No Animal
Time and again, the feature film places animal actors at the side of its human protagonists – sometimes as loyal companions, sometimes as fierce opponents. However, its stagings do not only instrumentalise animals to release emotions, but also raise a fundamental question of our anthropocentric self-image: how to deal with the experience of the otherness of the animal?
„(…) Even when the silver screens shows the animal actors in full face, we seem to look down at them from up above with a smug smile. Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller however create proximity to humanity by cataloguing congruent fundamental emotions such as anger, fear, or panic on the faces of the animals. At the same time, they create space by releasing the animal from its function as a dramaturgical switch operator in order to grant it resistance and speechlessness.“
Curator’s notes, 39th Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, June 2023
No Animal
2023
Germany
21 min 3 sec
not specified, Avantgarde/Arts
No Dialogue