It’s a lot to ask of a short film that it take you somewhere you’ve never been in just a few minutes. It’s even more to ask that this experience of newness spans both visuals and ideas. Yet the German artist Patrick Buhr does just that with his short film From Over Here (2020).
Through a distinctive animation style that combines a sparse colour palette of blue, black and white, and shaky stick figures moving in and out of three dimensions, Buhr immerses viewers in a peculiar world that, unless you’re already familiar with his work, probably doesn’t resemble any digital space you’ve ever encountered. Letters on screen, often a shortcut in animation, are deployed here with care and creativity, dotting the landscape, shuffling in and out of meaning, and lending the piece a handcrafted aesthetic. But beyond just impressive world-building for its own sake, Buhr’s trippy terrain is constructed as a venue for examining his relationship with stuttering (or stammering) and himself.