In addition to our competitions the festival offers programmes that take a closer look at chosen topics. This year we offer an aesthetical and technical reflection on the art of the split screen and multilayered visuals. Next to that we challenge the foundations of programming itself – the construction of categories. In an attempt to highlight the ambivalence of social categories and to provoke the audience to investigate their own mechanisms of schematisation we will try to get to the bottom of the phenomenon of classification, simplification, and trivialisation by examining categories from a cinematic as well as from a social perspective.

 

Multiple images on a single screen seem to be everywhere these days, from successful TV series to Hollywood features. But no other cinematic form ever explored the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of split screens as thoroughly as the short film, and so we decided to dedicate a full special programme to this wonder of modern technology and its history from the 1920s to the present. 

Divide and conquer: Our special programme entitled Again(st) the Categories was divided into four (un)easy parts. An open invitation for everybody to conquer the broad field of cinematic categories:

Adolescence is more than just the waiting-room between child- and adulthood. It is a time of enthusiastic forays into sexuality, fresh ideals, frustration and doubts. And most of all, adolescence is always one thing: intense.
Two programmes told from a juvenile perspective, adressing everybody with a rest of youthfulness.

Like all forms of cinematic art, the short has always concerned itself with images of the uncanny, the unusual, the terrible and the horrible. Our special programme entitled Fear and Loathing in Shorts will be taking a wide-eyed look at both classic and more recent examples of shorts a wide variety of genres. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The special programme Sound of Images will be taking a look at the manifold artistic experiments in sound and image. From the 1920s and 30s to the present, from the early modernist stages of the mechanical reproduction of works of art to the digital age – artist-engineers have always been quick to work with and recontextualise new technology in order to render musical structures visible, and their work left its mark especially on the animated film.
Well, let’s see what we’ll hear.

Catastrophic cartoons, hazardous hilarity and perilous pranks: humour is a very serious matter. One person’s larks might be perceived as the centre of a potentially deadly flu epidemic by somebody else. For this special programme entitled On the Fringes of Humour, we went on a foray into the backwoods of the world of humour and even found some jokes in the suburbs of laughter. What we brought back ranges from the unintentionally funny to the deliberately offensive. In short: we have put together a collection of films that some might actually find funny.