All Films in Competition

Music animation for the song “Be Gone” by electronicore band KNIVESRAIN. By exploring the possibilities of combining AI-generated content with hand-drawn 2D animation, it tells a story of a mobile phone that experiences the plight of modern people in a serendipitous epiphany, learning what it means to be human between life and death.

That night, a lady met a group of lovely beasts – gigantic slimy cheesy ones.

The animation was largely formed from a series of biro drawings from my sketchbook depicting moments of restlessness and increased anxiety during a sleepless night. I drew upon my experiences of trying to sleep in a century which seems to only offer up ever worsening news and dire forecasts for our future with no solutions in sight for our predicament. Another source of inspiration are my personal experiences with hypnopompic hallucinations, which occur as you awake and the tricks my brain can play on me as it tries to make sense of the impoverished images my ageing eyes send it in the darkness of the night.

Bell Jarred was filmed under quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic; showing the home as a container and smaller containers within the home depicts a state of confinement. The film is an indefinite cycle of passing time. Life thirsts for more as it rattles around inside recursive vivaria. Skeletal remains and empty plant pots become ominous gnomons outside. Home is a bell jar—we are its contained specimen. The viewer is placed inside a bottle, protected from precipitating events. Air and sun circle above carrion as dust collects on isolatory stillness. Tintinnabulation of bottles, curtains, locks, cicadas and wind chimes resonate within interior spaces.

A brief nightmarish visit to an invisible factory of the inner mind. (Stop-Motion and Light Painting).

“Blue Curtain” is the first film in an ongoing series of films inspired by my visit to an exhibition of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe. The wonderful paintings gave me the idea that I can make films less as a filmmaker and more with the sensibility of a painter. This means I start with a certain color or texture instead of a story or a concept and go from there. Also I let my experiences with analog work on 16mm film flow into my work with the digital medium. (Philipp Ramspeck)

Sober and short kept notebook entries, piled up within a period of 40 years, are the starting point for a fragmented cinematic approach to an attitude to life. It brews, it nearly boils over, but the lid is solid on the pot. States of anxiety and trepidation are fought against with pills. War memories try to creep via dreams on the surface. A swallow flies inside through a window and Jürgen disappears in an earth hole.

The reality of beach snails is not that much different from human lives, filled with an intricate interplay of social interaction and solitude, curiosity about the world and its rigid rules, fleetingness of life and the resilience to go on.

Mankind has long debated the meaning of life without knowing that it has long been found in some places. This is the formation of strange dance patterns.

DANCING IN THE SHADOWS is the story of a lonesome and deflated figure who aimlessly roams the metropolis at night. They gradually realise that their shadow has come to life, moving freely from and separate to its owner.

Their shadow soon discovers new ways to move and dance. The protagonist is first apprehensive about their shadow’s new found rhythm of movement, but as they chase their shadow through the streets, they are soon mesmerised.

Their shadow then encounters another shadow, together they coalesce and dance, transcending their figures into a new dimension, forming a unison through dance.