Review: International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film 2024

While the legal, economic and ethical impact of generative AI continues to ripple through the media industry at large,[1] one might be forgiven to find at least a modicum of solace in the belief that independent animation continues to be, in some ways, a world apart. This is not to say, of course, that animators, even art-house animators, are somehow shielded from the disruptive potential of exploitative technological innovations, or immune from the material and ideological concerns that affect the rest of the image-making community. It does seem to me, however, that such stubborn singularity of craft as it exists in the world of independent animation leads to practices and artistic outcomes that are both highly idiosyncratic and, thanks to international networks of patronage and exhibition, individually interconnected. Critics, historians and indeed curators are thus left with the task to assemble alternative geographies, retrace flows and find connections. I use the word ‘alternative’ loosely here, as these geographies obviously coexist and, by necessity, partially overlap with the cardinal maps of power and industry and capital. Yet they also remain, in the literal sense of the term, eccentric, and as such they offer a privileged vantage point from which those very same maps can be, if not entirely denied, at least reframed.[2]

Fig. 1 - International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film 2024.

From this point of view, the animation programme of the 2024 edition of DOKLeipzig presents a prime opportunity for reflection (Fig. 1). With its historic emphasis on bridging the gap between animation and documentary, the festival is ideally suited to map out those eccentric trajectories and intersections. In the main competition, for example, I could distinguish two clusters of films. On the one hand were several films that uses CGI to deal directly with contemporary issues: like Where the Jasmine Always Blooms (Husein Bastouni) or Aferrado (Esteban Azuela), in which jagged or noisy digital images operate as a correlate of a society broken down by violence and war. I would also include here Aurelijus Čiupas’ The Diffusion Pilot, which addressed the nihilistic implications of AI-generated material, turning the associative, unending drift of generated imagery into a self-interrogating soliloquy.

Irrespective of their individual merits, my sense is that these these films speak from a position of linguistic resignation. They use 3D scans, noisy renders or computer generated imagery to evoke a semiotic vacuum, as it were. Their strategy is to re-signify the loss of visual meaning, either by linking it to the trauma of violence, or by making it the subject for a glib intellectual exercise.

The Wild-Tempered Clavier (Anna Samo, 2024) - Trailer

Another constellation of films in the programme pursue a very different strategy. Take Abba Samo’s The Wild-Tempered Clavier (2024): a Covid project, in which painted images come alive on rolls of toilet paper. The static frame of the film present the viewers with a makeshift editing device, built with colourful children blocks. The toilet paper streams through the mask. A piano performance unspools: Bach’s music, interrupted multiple times by the incongruous appearance of a military tank. The toilet paper breaks; the hands of the animator enter the frame to cut, rewind, restart. Both the animated images and the meta-filmic conceit dramatise a labour of human perseverance: the struggle to achieve beauty, to bring harmony to chaos, even when such attempts seem doomed to failure, or worse, futility in the face of historical violence.  

Fig. 2 - On Weary Wings Go By (Anu-Laura Tuttelberg, 2024).

The same contrast between fragility and grace recurs in the unfortunately titled On Weary Wings Go By, which took home the Golden Dove in the short film section (Fig. 2). Anu-Laura Tuttelberg animates delicate porcelain statuettes, but does so on location, on a frosty Estonian beach, thus exposing her creations to the elements. One by one, the creatures succumb to the frost. Something hauntingly elegiac pervades this Nordic fable, a sense of inevitable loss that is both thematic (a hint to our current environmental catastrophe) and linguistic, as the very tools of the animator shatter under our eyes. 

What comes to the fore in these works is an act of faith in the radical, affirming inefficiency of animation. Compared to the nihilism of the films I mentioned above, Samo and Tuttelberg propose a sort of semiotic potlatch, in which the consumable, irreproducible quality of the materials (toilet paper, ceramic) goes hand in hand with the inordinate amount of labour required by the traditional process. The result is not so much a labour of love as it is a labour of resistance: a private, humanist affirmation, against the looming collective hopelessness (of war, of the ecological disaster) and the growing digital aphasia.

Fig. 3 - Isabel Herguera in conversation.

I said ‘private’, yet that is not entirely accurate. Indeed, in the sidebars of the main competition I found even more clear traces of those alternative geographies I mentioned at the start. The homage to Isabel Herguera, for example: her career started in the Basque country under Franco, continued between California and Germany, and culminated in a life-long relationship with India, where she has been leading animation workshops and making films with people of all backgrounds (Fig. 3). An established, truly cosmopolitan figure, Herguera is inspiring in more than one way. Her first feature, Sultana’s Dream (2023), takes its inspiration from a feminist utopia published in 1905 by Bengali intellectual and eduator Begum Rokeya, and follows a Spanish artist, Inés, in her journey through the Indian subcontinent as she retraces Rokeya’s steps.

Fig. 4 - Sultana’s Dream (Isabel Herguera, 2023).

Peppered with Sardinian lullabies and different styles of animation, Sultana’s Dream is a lush, magnificent film (Fig. 4). But it’s Herguera’s work as an educator and cultural organiser that made the most impression on me. Over a series of two in-person encounters, Herguera generously recounted how she managed to carve out a viable career for herself, balancing teaching and programming and film-making to remain independent. She dwelt, too, on the importance of international collaborations in her practice, and the need to invent a common language for cooperative, long-distance projects like Diaries of Confinement (2020). Herguera described the experience as creating ‘exquisite corpses’: mongrel assemblages, Frankensteinian creatures in which disparate fragments of human experience and language find unity (and shared meaning) through collaborative animation. This is, in my mind, how independent animation can leverage the idiosyncratic singularity of its methods to point towards a different mode of cultural production, one in which different idiolects blend and coexist without losing their human individualities.

Fig. 5 - Families’ Albums (Moïa Jobin-Paré, 2023).

A final example of this was the beautiful dialogue between Moia Jobin-Paré and Gudrun Krebitz curated by André Eckhardt for this year’s Animations Perspectives, a regular format whereby the festival connects two animators and presents a joint retrospective of their work. The encounter between the two artists, one based in Montreal the other in Berlin, felt like an experiment in mutual translation, with each tentatively looking for a language to share her process, ethos and approach with the other and with the audience. As Jobin-Paré explained how she scratches the emulsion from photographs placed on a light desk, to allow light to filter through, the audience in the small, crammed room listened with a mixture of fascination and complicity. It struck me, as I sat watching those analogue images radiate and explode with new light in Families’ Albums (2023) (Fig. 5), and then hearing her describe her technique to enthusiasts and fellow animators, that I was witnessing something rare: a private language turning into shared meaning. Perhaps Herguera is right. Perhaps what it takes to bring a corpse to life is only a moment of human connection.

**Article published: December 6, 2024**

Notes

[1]  See Aurélie Petit’s recent report from Ottawa on this website: Aurélie Petit, “Review: Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) 2024,” Fantasy/Animation (October 18, 2024), available at: https://www.fantasy-animation.org/current-posts/review-ottawa-international-animation-festival-oiaf-2024.

[2]  For more on this, cf. what I wrote in “The Third Song on the Record: The 60th Annecy International Animation Film Festival.” Film Criticism 44, no. 3 (2020), available here.

Biography
PM Cicchetti is a film critic, educator and scholar based between Bologna and Edinburgh. He writes for several film magazines in Italy, Switzerland and the US, including Filmidee and Filmexplorer among others, and has been lecturing at various universities in Scotland since 2012. Starting in 2018, he has been involved with the European Movie Masters programme KINOEYES.