
Berlin-based Milena Gierke’s Super 8 films exist within a small yet formidable tradition of experiential diary and portrait films that combine playfulness with innovative seriousness. She studied experimental film at… Read More
Berlin-based Milena Gierke’s Super 8 films exist within a small yet formidable tradition of experiential diary and portrait films that combine playfulness with innovative seriousness. She studied experimental film at… Read More
Columbus gazes happily from the wings of the dove that carries him over and through the world. Visualised by a papercut, a profile that seems to consist only of a nose and a single eye, he appears as an anti-version of the explorer – mischievous, down-to-earth, completely without ambitions of wanting to claim ownership. It’s an unusual protagonist Sonja Rohleder has animated here in co-direction with Veronika Samartseva for Keimzeit’s song Kolumbus, and yet, it’s prototypical of Rohleder’s animation style and production process. Read More
“Please Stop Breaking the Windows. Still Occupied,” a text panel that casually appears in Marian Mayland’s first single-channel video work, already pointing in the direction of her later films. Read More
Birgit Hein was among the most important figures of avant-garde film culture in Germany and Europe. Along with her ex-husband and collaborator Wilhelm Hein, she led film into radical and uncharted territories, concerning herself unreservedly with the development, criticism and dissemination of avant-garde film.
She passed away in February 2023 at the age of 80, leaving behind a trail of pioneering accomplishments, singular in their scope and significance. Read More
An image that fits to a T – what is that exactly? And what precedes it – perhaps another image, one before the inner eye, or merely just a vague thematic hunch? These are questions that arise quickly when you explore and engage yourself with Volker Schlecht, who pivots back and forth between the moving and the non-moving image. Read More
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
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
“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
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
Little effort is required when gleaning facts from the available databases. We soon discover here that the non-profit Chemnitz Filmworkshop is a media-education institute that “promotes young filmic talent”. Its headquarters and official address is the Clubkino Siegmar cinema, which was entrusted to the association in 1996. But what exactly lies behind these sobering facts and figures, behind these ideas, which is far greater than them and has already been lived out for decades by the out-and-out filmmakers from Chemnitz? Read More
Sophie Linnenbaum, who was born in Nuremberg in 1986, is an observer of small everyday moments and human encounters. Yet her films are not intended to be understood as pure entertainment. Nor do they let themselves be casually consumed and then founder in our memories overflowing with moving images. Read More
Whenever Alex Gerbaulet says the word »I« in her works, she is also always saying »history« and vice versa. Read More
For his short film with the striking German title of PROLL!, the filmmaker Adrian Figueroa received the German Short Film Award in November 2021: Consisting of a golden metal band set on a base and swirling upwards spiral-like, as tall perhaps as a bottle of champagne. Congratulations!
Adrian Figueroa comes from theatre. Having grown up in Frankfurt am Main, he took drama studies and applied theatre in England, gaining an education that was as theoretical as it was practical. Read More
Anne Isensee likes getting right to the point. And that in both her works and conversation. With her at times very short films, the animator artist who lives in Berlin has enjoyed success at numerous festivals for years now. In 2017, she achieved an impressive debut with her mere 101-second-long film “Mega Trick” (2017), which garnered the Golden Dove for the Best German Short Film at the DOK Leipzig International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. Read More
“Everyone can see that your body is high-class. You have to make something out of it. Why are you so sad? You haven’t been sitting in front of the TV of life, you have been active. What a guy!” – an off-screen male voice accompanies Max the model as he rambles around looking for a hotel in a city where a male-model killer is up to mischief. The video piece “pretty boyz don’t die” (2016) forms the beginning to the “pretty pretty mad sad” (2016-18) four-part short film series and is the first filmic work by the writer and filmmaker Jovana Reisinger. Read More
Victor Orozco Ramirez is a filmmaker with all his heart and soul. Living in Germany since 2002, the Mexican by birth has been a long-established name in the German… Read More
Fragmentary memories act like a common thread, taking us through the works of Sylvia Schedelbauer as they oscillate between experimental and essay-film genres, and which could also be called “filmic… Read More
