A migrant jute mill worker moves through Calcutta and along its riverbanks, carrying fragments of a life shaped by memories of labour and loss. As he cycles across the city, his voice takes the form of an imagined letter to his wife, recalling shuttered jute mills, unpaid work, and fading memories of domestic life.

Moving between black-and-white and colour, and between 16mm film and digital images, the film constructs a composite narrative from jute workers’ testimonies, archival traces of the disappearance of labour, and staged reconstructions. Shot inside functioning and abandoned mills over eight years, the film situates an individual journey within the larger history of the jute industry along the Hooghly River, once central to colonial trade and industrial expansion and now marked by closure and neglect.

What unfolds as a singular narrative is shaped by the collective portrait of workers displaced by deindustrialisation, capital, and historical erasure.

Acht Eimer Hühnerherzen, Apocalypse Vega, Hr. Bottrop, Bene Diktator and others.

For the 10th birthday of the Berlin-Kreuzberg band Acht Eimer Hühnerherzen, a documentary was created that offers a charming and honest insight into tours, concerts and the small moments in between. Michael Terhorst followed the band for a year for his Acht Eimer Hühnerherzen »film«.

The result is an unpretentious portrait of the friendship of three completely different characters, accompanied by Powerviolence-Wandering guitars-Punk and atmospheric images of highway rest stops, travels, clubs and stage moments. The trio gives an intimate insight into both absurd situations and everyday band life, and remains true to their attitude of questioning themselves and not taking themselves too seriously.

Serious topics come up too, but the band stays true to their humour. The overall mood remains cheerful and warm.

The film dispenses with dramaturgical structure and crisis narratives entirely. And those who look closely will discover quite incidentally a lot about the times we live in.

Birthright follows a Finnish filmmaker’s attempt to understand an identity passed down through absence: an Israeli father who left before she was born, and a country she was never given the chance to know. As the possibility of a relationship with her father recedes, the search shifts. The film becomes a pursuit to form a connection with a country instead – its history, its present, and its weight. Unable to film what isn’t there, she turns to what stands in its place: archive, reconstruction, objects and gestures.

Birthright is a personal essay film about what we are given by birth, and what we have to piece together by hand.

Bride of Aravan follows transgender woman Bawadharini as she navigates the joys, grief, and challenges of life in a prejudiced society in South India. Each year, her community celebrates a vibrant two-day festival in which they ceremonially marry the warrior god Aravan – an ancient ritual drawn from the Mahabharata epic in which Aravan consents to die in battle only after becoming married. To fulfil his wish, Krishna takes the female form of Mohini to become his bride for one night. Revered as akin to goddess Mohini for two days, the trans women experience a stark inversion of the prejudice that marks their daily life, as they participate in rituals, revelry and collective mourning.

Weaving Bawadharini’s reflections, observational ethnographic footage, and dramatised myth in the local “terukutu” performative tradition, the film draws the intimate, communal and sacred into a textured story-world. It explores the fragile convergence of ritual and identity that makes space for expressions of grief, dignity, belonging and transcendence.

During the siege of Sarajevo, while the city is cut off from the world and its inhabitants struggle to survive, a group of filmmakers makes an audacious decision: to launch a film festival in the middle of a war.

With no electricity, running water or security, cinema becomes an act of defiance. Films are screened in darkened cinemas and improvised spaces, bringing audiences together for moments of escape, connection and dignity. The Beyond the End of the World film festival is born not despite the war, but because its creators refuse to surrender the city’s cultural life.

Three decades later, Cinema Under Siege revisits this extraordinary story through rare archival footage, intimate testimonies and the films and images that survived the conflict. Moving between the claustrophobic reality of a besieged city and the liberating space of cinema, the film explores what happens when culture becomes a form of resistance.

At its heart is a universal question: Can cinema keep a society alive when everything around it is being destroyed?

Cinema Under Siege is a film about Sarajevo, but also about the universal human need to gather, create and imagine a future – even when the future itself is under siege.