In Georgia’s remote Pankisi Valley, four Muslim women preserve a centuries-old tradition of sacred Sufi songs, passed down through generations of women. Once at the heart of the community’s spiritual life, these songs are gradually fading, while male religious rituals continue to thrive.

Raisa, Taisa, Markha and Rita belong to one of the last groups of women still carrying this tradition. Through rehearsals, conversations and moments of everyday life, Sacred Songs enters their intimate world, where faith, friendship and music are inseparable. Yet beneath the continuity of their singing lies a growing uncertainty: who will carry these songs into the future?

Filmed over several years, the documentary observes a tradition at a quiet turning point. As the women reflect on what they inherited and what can still be passed on, their songs become both an act of devotion and a fragile archive of female memory, one whose survival can no longer be taken for granted.

Jardim Monte Azul, São Paulo, 1970s. Natalia stands before the favela where she will begin a new life. She has come from rural Brazil, and the sight of this enormous city leaves her in shock: wooden shacks, open sewage, extreme poverty. She breaks down in tears, but there is no going back.

In the 1980s and 1990s, this area was considered one of the most violent neighbourhoods in the world.

Not far away, children stand at the gate of Ute Craemer, a German who came to Brazil in 1965. They ask if she has anything to give them. Ute opens her door, and soon her home is far too small. A letter arrives from Germany: a boy from Munich, who died at nine, wished that his family’s compensation goes to poor children. It pays for the first barrack.

Ute and her friends found the Monte Azul Community Association. The residents build paved paths, kindergartens, and a small clinic. Volunteers arrive from Germany and beyond. Natalia becomes part of this community and forms a deep bond with Angela Gehrke, a midwife from Kassel who helps her bring two children into the world.

Today, Monte Azul employs more than 2,000 people, and it helps thousands of people each year. But what holds it together goes deeper than numbers: a sense of community that must be continuously tended.

After decades of opioid addiction, Viola and Gerd – both around 70 years old – found a therapy that really works for them. In their model clinic, they are provided with pharmaceutical opioids and can finally live a life that leaves them space to breathe.

Likewise, Ariane has left the stress of street life and illegal drugs behind. Supported by clinical heroin, she is building a new, stable life for herself: with her first own flat, with a workplace she likes, and by building a closer relationship with her two kids, who are living in foster families.

Among the high-rise blocks of East Berlin, in Gerd’s dystopian paintings, and in archive footage from the 1970s taking us along the so-called “hippie trail” that Viola travelled back and forth, we take a deep dive into living through addiction – and beyond. The short, flashlight-like therapy sessions at the clinic provide additional insights into the inner worlds of people who struggle with dependency, thus allowing the audience to challenge what they think they know. The director, himself a doctor at the clinic, had previously worked closely with the patients, and the deep (and deeply informed) trust between him and the protagonists is very palpable throughout. In this film, addicted people are not “the others”.

After driving home from a devastating funeral, Deyanna Davis mistakenly drives through a protest in the streets of Buffalo, New York. Confused and injured by police fire, the mother of five soon realises the accident has also impacted a police officer and is placed under arrest at the hospital.

At that same protest is Myles Carter, a single father and organiser who is assaulted by police, witnesses the events unfold, and begins advocating for Deyanna’s innocence. Tied together by the trauma of the same night and bonded through parenthood, Thank You for Thinking of Me follows Deyanna as she faces imprisonment, Myles as he navigates the risks of organising as a Black Muslim man, and their fight within a criminal justice system that places greater value on the lives of police officers than the citizens they are sworn to protect.