Director: John Price
Canada 2009, 11 min.

A mobile snapshot from a children's birthday party on the moon

He looks like a small Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon, but in reality he's on his way to Halloween in his silver-coloured space suit. The Canadian filmmaker John Price has filmed his mesmerisingly beautiful black-and-white home movie as an anthropological study of an invisible envoy from another planet, with his own children playing the representatives of a future human race. The film's observer thereby watches life on our planet with both a sense of known familiarity and the unaccustomed view of a stranger through a 16mm camera that floats in an ethereal orbit around the small astronaut and his sister. Price processes his films right down to their chemical foundations to create his light-sensitive style. The silhouette of a climber, who hangs with all his weightless fragility between outer space and nothingness thereby gets recorded on the image like a fossilised imprint from a time and a place that once was - or maybe one day will come to be. The soundtrack is self-evidently superfluous, and so is each attempt to come up with something resembling an explanation.

Director: Ulf Aminde
Tyskland 2009, 12 min.

Performative puncturing of social paragraphs

Two people meet at night and peculiar music is the result. A third person joins in, and a curious ménage à trois takes shape in the cold limelight of the neon street lights. The anonymity of public space is already a brutal setting for the small farces and tragedies of everyday life, so why not? Under the direction of the Berlin-based video artist Ulf Aminde, the dreary concrete surroundings are reflected in the black impenetrability of face masks, in a theatrical parody on social customs in a suburban setting, where one is quickly given a telling-off for not minding ones own business. Aminde works with performative stagings of the restrictive norms of social interaction in the public arena, be it the semi-private home or an apartment block, the artificial setting of an IKEA kitchen or life in a subway station. But Aminde's improvised analysis of the way we live today also prods the collective fear of random violence and of making the wrong move.

Director: The Otolith Group
UK 2009, 49 min.

Philosophical science-fiction from an artistic think tank

The London-based Otolith Group makes films that make even the steadiest among us feel dizzy. The artist duo Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun have named themselves after the pip in our inner ear that governs our sense of balance, and which is consistently driven into over-gear by their fractal-philosophical montage labyrinths. 'Otolith III' thus follows up on the group's two preceding, but independent works in a historical reflection on time, memory and the events that never happened - in this case a Satyajit Ray film, which the Indian master director is now confronted with by four of its (non)actors. Like with their French role models Marker, Godard and Resnais, the political is ever-present - as thought and expression - in the works of The Otolith Group, whose reality-based science fiction neutralises mental gravity without losing touch with what's real. This also goes for the group's latest work, which pays homage to all the unfinished films, which were born in minds, forgotten again and consigned to oblivion by the flow of time.