Merlin Flügel draws people the way they actually feel: slightly wrong, slightly stuck, permanently on the verge of something they can’t quite say. The Berlin-based director and animator has been carrying that sensibility through the festivals that matter, with films like How To Disappear, Rules of Play, ECHO and Hotel Oblique landing at Berlinale, Annecy, Go Short, Pictoplasma and Animateka. When he isn’t making his own work, festivals come knocking: he designed the trailer and key visual for the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film and the Interfilm Festival trailer.
At Kinomural he’s showing Peripherie, an early experimental piece from 2012 and still one of his sharpest. In the noise, every conversation turns into a creaking sound. Stagnation. The film hovers along the outer edges of everyday communication, trying several ways in, and finding that none of them quite work. Under three minutes, and it stays with you for considerably longer.
