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A selection of films dealing with the topic of the Berlin Wall, curated by Annegret Richter, Head of Animation at DOK Leipzig.
All films either have English subtitles or no dialogue.
Sitis
East Germany, 1987, 11 min, Director: Rainer Schade
The cartoonist for this film, which depicts a character who runs his life into a wall, is still surprised that an East German state operated and controlled studio would produce a film with such a storyboard.
Rainer Schade is a German painter, graphic artist, cartoonist and university lecturer. He serves on appointment committees for universities in Halle, Dessau and Schneeberg, and has been chair of the art association Leipziger Jahresausstellung e.V. since 1995.
The Other Side (Die andere Seite)
UK/ Germany, 2007, 5 min, Director: Ellie Land
In this starkly animated documentary about the Berlin Wall, the subjects recall what they imagined was on the other side of the Wall.
Ellie Land is an award-winning filmmaker internationally, and works with documentary and animation. Her films have received awards and commendations from a variety of prestigious international film festivals. She lives in England, where she serves as senior lecturer in animation at Northumbria University, directs commercial animation and is developing a cross-media animated documentary project.
The Scent of the West (Der Duft des Westens)
Germany, 2013, 5 min, Directors: Mark Huff and Arne Breusing
A story of escape - between 1949 and 1989 about three million people left the GDR and the Soviet-occupied zone. Reinhold Huff, Mark Huff's father, escaped in September 1973 through the inner German border into Bavaria in western Germany.
Mark Huff is a motion graphic designer at Gravity Germany. Arne Breusing is a 3D and motion designer who works at Kochstrasse, a design studio in Hannover, Germany. He was a guest lecturer in 2010 at Hefei University in China. Their debut film, The Scent of the West, was their bachelor thesis at the University of Hannover.
Micki
Germany, 2014, 5 min, Director: Alexander Lahl
Micki recounts the story of Marienetta Jirkowsky, who tried to escape across the Berlin Wall for love. With only a few more meters remaining to climb, her story came to a tragic end.
Alexander Lahl was born 1979 in Berlin (GDR). He studied cultural sciences in Berlin, Wroclaw and Frankfurt (Oder). He works as a writer and filmmaker in Berlin. He is currently working on an ARTE documentary about the world's oceans.
Esterhazy
Germany/Poland, 2009, 23 min, Director: Izabela Plucińska
A small Esterhazy rabbit travels to Berlin in 1989. After months of looking for the mysterious wall, he finally finds it and meets Mimi. Right in that moment, the Berlin Wall falls.
Izabela Plucińska was born in 1974 in Koszalin/Poland. Following film studies in Lodz, she received a scholarship for the Konrad Wolf University of Film & Television in Potsdam- Babelsberg. Plucińska received a Silver Bear at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival for this film, which premiered internationally at the 2009 Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Hollow Land (Terre d'écueil)
France, 2013, 14 min, Directors: Uri and Michelle Kranot
A story about the eternal human search for home, Hollow Land begins with the dream of utopia. Solomon and Berta are two seekers who arrive in a land that promises respite from their many journeys. Hollow Land captures the state of being displaced—whether by circumstance or by choice.
Michelle and Uri Kranot are independent filmmakers, interdisciplinary artists and immigrants. Originally from Israel, they have been living away from their homeland for many years. Their films have appeared in numerous film festivals and won many international prizes.
Chronicle of Oldrich S. (Kronika Oldricha S.)
Czech Republic, 2011, 18 min, Director: Rudolf Smid
Mr. Sedlacek wrote one-sentence entries in his journal from 1981 to 2005, recording everyday stories of his family's life, the life of the village and its surroundings, and international events.
Rudolf Smid is a sociologist, photographer, and freelance writer. The animated film Chronicle of Oldřich S. is his directorial debut.
Annegret Richter, a member of the selection committee, is the Head of Animation at DOK Leipzig. She was formerly Festival Director of the International Short Film Festival – Filmfest Dresden, film editor for various radio stations and magazines, and the curator of the 2008 special animated documentary program at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animation Film.
