Maya Steinberg is a secular Israeli. Her father, however, had a late religious awakening. He will not appear in her film. Instead, the young director approaches his faith and her lack of understanding for it through a visit to the gravesite of rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in Galilee, where she spends a few weeks, observing believers, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, and wondering: Is there a place here for women? And can there be a place for queer women?

There are children, too, among the Palestinian insurgents. For some time now, the Israeli side has observed minors who take an active part in an Intifada, especially with knives. They are harshly dealt with: prison, hardly any judiciary support. Ada Ushpiz, filmmaker and journalist, comes surprisingly close to some of the Palestinian families concerned. She has accompanied the dubious insurgents over several years and witnessed terrible pressure.

Freshly released from prison, 12-year-old Dima encounters a crowd of television people. A few months ago, she was caught with a knife. The attack was said to be aimed at Jewish Israelis. Now, in a frenzy of camera flashes, her mother stands close by her side. But instead of offering protection she assumes the role of an agitator, demanding that her daughter report how she was treated by the Israelis. But Dima remains silent. Her family describes the pubescent girl as mentally handicapped. Dareen is younger than Dima and lives with her brothers, father and a few snakes in the immediate vicinity of their Israeli neighbours. Soldiers stalk the house, sometimes stones fly, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, is allegedly involved. In her astonishing film, Ushpiz shows a life in constant tension. Her approach is unapologetic and familiar.

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.

Avi Mograbi met his grandfather in a dream. The setting: Damascus, 1920. Would the two have spoken Arabic or Hebrew at this impossible encounter? It’s amazing that they were able to communicate at all! For Mograbi barely speaks Arabic, and his grandfather only learned Ivrit later. Another impossible conversation begins in his friend Ali Al-Azhari’s flat: between Avi, the Jew, and Ali, the Palestinian. Their lively, affectionate exchange about ancestors, vocabularies and dreams is supposed to prepare for a film that ends up not being made. But since the footage has already been shot, why not use it to tackle a new Israeli-Palestine reality?

In this indie game we embark on a journey into the vast expanse of the void. If you like, you can contemplate, rest, observe yourself. If you feel like moving, you can navigate the white space step by step – or just take a break … But not for too long! Or you will miss the chance to uncover hidden secrets and find your own path in the middle of nowhere.

Microplastics are everywhere: in the air, the soil, and the water. In this “surreal eco-fiction,” plastic and the environment live in peaceful coexistence. They invent a comforting world in which we merge with plastics to become hybrid creatures, endowed with a new identity and DNA. In the plastisphere we become the material that unites us all – if only it were finally allowed to re-shape us.

Leaving home to live in a new country isn’t easy at all. Lyri moves to the Netherlands with her family and talks about her experiences. Given the choice, she would have preferred to stay in Israel. So many things are foreign and different now. What strikes her most, though, is that the children here learn to swim in their street clothes.

The archived testimonies of “Breaking the Silence”, an association of military veterans, are to be turned into a compilation of “service incidents” in the Israeli-occupied territories. But Avi Mograbi confesses: “My films tend to get complicated, even when my intention is to make a very simple film.” His reaction to a complex doom is artistically and intellectually commensurate: complex. Once again he uses a built-in commentary function in which he himself, white-bearded, explains the tricky situation to his audience: not as a special “Israel-Palestine” case, but as the bitter standard application of the globally familiar aporetic model of “military occupation”.

The NGO “Breaking the Silence” – BtS for short – consists of veteran Israeli soldiers who, by collecting personal accounts of their memories, want to raise awareness of everyday military life and the treatment of the population in the Occupied Territories. Director Silvina Landsmann’s film allows us a look behind the scenes of a contested group with a controversial approach in the midst of a conflict that’s been smouldering for more than 70 years.

What makes a good soldier? The ability to execute orders without scruples, or the consideration of higher moral goals when dealing with the enemy? For many members of BtS, the latter was only possible after active military service. In their work, they engage with operations and acts that in retrospect seem wrong to them. They address the Israeli population and foreign media with videos, lectures and city tours. The streets of Hebron are the site of frequent clashes between BtS, Israeli settlers and the army. On the political level, too, the organisation is harshly criticized. They are accused of fabricating stories, damaging Israel’s reputation and playing into the hands of anti-Semites. Landsmann observes with a cinematic, sober eye how the group struggles internally and externally to find its voice.

Under file entry Z32, the testimony of a former elite soldier of the Israeli army is preserved. He confesses to having participated in the killing of Palestinians. Was it a breach of duty resulting from high spirits, collateral damage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the self-fulfilling prophecy of every military training? Avi Mograbi uses the testimony and his own disturbance as an occasion to re-interrogate the confessor who is made anonymous by image manipulation. He calls his cross examination a “documentary musical tragedy”, because he sings his comments right into the experimental interrogation room: “Oy, I’m harbouring a murderer, oy, inside my film.”