Director: Marcus Günther

Film: Not a long time ago

Bio: I’m Marcus Gunther. I am a visual artist from Germany. My artistic work includes painting, linocut, video clips and since 2022 also animation.

I have completed training as a plasterer and stage painter. I worked as a painter at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, for national and international film and television productions. I have been living and working as a freelance visual artist in Düsseldorf since 2000.

Science fiction, fantasy and horror films influenced all of my work from an early age, but I’m a complete novice when it comes to the animated film genre. I made everything myself because my premise is…just do it yourself.

My animated film “Not a long time ago” is about my personal creation myth. The origin of this work lies in my early childhood imagination of falling to earth and then absorbing the world around me. Coupled with all the clichés of myths and other formative audiovisual experiences I’ve saved from childhood to this day. My animated film was created from the selection and combination of precisely these perceptions.

I experience various adventures together with a stocked hybrid of blobfish and ostrich. There are diabolical, tragicomic, but also poetic moments that take place in my world. Sometimes humorous and sometimes with a bitter undertone. Fictional galaxies from a distant past or future pass us by.
My snapshots are always evidence of my own inner quarry, on which bodies, lines and surfaces of imaginary dream worlds are depicted. Whether utopia or anti-utopia, places and worlds are imagined in which fiction always meets social reality. Felt similar to the scenes we encounter in my animated film “Not a long time ago”.

Similar to Aldous Huxley and Thomas More, none of my landscapes can be localized. And why should I? They are my virtual mind games, fed by the visual and acoustic environment that surrounds me every day. Be it real, media or hallucinatory in nature. I combine and assemble fragments from various sources (Internet, newspapers, etc.) to create my own world, in which the seemingly banal and unnoticed acquire a new, spun existence.