The AniDoc film genre combines documentary content with animation techniques to make the unshowable visible and convey experiences on a different level. The directors of the selected films courageously deal with questions of identity, political persecution and their own family histories and show us a variety of narrative styles ranging from classic animation to 3D animation and puppet animation. In “Kaputt”, for example, various women describe their traumatic experiences in Hoheneck women’s prison in the GDR. In “Centrefold” and “Alienation”, young people from different backgrounds deal with ideals of physical beauty and with growing up. In cooperation with Haus des Dokumentarfilms.
As a child, Carlotta didn’t expect the people around here to have faces. She even doesn’t recognize her own face. Years later, she learns about a rare, untreatable deficit of her brain. It was art, after all, that offered her a way to finally recognize herself.
In a small apartment in Buenos Aires, an old woman eagerly awaits the birth of her grandchild and all the joys that come with being a grandmother. However, horrific circumstances mean she is forced to wait over 30 years. The film explores the traumatic ramifications of General Videla’s military dictatorship in Argentina, whereby an estimated 30,000 people „disappeared.
They had a normal father-daughter relation. One day she told him to set off for a wedding party in Denmark. But that was a lie. A few months later she started her new life – as the wife of a djihadist living in Syria.
While transitioning from male to female gender, Matia struggles with finding a genuine intimate relationship with a heterosexual man.
A true story based on a testimony of Holocaust survivor, the late Nomi Kapel. Nyosha is a ten-year-old girl, that lives with her mother in a small village in Poland. Nyosha has a seemingly naive and simple dream, to buy herself a pair of shoes. But a ruthless war is arriving, and her dream is put aside. In midst of a terrible action, when she stands face to face with death in a fatal moment, she is torn from her mother and taken to the truck. Nyosha believes that her shoes are the ones that convinced the Nazi soldier who held her, to spare her life. A range of animation techniques brings together the dream and the reality and tells Nyosha’s story.
,Kaputt (Broken)’ is an animated documentary shortfilm about the castle in Hoheneck, the central female prison within the GDR. Besides uncovering the living conditions, the film explores especially the enforced labour and export of its products to West Germany. Gabriele Stötzer from Erfurt and Birgit Willschütz from Berlin face their time spent in Hoheneck as they record their memories. Their testimony is interpreted within simple, barely animated, monochromatic imagery.
In I Love Hooligans we enter the world of a homosexual hooligan. He lives for his club and football. His sexual orientation is a well-kept secret. The match against the archrival is the highlight of the year. On that day they turn to booze and drugs. All matches end and he has to go home, where no one is waiting. This homosexual hooligan has one dream: “To die in the arms of my loved one.”
Over the past decade, female genital cosmetic surgery has increased by a staggering 500%. ,Centrefold’ is a unique animated documentary that takes an innovative and balanced approach to this controversial topic. Created by award winning filmmaker Ellie Land and funded by the Wellcome Trust, the film follows three women, aged 24 -41 through their different experiences of labiaplasty (surgery to trim or remove the labia). By documenting what is involved in the procedure and its varying outcomes, the film seeks to offer a non-judgemental view of labia surgery and to encourage informed discussion: Is labiaplasty anti-female ‘pornification’, or an empowering personal choice? Centrefold provides the facts. You decide. To join the debate and find out more, visit www.thecentrefoldproject.
An animation-short about puberty, based on real life interviews with teenagers.