Peekaboo

They must come from somewhere, all the children. Maybe from the stream, as little Olga says. Or the belly, as a boy explains to her while she sits on the bank, keeping her eyes peeled for a little sister floating on the waves....
An old woman reminisces about her childhood and her experience of the circumstances involved with giving birth in the early 20s. Memories appear like flotsam and jetsam on an unregulated narrative stream, mingle with short-lived visual or acoustic stimuli - and then become hazy.
Starting with her grandmother´s stories, Sabine Groschup´s animation film, Peekaboo, breaks down the theme of taking shape in an allusive ensemble of forms, sounds and narratives. Similarly to the nervously pulsing brushstrokes and fields of color, and the excitedly twitching notes of a saxophone, the old woman´s voice over, spoken in a broad Austrian dialect, is part of an arrangement in which suggestion and intuition, imagination and reminiscence come together and flow apart in an intoxicating composition. Through the spontaneous gesture with which the drawing was made directly on the strip of 35mm film and in the spirit of free jazz, Peekaboo both playfully and precisely transforms the element that provides meaning in a fragmentary way into a sensory impression which moves smoothly and without interruption.

(Robert Buchschwenter)


In 1999, two years before she died, my grandmother Olga told me and my family stories about her life as a young girl and woman in the Tyrolean countryside around 1920. Two of these stories are animated in Peekaboo. In the first story olga talks about her childhood thoughts on pregnancy and how women have babies. The second part is about having babies, infant death and death and the conditions of life surrounding it.

(Sabine Groschup)


An animated documentary in which the drawing was made directly on the strip of 35mm film in the spirit of jazz. The old Olga reminisces about her childhood. Memories appear hazily like flotsam and jetsam. The story flows along the stream of consciousness, uninterrupted. The brushstrokes move like a pulse. the film shows excitedly twitching notes of a saxophone, the old woman´s voice over spoken in a broad dialext, sensory impressions and the fragments of memories.

(Cho Hye-Young)