Visiting the Inner Sanctum of Richard Thompson (The Cartoonist, Not The Singer)
by Hilary Price
October 29, 2014
Marc Singer
http://notthebeastmaster.typepad.com/weblog/2014/11/pax-americana.html
Quirky quartet draws plenty of laughs [online as 'Penguins of Madagascar' movie review: Delightfully silly star turn for the quartet]
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post November 26 2014
The career trajectory of the four wisecracking cartoon penguins introduced as minor characters in "Madagascar" has been one of meteoric ascendancy, with return appearances in two sequels, a couple of stand-alone shorts and a television show. It's not an unusual path in animated Hollywood. We've seen it before with Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel from "Ice Age," who parlayed a cameo in the first film into a cottage industry of increasingly annoying shorts and a camera-hogging turn in the second sequel, "Dawn of the Dinosaurs."
But unlike that acorn-obsessed, chipmunk-cheeked, paleo-rodent ham, the Flightless Four known as Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and Private are ready for their moment in the sun. "Penguins of Madagascar" is a delightfully silly star turn for this quartet of absurd little birds, who operate as a team of commandos.
There are several reasons why this works.
First is the voice talent. Although none of them is a marquee name, the actors who bring the penguins to life — Tom McGrath, Chris Miller, Conrad Vernon and Christopher Knights — do so with verve. (Special credit goes to Vernon, who voices the almost nonverbal, but nevertheless vocally expressive Rico, who is often shown coughing up indigestible objects that he has swallowed.)
Other notably funny turns in "Penguins" include John Malkovich and Benedict Cumberbatch. Playing to type, the A-list actors provide the voices for, respectively, a villainous, emotionally unstable octopus named Dave and a heroic, cucumber-cool secret agent gray wolf whose name is classified. (That's right: The character's name is never given — "My name is classified" he tells us, in Cumberbatch's mellifluous British baritone — leading to some giddy "Who's on first?" confusion.)
Which brings me to the real reason for the movie's success: the writing of the story, which concerns Dave's plot to kidnap penguins from all of the world's zoos and turn them into monsters.
Fleshing out characters created by "Madagascar" directors and writers Eric Darnell and McGrath (whose voice propels Skipper's MacGyver-like can-do spirit), the screenplay by John Aboud, Michael Colton and Brandon Sawyer has a fizzy, pop-culture pizazz, tempered by a distinctly vaudeville sensibility. It's smart, but not brainy; dumb, but never inane.
Colton, who was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon in college, worked briefly at The Washington Post in the late 1990s before leaving to form the now-defunct online magazine Modern Humorist with Aboud. Their work with Sawyer, a children's TV writer whose credits include the "Penguins" series on Nickelodeon, is perfectly aimed at the target demographic of silly but savvy 10-year-olds. One recurring joke involves Dave barking orders to his tentacled henchmen, leading to a series of increasingly nutty puns name-checking famous movie stars: "Nicolas, cage them!" "Charlize, there on the death ray!" "Drew, barry, more!"
It's gloriously juvenile, but also very, very funny.
Other ingredients in this self-referential pop-culture puree include a cameo by the German director Werner Herzog, voicing the filmmaker-narrator of the penguin documentary that opens the film in Antarctica, where its prologue is set. Observing that our four heroes are "frozen with fear" on an icy precipice, Herzog orders his sound man to "give them a shove," in order to increase the drama.
And increase it he does. One of those early scenes features a leopard seal eating a seagull. It's an indication of the dark edge that will give the story its slightly grown-up astringency. "Penguins of Madagascar" is by no means inappropriate for kids, but there's a coolly self-aware smirk to it that makes it palatable to people with driver's licenses, too.
And, oh yes, the 3-D animation is a treat.
But the real charm of the film is its stars. As Skipper says, "A good plan is about more than effecty stuff and big words." That's equally true of a good movie.
BENEATH THE COVERS: The real story behind The New Yorker's Thanksgiving/Redskins cover ['So arrogant and clueless' a mascot 'that it lends itself to some kind of exposure']
By Michael Cavna
Washington Post Comic Riffs blog November 24 2014
