Portrait

The German short film scene encompasses a large number of innovative filmmakers who have deliberately chosen to go the independent route or who, in addition to feature film projects, continue to shoot short films as well. In the “Portrait” section, shortfilm.de will feature reguarly a cameo of one of these filmmakers.

Portrait

“Limited Possibilities Create Freedom” –
The Animation Filmmaker Sonja Rohleder

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

Portrait

The X Factor, Birgit Hein – writing, filmmaking, and curating in the 1970s

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

Portrait

Volker Schlecht: Seeking the Right Image

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

Portrait

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

Portrait

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

Portrait

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

Portrait

Chemnitz Filmworkshop

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

Portrait

Adrian Figueroa

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

Portrait

Anne Isensee

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

Portrait

The gaping wound – Jovana Reisinger’s humoristic exposures of current role inscriptions

“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

Portrait

Nicolaas Schmidt and His Microscopic Cinema

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

Portrait

Steps within Crises
Notes on the Filmic Encounters of Clara Winter and Miiel Ferráez

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

Portrait

Everyday Marvels: Film Portrait of Gunter Deller

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

Portrait

In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middleway Spells Certain Death
The film collective Spengemann / Eichberg / Goldkamp / Hans

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

Portrait

Almost Faint or the Like.
The Video Works of Stefan Panhans

Ein junger Mann mit rot-schwarzer Kappe schaut in die Kamera. Er trägt eine Kapuze mit Fellbesatz

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

Portrait

Erik Schmitt

Kurzfilm Nun sehen Sie Folgendes von Erik Schmitt: ein Mann mit Brille und Schnurrbart schaut durch eine Lupe in die Kamera. Durch die Lupe wirkt sein rechtes Auge unnatürlich vergrößert.

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