Land der Märchen [Fantasyland]

Whether as book, comic book or animated movie, the story of Peter Pan is to be found in virtually every children’s room. The fairy tale character that has been adapted many times is a child that wouldn’t grow up. Pan lives on the island of Neverland where he sets out on an endless series of adventures. The boys and girls that he brings to his island with the help of fairy dust eventually return home and grow up to be adults. Not him. The longing for total freedom yields an imaginary backdrop to Land der Märchen [Fantasyland], in which four contemporary short films each develop their own kind of magical realism. By intertwining fantasy and reality as well as language and movement they reflect on biographical and societal ruptures. In Liza Johnson’s In the Air it is the circus school in an economically depressed town in Ohio that serves as a refuge for young people. The tragicomical memories of a childhood in Austria bring to light the relationship between individual and collective identity in Gernot Wieland’s Ink in Milk. The short video A Concrete Song is a poem about the roughness of the city of Belfast, spoken and danced by Oona Doherty. Tobias Yves Zintel’s Neverland interweaves interviews and fictional scenes from what was originally a youth theatre project at the Staatsschauspiel Hannover into a grotesquely cryptic world of subjectification. Michael Jackson meets Wendy – Peter Pan’s temporary surrogate mother.