The Star of Bethlehem

Against a velvet night sky that seems to inhale and exhale, Lotte Reiniger’s paper-thin silhouettes pirouette like memories caught between candle-flame and shadow. A donkey’s ear flicks; a king’s cloak unfurls into a comet; the Star itself, a lacework lantern, pulses as though stitched from extinct constellations. Ruick’s lullaby voice coils through the gaps, turning parchment camels into breathing aches for home. The Nativity becomes, in this 11-minute prism, not docile pageant but migratory vertigo—every snip of Reiniger’s scissors a footstep across centuries of exile, every back-lit profile a refugee stamp. When the blade-shaped angel hovers above the crib, the paper negative space glows hotter than the figures themselves, as if holiness were less presence than perforation.