PROGRAMME ADVISORY BOARDS

If everything changes, what will become of us?
Comments on the Long Documentary Advisory Board’s 2024 programme selection

The world, where it changes, may make us feel alien. What we used to know disappears and makes way for the new: tourists enter the scene, engineering facilities spring up, progress takes its toll. Our films tell such stories.

Suzanne is still able to lead the life of her ancestors in the High Vosges of France, but her decision smells of resistance to the modern world.

In Colombia, on the banks of the Red River, people have just left behind a time of civil war. But this also means that their habitat is now catching up with globalization, to which they will have to adapt.

Gerlach, a Dutch farmer, tries to withstand suburbanisation in an increasingly hostile environment.

On the Adrian Sea coast of Italy, by contrast, rural transformation seems to be complete, with every square metre and every hand put into service to fulfil the bathing tourists’ needs. The world becomes a commercial zone.

Against this background, we were keen to explore films that depict cultural obstinacy.

Angeli, who has come to complete a voluntary social year in Germany, is entering a new and alien world. People put in some effort to be welcoming, but effort alone is not enough to make a country hospitable.

In Antier Noche, young people from Spain must face the constraints of modern life but also manage to play with them in their cinematic setting and, within it, eventually reclaim their rural environment.

Similarly impressive is the story of Atirkül, a Kyrgyz woman committed to the traditional horseback sport of Buzkashi, who enters a men’s domain to take control of change herself.

In Mexico, the Tsotsil people show remarkable spiritual perseverance in their religious rituals and manage to remain largely immune to the logic of commercial exploitation.

The stories vary, but all of them show the pressure of change and how people muster their strength and great capabilities to cope with our present and build bridges between the past and the future.

Long Documentary Advisory Board
Madeleine Küssel, Sven Wallrath, Gregor Glass, Kenneth Anders

How does a film enter the competition?

We had to review 135 submissions from 25 countries, as long as three minutes or as short as forty-five. Some of them are straightforward in telling a life story, some experiment with cinematic refinement. Some are meditations on a single thought, some nervously jump from one point to the next. Some use the power of music to colourise their pictures, some draw on authentic soundtracks. They accuse, mourn, ridicule, explain, explore, marvel or orbit around people, places and situations. They are sober, emotional, technically refined or simple, they show the all too familiar or lead us into unknown territory. They reveal glimpses of the world, no more and no less.

Our selection shows snapshots of this variety. All eight short documentaries have impressed us in different ways. We look forward to your openness and the impressions you may share with us in our guestbook or directly in conversation with us and the filmmakers.

Short Documentary Programme Advisory Board
Thomas Winkelkotte, Sven Ahlhelm, Julia Hebestreit, Olaf Schilling

Work or life – is that the question?
About our programme’s short feature films

A migrant worker from Afghanistan is kicked out of his job as a janitor and cleaner in an Iranian office tower after 25 years. Droughts, a locust plague and missing aid money drive a Sardinian small farmer into despair. A mother whose toil as a hairdresser has allowed her son to become an author cannot come to terms with the cultural sector. An old shepherd leaves his herd and village, driven by desire for a change in life. Young Mila, both shielded and imprisoned by the tubular office tract of a small business in the Philippines, and Barbara, an energetic woman who takes in refugees and, in exchange for help in the garden, introduces them to German culture: many of our eleven short feature films picture the fields where day-to-day life and work alternate and collide so impressively that we found it apt to choose Work or life as a title to our programme.

What do we work and what do we live for, and what could an environment look like where those opposite poles enter into a fruitful connection? What does a word like working life mean today? None of the films gives an answer, but all of them force us to contemplate how the contradiction introduced by a small word between work or life, the major nouns of our existence, could be resolved.

The films are worth seeing not just because of the characters they show, the accuracy of the settings they choose and the stories they tell. Many also capture our attention by precise camera work, as in Cross My Heart and Hope to Die, which brings the hopeless conditions of an office worker so close to our eyes that we have no chance to escape and, inevitably, come to dissect the term working life like surgeons, with the ultimate challenge to stitch it back together again so as to make sense of it. Too bad that none of the submissions had enough utopian potential to offer a solution. But, who knows, maybe you will discover something we didn’t. If so, we would be happy to learn about it.

