Dantes Traum von der Hölle

Deep in an ocean facility, Aryanna, must face the unknown, as drips from water-tight air vents and scratches from within empty cells drive her to the brink of madness.

A debt-settlement meeting turns into a surreal nightmare of ego, sexism, and chaos.

A girl and an older man discuss the nature of reality while doing chores on a pig farm.

For the multimedia exhibition Tangenten I (Tangents I), Dammbeck and co-organizer, sculptor and painter Frieder Heinze had planned to collaborate on a film that would combine non-camera animation with 35mm footage of a train ride between the two Dresden districts of Radebeul and Pieschen. When the exhibition was banned in 1978, Heinze turned to other projects, but Dammbeck continued working on the film by himself. Metamorphoses I—the first experimental film ever to be shown publicly in East Germany—marks the filmic beginning of Dammbeck’s long-term art project the Herakles-Konzept (Hercules Concept).

Begins as a whimsical piece with 'sheets' of lines running down the screen, progressing into more and more complex geometic patterns but without deviating from the basic precepts of 'dot and line' animation. Jazz piano on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and a spring color palette. -- Stephanie Sapienza. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2001.

In the aftermath of an emotional shock, a ruthless high-class manager faces her own abyss, becomes pervaded by a sensory spirit and undertakes a purifying voyage.

A young woman under the influence of narcotics finally realizes how she’s been spending her nights.

An experimental avant-garde film where the character battles with herself, struggling to understand and embrace her true identity. Blending dream-like and reality sequences together, the film connotes inside the character’s mind. Escaping to different parts of her subconscious, she is met with confrontation, fear & desire. This piece of work highlights themes of identity, surrealism & subjectivity, where the instability of the self is at the forefront of the film. The film uses elements of mixed media montage to portray the character’s inner thoughts.

A man on his way to an interview stumbles upon a surreal VOID, ANCIENT TEXTS, and ENIGMATIC FORCES.

Hacking a claw machine inside C4D.

An experimental short from Oskar Fischinger

Awake / El despertar

Maxed out, burnt out, and sex-starved, Amber Su falls under the spell of glamorous self-help guru Coco Ging, whose mentorship turns desire and ambition into different kinds of debt. Repression evolves into possession as Amber molts into a new ego: a worksona.

Mara—the spirit of the night, the weaver of darkened dreams—pressed upon my chest as sleep held me captive. My memory. In the haze of a dream, I saw those I loved, their faces bathed in an otherworldly glow. The nightmare was not the shadows nor the fear they whispered, but the cruel certainty of waking—of losing them to the morning light

travelling through time and space to a place where, it seems, you used to be happy in.

Psychedelic and occult visions intertwine, between a woman and a decapitated pig's head.

Polish avant-garde animation in which a periodic series of aggressive starbursts interrupt the melodic dancing of fluid shapes, one raid even freezing the image for a moment.

An abstract short film about an alien invasion.

A girl gets ready for a ritual.

Peter Larsson’s Keyhole Conversation draws the eye down to the small gate of the camera. From there, through quivering and percussive forms of direct and stop-motion animation, the eye begins to experience the scale of an image anew. At times segueing into a flicker, but maintaining a charmed form of attention to the marks of pencils and the channels dredged in emulsion by a paintbrush, all to a curious soundtrack of pulses and bleeps.