Five young people from Ukraine talk about their lives after the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all of them fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the war, however, shattered their life plans. Representing “Generation Maidan”, they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. Theatre director Roza Sarkisian produces a Hamlet adaptation with them in which they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas on stage again.

For them Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is not just a historical text, but a current and existential dilemma that has no clear answer. The film follows the rehearsals where different biographies, self-images and political positions clash: A soldier meets his first LGBT person, the feminist quarrels with the fact that the war has undone hard-won emancipatory achievements. Frictions and differences are exposed, compromises are strenuously negotiated. Eventually the film’s focus widens and leaves the stage to introduce the five as individuals with their own inner struggles. The result is a many-layered, dense portrait of a torn and yet powerful Ukrainian generation who, due to the Russian invasion, find themselves at war again, only a few months after their production premiered.

After reunification, immigration made the Israelite Religious Community of Leipzig grow to considerable size, too big for its old rooms. The Ariowitsch House, built in the 1920s as an Israelite old people’s home, is to become the home of a generously dimensioned cultural and community centre – and at the same time commemorate the residents of the home who were deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. But the start of the development is delayed: neighbouring land owners file a lawsuit. Miriam Pfeiffer intervenes in the ongoing public debate, asking citizens of the city about their suspicions concerning reasons of the refusal that the competent court may not be aware of.

An innovative approach to the subject of National Socialism which uses a composition by Georg Katzer, a GDR pioneer of Neue Musik. The sound level – acoustic distortions and sound bites by leading representatives of the Third Reich – dominates, juxtaposed with minimalist images. A dialogue between viewers and memorial evolves in shots and counter shots.

Elise is a timid woman. She’s even afraid of trees. When one day a paper plane sails through her window, she’s so agitated that she hardly sleeps a wink that night. The next morning Emil, a boy in a baseball cap, knocks on her door. He’s looking for his plane and also needs to go to the loo. Suddenly Elise’s life changes in a wonderful way.

Complete darkness. Our concentration turns to the spherical sounds around us. Basses wander through our body, triggering images, emotions. The sensory overload which usually has us so firmly in its grip is turned off. Sound – improvised and modulated interactively – takes the lead. Stories emerge. And all this exclusively in our own heads.

Silvia Szuprizinski has lived alone with her little daughter for a year now: time to take stock. The young woman talks, her stories commented by Gabriele Hochneder’s pictures of everyday life that tell of efforts. Silvia, leaning against the tiled stove, talks about the failed relationship with the child’s father with detachment, but also with a certain degree of regret. At least her own family are present, all of them at the door in time for the first birthday. Still, Silvia spends her nights alone with herself – and the television. The fact that Hochneder’s film, despite the adversities, does not become a lament is at least partly owing to its sanguine main protagonist.

The theatre of the city of Greiz was closed for years in 2011. For generations of spectators, worlds and visions were built with language here. Now this cultural home is dissolving. The long-silenced singing of local choirs echoes in the decrepit, empty rooms. Diapositives are slowly corroded by mould and chemicals. A farewell.

It’s spring and the little bird discovers the first leaves on his tree. Already the buds open and the bee comes buzzing. Curious, the little bird stumbles after it and almost overlooks the fox who is growling hungrily again. After the farting caterpillar last year, the bird can now be happy about a new companion.

After ten years in Germany, where he acquired “the beautiful language of the former arch enemy”, the filmmaker returns to Haifa and takes stock of the time spent between the rivers Rhine and Neisse, but also looks at his home from a changed perspective. The result is a complex montage of images from those years: conversations, landscapes and objects, sought and found in Germany, Poland and Israel.

“The Rhine Flows to the Mediterranean Sea” attempts the Sisyphean task of a localization between philo- and anti-Semites, the anxious and the indifferent, those who remember and those who suppress. Not an image or sentence that doesn’t trigger a multitude of associations. The devil is in the detail: This film opens our eyes to this. What are the traumas that perpetuate the Holocaust, which the filmmaker, son of a Polish survivor, was unable to forget, “never, not for a single day” in all those years in Germany? What mechanisms of suppression are at work among the relatives of the perpetrators, of the victims? How is the perception, the mind, the memory of the individual shaped by belonging to a nation, a religion or political group? Offer Avnon gives fragmentary answers and each raises new questions. The search for the “uncanny” he began with his film is far from over.

