Travelogue Tel Aviv (2017)

This intentionally short animation film looks like it was sketched in a notebook with a pencil on the run, like the blurry touristic photos of Tel Aviv snapped on the way from one nightclub to another. After seeing the city in passing for the first time, twenty-six-year-old Samuel Patthey (a Berliner who spent six months in Tel Aviv; the film is his graduation project) managed to capture the essence of the second largest city in Israel. He shows how the entire city with its tiny figures of cars and people in perpetual motion suddenly freezes for several seconds after hearing the terrible sound of sirens from afar. The forest of the ravers’ legs on a dance-floor of a techno party rhymes with legs that wear a uniform and belong to the military men in gas masks, while the gunshots firing in the distance rhyme with fireworks exploding at a wedding. These images are living, even if drawn with just a couple of precise pencil strokes, and they show a city that is young and energetic, that never forgets about its past and the war in its present: the people are never allowed to forget it, after all.