Killing Animals?

If the festival programme simply mirrored the entered films, the 13th Mo&Friese Children‘s Short Film Festival’s audience would need support from the tissue producing industry and children’s psychologists. This screening year can very well be called the year of dead animals.

 

Of course, there wasn’t hunting, shooting and killing in every film, but there was an undeniable tendency towards culminating plots with the act of killing or adding symbolic depth with the view of a cadaver. The dead animal turned into a ritualistic remnant. Interestingly, all the films that used dead animals had a special, drastic logic in common, and it would have been interesting to address this qualitative surplus in a programme of its own. Yet, the Mo&Friese filter did prevent us from realising this idea. We don’t want to artificially protect our young audience, but our first and foremost interest remains in engaging children with the art of cinema and short film.

 

Hence we decided against the buzz worthy shock visions of growing up in our programme and relied on constants instead of trends. We open with unusually beautiful animal stories, then there are films with animals acting like humans for the youngest ones, and to the older children alone we offer some stories that walk on animal corpses if the intended message demands it. So much about our little Mo&Friese animal dramaturgy.

 

There is an almost existentialistic tendency to the subject matter of our programme. Recognizing your own being by experiencing your own acting as well as encountering and confronting the Other is a leitmotif of most films. At times the examination of fear and the transient nature of existence is served as a soft sponge cake and sometimes confronting the consequences of a made decision may be hard to swallow. It is always about making a choice and facing up to your responsibilities.

 

In this way, we aren’t showing films about the life of children, but we are showing films about life to children.

 

Film selection: Lisa Dutschmann, Victoria Holdinghausen, Sandra Lösel,

Agnes Nuber, Susann Rutscher, Maraike Steding, Alexander Wall