In the mid-19th century, a massive fireplace was the centrepiece of every stately home in England. Children are agile enough to keep the flow of air going in the narrow and dark flues. Their young skin is scraped raw by the sooty stone walls. Their fear of falling is as strong as their fear of the master’s punishment. Black-brown-red cross hatching and unusual camera perspectives bring to life the report of a chimney sweep of the time.

The project “Germany 09” brought the upper league of German auteur filmmakers together to take stock of the Berlin Republic in individual film contributions. Dominik Graf contributed to this collage of the German image a reflection about post-1945 urban architecture shot on old Super8 stock: provisional, slipshod ensembles of pretty-ugly public buildings, fenced-in urban wasteland, draughty storefronts and uninhabited housing blocks in Munich, Duisburg, Frankfurt am Main, West Berlin, all of them testimonies to an unplanned through traffic for social and migrant milieus. A thorn in the side of the reunited mania for cleaning up, renovating and decorating.

It is a stroke of luck when a film manages to simply observe the flow of life and almost casually show us the miracles found in life’s corners. Ann Carolin Renninger approaches people and things with great serenity and a palpable joy of searching for and finding images.

Rovin lives on a remote farm on the Baltic Sea and explores his surroundings with insatiable curiosity. He is interested in the universe, planets, unknown creatures – and in tardigrades, those tiny multicellular organisms that look like dust bags on legs and are real survival artists. Quite unlike humans, as Rovin points out, because the latter are sure to die out one day. He sees this as a logical fact, not a threat. And when you open yourself up to the grainy, earthy images and the calm narrative, you eventually stop wondering, too, why that should be a problem. After all, as long as the wind blows through the trees and scatters the tardigrades, everything is in good order. In addition to the captivatingly alert boy, Renninger meets Marie, who knows everything about rocks, and Christopher, who decorates a place with these rocks. They are all on a quest and every day find a piece of what one cannot hold onto: the present.

Phew, it’s so boring. Nothing is allowed at grandma’s! No touching anything, no painting on anything, always being quiet. But when grandma is taking her nap, Greta comes up with the idea of playing funeral with her. The stuffed animals mourn around the sofa grave, Greta gives a speech in a trembling voice. That’s when grandma wakes up and they both realise: For good memories, one must create beautiful moments together.

Workers reconstruct a railway bridge and Eva Fritzsche reconstructs the process behind it – by re-enacting what she couldn’t film, supported by the participants, who re-play themselves. The film sings the praises especially of those whose commitment was held in low esteem: young people who even give up playing football, and women who suddenly find themselves working in the factory. “Women as blacksmiths, what a joke!” a job centre employee sneers. This echoes what Eva Fritzsche herself had to listen to at DEFA: “Women don’t make films!” Yes, she did – and created one of the most impressive testimonies of the years of reconstruction.

World history meets local history on the street corner of Sperlingsberg in Oberdorla, Thuringia. In 1945, an American soldier was shot here. A photo of him became famous and, decades later, is circulating on the internet. Director Christa Pfafferott places this picture at the beginning of her research.

You feel welcome on Güler Yücel’s terrace. The temperamental artist presents colourful paintings of the life she knows intimately. Yücel lives and paints on the Turkish Datça peninsula. Her paintings are a chronicler’s narrative. They capture the exuberance of a wedding, follow labourers during the olive harvest, show a flock of goats. They also tell of her marriage to Can, a politically persecuted poet now dead.

When Güler Yücel feels too hot, she laughingly hoses herself down. Even her latest works must withstand the water test. We meet an unconventional woman who, though old, explores her surroundings with a beautiful joy of life. Inspired by the conversations and by Yücel’s works, the camera goes on a journey of discovery, resting on other women who confidently look and talk into its lens, like the goat herd about her time in the city, where she felt other-directed. Now she has found herself. Later, at a wedding party, the young bride proudly strides towards her future. Güler Yücel, too, has lived her life and known love. One of her paintings shows Can and her sitting naked in the sun. She remembers her husband, the political battles they fought together.