Long walks through almost deserted cityscapes which even in the late 1970s still bear the distinct scars of the Second World War: a Belgian filmmaker encounters West Berlin. She tries to re-adjust in this terrain saturated with European history and films this transformation in the first person singular. The images of twilight captured on grainy 16mm footage make Berlin look like a city that lies deep in the East, even though it sees itself as a Western city. But Annik Leroy mistrusts the mirror images: they don’t help if you want to see things more clearly.

Bertha loves to draw. She needs help in her daily life for she has a rare disease that impairs her vision. But Bertha refuses to be discouraged. She has organised an exhibition together with a well-known painter. The proceeds will go to research into her disease, the so-called Wolfram syndrome. Can Bertha tame the wild wolves in her life?

It could be called a portrait or a composition with text and sound. Ulrike Meinhof’s “Letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing”, written in prison in 1972/73, a document of detention in thought cascades, lends structure and weight to fifteen minutes of film. The apparently black background is dimly animated at intervals, hinting at a nocturnal outside or an area near water. This attempt to communicate the sensory deprivation resulting from isolation attempts what’s actually impossible, pushing towards abstraction, harsh, brutal, dry. Any narrative “grease” is discarded. There is no space at all, hence not for a narrative, either.

The vultures are circling over the Cevennes, the south-eastern part of the French Massif Central. They are part of the holistic cycle of becoming and passing away which shepherdess Nathalie seeks to come closer to. Because the vultures are gnawing at the remains of her beloved animals. She considers herself responsible not only for their lives, but also for their death. Elsa Maury’s film is an unequivocal testimony to what it means to wield the fatal knife oneself.

The sounds made by a ewe when a lamb is born seem almost human. And when a little later the newborn turns out to be unwilling to live it seems as if one could detect pain in the mother’s eyes. The shepherdess Nathalie’s empathic look at her flock was transferred directly to the viewer. Each animal here has its own name, each has a biography that Nathalie knows by heart. And it’s ultimately up to her to finally decide when the end of a sheep is near. In diary-like sequences we learn about her feelings, take part in a difficult process of development which results in new self-confidence, perhaps even new wisdom. Elsa Maury shows a perennial school of killing and death. She leaves the events uncommented, but achieves an intensity through images and editing that stays with us for a long time.

Kwinten is proud of his Dad who is the commander of a naval ship. But a new mission takes his Dad to sea again for three months. Kwinten waits for postcards and counts the days. His best friend now lives in another town, but fortunately comes to visit. Coping with missing his father isn’t easy for Kwinten. Seeing him again is all the more wonderful, though.

In the summer of 2000 Ugandan and Rwandan troops fought a devastating battle in Kisangani. The International Court of Justice sentenced Uganda to pay one billion U.S. dollars to the civilian victims. After almost twenty years of waiting in vain, some of them set out for Kinshasa to enforce their legal claim. The physical and theatrical power of their mission both drives and radiates from this film.

Dieudo Hamadi has given the women and men he is about to follow down the Congo a visually confident and assured exposition. Gathered on an inky black stage, they look at us and sing: of blood spilled, of money forgotten. Then the march of the maimed sets itself in motion, on crutches, with prostheses, past the nearby pits of the dead and out into the country. Every metre covered is an act of rebellion. When the procession of beggars, who rightly won’t tolerate this designation, finally climbs the stairs of the National Parliament, iconic scenes of Soviet revolutionary cinema seem to shine through. But the crowd that is moving here is different. Its individual bodies push back with all their weight both against the casual shrug of the shoulders of political routine and the carelessly rounded calculations of loss and equivalent value of the arithmetic of war.

The siblings Fien and Jip are on summer holidays. They sit laughing in a pedal boat, sunbathe giggling on a meadow, and talk about a great unknown: love. For Jip is extremely busy sending his crush many hearts via smartphone. But who can provide information about this exciting feeling? Fien thinks: “Love is like ice cream with chocolate sprinkles on top.”

Electromobility is a great promise of the future. The Democratic Republic of the Congo with its vast cobalt and lithium deposits supplies two of the essential building blocks for the necessary batteries. “Machini” focuses on the lives of those who bear the brunt of the exploitation of such dirty raw materials for our “clean” energy.

Once again ten-year-old Romy must say goodbye to her school class to travel through Europe with her family. She pitches in at home because circus life makes children grow up quickly. This film lets us share in her everyday life and the passion for the grand performance. It talks about her longing for the familiar, but also the freedom of being on the road.

A cinematic family constellation in which the audience is guided through a seemingly random conglomeration of private photos, video recordings, notes, thoughts, sounds and texts. Narrative strands crystallise, only to be discarded, taken up again and finally left standing in their ambiguity. A film about the big questions of life, love, family, relationships, death and good food. No more, and certainly no less.

An ingeniously sketched chamber play about the nerve-racking hour before dinner: mother peels vegetables while father is trying to convince their little daughter to take a bath. The protagonists are pretty caricatures of their respective natures, even more so of the roles imposed upon them. An ordinary family – bound together for little good and much evil.

A young taxidermist is fascinated by crows, paying considerate attention to their dead bodies. Her work on the birds is simultaneously a careful study of anatomical connections and a kind of service toward the resurrection of this mythical creature from the realm between life and death. Through detailed, pulsating black-and-white images and a sparingly intense soundtrack, a charged atmosphere unfolds between craftsmanship, imagination and poetry.

Inspired by the course of the Danube, the European river par excellence, this film drifts from the source to the delta, from the forest of origins to the sea of arrival, both black by name. The water keeps flowing, seasons pass, borders move past and languages change. The images and sounds are the results of a poetic and meditative work which abandons itself to the river’s speed and rhythm. Via encounters and reports, dialects and philosophies, people and landscapes, the grand narrative of a fragmented, torn Europe emerges. But it’s here precisely, along the Danube, that this continent is also marked by the wealth of intertwined cultures.

An added title like a lead weight. Four words from Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel “Malina” set the tone: “There is always war.” Who could ever accept this?! And who hasn’t long since come to terms with it?! “Tremor” is a harsh film in vibrating black-and-white images and a choir of voices from offscreen, as compelling as it is implacable. This continuing meditation on great brutalities, small impositions and omnipresent conflicts takes us to task. But it releases us not into short-lived outrage but into lasting rage. At the end an Afropop song by Jupiter & Okwess International: a song about crying and suffering – and fighting.