Diego Marcon’s Krapfen (2025) unfolds like a dream. Part lullaby, part nightmare, part stage play musical, part vintage Disney animation. Projected in an endless loop, the film immerses viewers in a surrealist, fantastical choreography of gesture and sound. At its centre is ‘The Kid’, performed by professional dancer, Violet Savage. Appearing uncannily like a porcelain figure suspended somewhere between childhood and something otherworldly. Neither boy nor girl, innocent nor knowing, The Kid becomes a vessel through which desire, discipline, and fantasy entwine.

Around this central character, four spectral companions animate themselves into being. A pair of gloves, a foulard, a pair of trousers, and a pullover appear as sentient yet disembodied, gliding and twisting like ghostly puppets, whispering commands in musical refrains: 'The krapfen recipe / Is easy enough to make…' Their chant becomes both a taunt and a lullaby, a type of indoctrination cruelly disguised as play.

The operatic score, composed by Federico Chiari, drives the rhythm of the film. It is an energetic, swelling and receding symphony that moves from grandeur to fragility, mirroring the shifting emotional terrain further dissolving and blurring the boundaries between theatre, animation, and ritual with a frantic energy. The familiar sweetness of the eponymous pastry becomes a mirage, a symbol of temptation and control, where fantasy easily slips into disquiet. Marcon draws on the golden age of American animation and the grandeur of Italian opera to construct a hallucinatory fable about innocence and manipulation. While the work recalls the dark folktales of the Brothers Grimm, its hypnotic repetition and haunting restraint lures its audience into a trance, revealing how childhood fantasy, ritual, and power perform endlessly upon one another, like a song or a dance that never ends.