Between millennia-old legends and daring visions of human futures, the two competitions Kplus and 14plus span a wide range of narrative forms. Wide ranging works include theatrical re-enactments that break the fourth wall, a cinema of great emotions, films in which a dance-like dialogue between bodies unfolds, and also animations that touch on the abstract. The Generation 14plus competition opens with Brendan Canty's Christy , which follows its teenage protagonist as he tries to gain a foothold in his hometown of Cork in the shadow of a difficult family history, painting a captivating and warm-hearted portrait of an Irish working class community.
Zacharias Kunuk, a pioneer of Indigenous cinema, returns to the Berlinale: Uiksaringitara Wrong Husband takes us to the Canadian Arctic years before our era, to a fairy tale about a young couple in love, in which the boundaries between the worlds of humans and spirits are permeable.
The heroine of Antoinette Jadaone's Sunshine , on the other hand, encounters a mysterious girl during a momentous decision, with whom she enters into a dialogue that makes her emotional world tangible. In Paternal Leave , Alissa Jung stages a teenager's search for an unknown father as a winding journey to herself. Three documentary works in the programme show different strategies for illuminating the present: Zirkuskind Circusboy by Anna Koch and Julia Lemke takes an unusual look at the world of the circus through the eyes of young Santino and the tales of his beloved great-grandfather Ehe, whose stories the film shows in animated sequences.
In Hora do recreio Playtime , Lucia Murat creates documentary and fictionalised spaces in which representing experiences of violence, racism and misogyny becomes possible, based on discussions among mostly Black youth in schools in Rio de Janeiro. Two further films reinforce the impressive range of animation forms in the Generation programme: the death of the grandmother forms the starting point of the stopmotion film Tales From the Magic Garden , in which a young girl takes on the role of the storyteller: a lovingly detailed animated ode to storytelling as a form of creating community and providing comfort.
Drawing from a wide variety of genre formats and based in an anti-naturalistic setting, young actors portray scenes where young people come into conflict with state authorities. A collective reflection on the systemic dimensions of justice and injustice. Little Rebels Cinema Club is the name of the new short film by Khozy Rizal, a homage to the space that cinema offers as a site of memory, of processing the world, community and self-invention.
