation techniques, all at the same time. Read More
