Anne Isensee

In 2013 Addai joins a salafistic group in Syria. The encounter of Addai's mother with Ilias, a homecomer from Syria, gives rise to invidual fragments, by means of which the story of the son and comrade can be traced.

The Big Bang has nothing on this.

Normally, you would drink a bottle of wine with your friends or family. Assuming you drink at all. But during the Corona confinement, nothing is normal. So a young animator drinks the bottle alone by herself and animates a movie.

What does it mean to make an animated film accessible to people with impaired vision? Can audio description convey what’s happening on the screen and what is, especially in animated film, often entirely a product of the imagination? Anne Isensee (Golden Dove for “Megatrick” in 2017) tackles these complex questions with a light touch, humour and verbal wit. She pulls off the feat of producing a concentrated cinematic investigation into the multi-layered quality of (all) perception.

Most accidents happen at home. Thus the appeal to one’s personal political responsibility comes as a surprise. Randomly reading a Brecht text inspires to take action.

Based on their experiences living and working amongst Soviet-era concrete, panel-block apartments, the filmmaker, together with five visual artists, examine past and present attitudes towards their former homes. Combining touching, personal stories with experimental research on the history of twentieth-century art and architecture, the film creates both a compelling narrative, and a contemporary aesthetic of panel-block mass housing using original watercolors, put into motion using digital animation and stop-motion techniques. As global and personal histories interweave, the film explores notions of moral and political responsibility as evinced in physical space.