Nicolaas Schmidt used to be a musician, he founded a virtual support group on sunsets, and has held exhibitions of colours, objects and photos. He usually works alone, having started with photography and filmmaking at almost the same time, before soon moving on to installative pieces in real and virtual spaces. In his work, people are confronted by spaces, objects and non-human animals that are almost their equals, for Schmidt is an explorer of balance. Schmidt’s films intervene in an “ordered” – i.e. hierarchical – perception of reality, and it is only the isolation of the cinema auditorium that lets us succumb to their open, flowing and circulating structures. Read More
Bereits fünf Filme entstanden aus der mittlerweile mehrjährigen Zusammenarbeit von Clara Winter und Miguel Ferráez, tatsächlich ist das dynamische Duo in allen selbst vor der Kamera aktiv und versucht, sich an zunehmend ausgestellten Positionierungen, Halbfiktionen und Zeichenspielen. Bei ihrer Begegnung trafen filmische Stile aufeinander, die verschiedener kaum sein konnten – das Resultat waren neue Fragen und Methoden. Die Filme der beiden protokollieren neben ihren expliziten Fragestellungen zu sozialem Status und Nationalität allem voran eine künstlerische Evolution und die Entwicklung eines transkulturellen Stils. Ihre Experimente wirken sowohl im Verhältnis zum deutschen, als auch mexikanischen Kino erfreulich deplatziert. Read More
Marvelling at the everyday, such as chance refractions of light, passing shadows, or a carelessly dropped handkerchief being blown by the wind almost gracefully across the ground – in the face of our fast-moving world, these brief observations of random phenomena seem to have ever-decreasing significance. With hardly any place left in our everyday lives for pausing and perceiving all that plays out quietly in our immediate surroundings. This is not so with Gunter Deller, who has made the marvelling at everyday phenomena his filmic practice. Read More
A fleeting view of a garden through a window. The sky a radiant blue, completely cloudless. A close-up of an insect, intently pursuing its purpose. In James Edmonds’ filmic universe,… Read More
Just a lovely animal. In “Buck Fever”, a video work from the NEOZOON female artist collective, armed people kill non-human animals for pleasure, and then pose beside the carcasses for… Read More
Spengemann, Eichberg, Goldkamp, Hans – four names arranged in a circle appear at the end of the credits of several short films that were made in the context of the HFBK Hamburg (University of Fine Arts Hamburg) since 2014. The four filmmakers flippantly describe the logo, composed of their surnames, as a “sticker”: a sticker can be attached to a film, but should not infringe upon it in any way. Read More
“I’d like to create images that fuel the illusions of memory,” says the artist Robert Seidel (1), who positions his work between film and projection art. This conflicting field of… Read More
“I’m a fan of fast movies,” says Brenda Lien. She values aesthetic compositions that get to the point. Beauty videos and make-up tutorials, cat films and digital meditation sessions: Over… Read More
Lina Sieckmann and Miriam Gossing have known each other since their youth, having both grown up in the same small town and studied at The Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). Still, it took years until they became a team in terms of their artistic endeavours. Read More
Since the beginning of the 2000s, Stefan Panhans has made a name for himself with works that refuse to be clearly assigned to an artistic genre or field of practice and entwine still and moving, as well as found and newly created images and spaces within constantly changing constellations. Doing so, he works with photography in which filmic plots are intimated, video installations that merge elements of theatre and computer games, texts that evolve like fictions you can enter, and performances that become films. He produces images of a present that is defined by the rhythms of goods and media consumption, that prefabricates their promises of salvation in the form of advertising, therapies and lifestyles and, doing so, fans the desires for the authentic and the immediate at the same time, and lets them ossify in their own clichés. Read More
Just the first few seconds of this film are enough to create an all-pervading sense of oppression that predominates for the next 15 minutes. “Berlin Metanoia” is a dark, almost (hellishly) dreamlike trip into the innermost realms of a city that loves to market itself as young and cool, but which has lost its soul somewhere between hipsterism, tourist onslaughts and hype. In his latest short fiction film, which celebrated its premiere at the 2016 Berlinale, Erik Schmitt approaches the latent psychotic Berliner identity with an intensity that continues to reverberate for a long time afterwards. Read More
Lukas Marxt wasn’t particularly surprised when Adam Hyman of the LA Film Forum told the audience at the Goethe Institute Los Angeles they need not worry about the narrative of… Read More
The films by Kyne Uhlig and Nikolaus Hillebrand are full of things that you would usually find in the kitchen or a closet. Gherkins march in step, spoons develop a dubious life of their own and lonely socks desperately search for their better halves. The filmmakers, who live and work together in Cologne and go by the name of “niky-Bilder”, prefer to use everyday as well as lost-and-found objects and breathe new life into them for their animated films – and that’s especially practical considering that they live right next door to their studio, making it easier to, whenever the need arises, place the contents of their domestic cupboards in the spotlight. Read More