Amidst an intense period of global transformation, we are faced with the same big old questions again: Who am I? Where do I belong? Who and what do I really value? Should I stay where I am or move on to pastures new? These are films about stagnation and change, holding on and letting go, life and death, staying and going. Or, sometimes, about putting up with things you cannot change and feeling liberated just therefore. All of this can be found in our selection of eleven films from six different countries.

Two long-time besties meet in their childhood village and plunge into excessive partying, just like in the good old days. But is it really preferable to stay, or should one move on to the city? A farmer boy is to slaughter a pig for the first time in his life. To kill or not to kill? A group of committed young men are planning a project in their hometown. But who knows what it takes to win over the local politicians? Two men decide to live together in the province. But how openly can they show their love, and will they manage to curb the neighbours? A young widow and her daughter carry on working on their late husband’s and father’s tomato farm. Will they be able to keep it going and make up with each other? On a holiday with his parents, a boy explores his mother’s birthplace on his own. Will he make friends there, and will he get the attention from his parents he so wishes for? Tobi returns to his notoriously rainy village and tries to persuade Lotte of the new life he has found. But what is the difference between tight and nice, and what does it all mean? A young man’s hometown is converted into a holiday resort, and he waits patiently for the changes to come. What’s next, and what happened to the water buffalo? An old fisherman finds a soaked coat with documents in it on the beach. Whose is it, and how did it get there? On a mystic ferry trip, the fragments of passengers’ conversations assemble into a mosaic, but where does the ferry go, after all? A young couple dream of starting all over again together, but will they manage to let go of the things that stifle them?

Where all of this leads us and whether the young couple will leave their home – you will learn it if you stay with us to watch the films. Come and travel with us through all these different worlds and have a look at their inhabitants.

Adrian Stuiber on behalf of the Short Feature Film Programme Board

Short Feature Film Programme Advisory Board
Lars Fischer, Imma Harms, Sascha Leeske, Adrian Stuiber

Animated Film Programme Advisory Board

A great variety of submissions has reached us again this year: kneaded ones, watercoloured ones and ones that used all the finesses of animation. The selection we’ve made is equally colourful and diverse. It seems impossible to put a common denominator to all these cineastic jewels or find a golden thread that would run through all of them. But let’s rewind…

This year’s selection pictures not one detail but every imaginable one. It shows not just one aspect of the world but boldly claims to explain how it came into being at all. In Au huitième jour, we are allowed to witness the genesis of flora and fauna and our entire existence as it springs up from a tangle of gaily coloured wool fibre.

But all things, from the void called forth, deserve … a second look, and that’s why we are not just spectators to this play. We foster our doubts when Antipolis asks humorously about the inmost force which binds the world and guides its course: miraculous matter, the paradox of gravity or even a monster gone wild? And how long will this subtle network of civilization and technology even hold if we stop maintaining it, as happens in PIG?

As we turn our eyes on the trifles of this all-embracing world, we see landscapes, fields and glowing souls that long for a bit of togetherness, as in Bright Souls, and find things vulnerable and worth protecting in human coexistence and separation, as in Dodo and Where Are You, Mr. Wolf?

Then, Stabat Mater shows us how humanness itself becomes a creative force and what the relationship between artist and work can turn into if the creation suddenly starts developing a wilful life of its own…

And then? Then we just tear everything down and go through a disturbing, feverish dream in Manitulation, interpreted in turns by the artist and AI.
To pick up on our thread from the beginning, we might say that this year is dedicated to one thing above all, and that is human relationships – those with our environment and how fragile they can become when nature, technology and creativity come into play. Our selection is to encourage you to rethink your actions and reflect on their consequences for the network of relationships we are all in.

And now, please enjoy ツ

Animated Film Programme Advisory Board
Kathrin Welke, Dominik Zwicky, Jonas Gelschläger, Almut Undisz