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.

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.

What did the Corona lockdown look like from a window in the residential towers of posh East London in the spring of 2020? The reflective two-week observation shows serious shifts in the everyday coordinate system of a privileged urban population at an immediate level. Meanwhile, the vacant apartments in the district, which were deliberately caused by speculation, represent a warning sign for the future of investor-friendly urban spaces.

The earth never sleeps. The duo Semiconductor distils research data on earth movements and animates them in a five-channel installation. In a dark hall, visitors to the Sónar Barcelona 2016 festival are captivated by a huge, luminous band of ceaselessly morphing layers of colours and strange sounds, experiencing a cut through both landscape and time.

Geologically, layers of earth form over thousands of years. The processes are almost imperceptible to humans. A research project in a Spanish quarry reconstructs earth movements, models them and records them acoustically. Creaking, rumbling and trickling, the layers leave traces of sounds animated in an audiovisual five-channel installation by the duo Semiconductor.

A man on a river at dawn. He prays, dives into the water, and comes back up with a bucket of sand. The single father Thomas Boa toils away as a sand diver in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. The sand eventually ends up at the construction site of Jianmin Luan, a Chinese construction manager who went to Africa to further his career. Luan pays a price for this opportunity: He lives very simply, plagued by power failures and fears of malaria, typhoid, and civil war. After years abroad, he has become estranged from his family in China; his wife is mentally unwell.

Directors Ningyi Sun and Pascale Appora-Gnekindy tell a story of globalisation, poverty, and labour, asking how life can be lived with dignity. Instead of perpetuating clichés they introduce us to two men (and their families) who are tiny cogs in the gears of a global competition machine. There is a lot of inequality in this system and next to no winners. But there are also moments when it all seems worthwhile: when Luan’s wife visits Africa and intimacy is suddenly rekindled, or when Thomas cultivates a field and is finally able to look ahead. A visually powerful, enthralling and horizon-expanding film that skilfully evades stereotypes.

What happened in the GDR on 17 June 1953? Using a lot of original footage, Norddeutscher Rundfunk looks back on the events in a detailed report marking their 20th anniversary and shows different interpretations and explanations. Agent coup? Workers’ revolt? Popular uprising? The interpretations were controversial, even among contemporary witnesses and Western historians.

Loneliness has many faces in Berlin. Young and old are afflicted by it, men, women, single and married people. It’s normal. Nonetheless there’s a stigma attached to this mixture of emotions that makes sufferers stay silent. Director Nicola Graef tries a different approach in her film: She lets the lonely inhabitants of the capital city speak, listens. The result is varied and quite often surprising.

Berlin is a city for extroverts, Tessa thinks. The young woman’s mind, however, is on the opposite site. The consequence is loneliness and that “is quite draining”, she says. 85-year-old Efraim, a photographer and flaneur, has found a confident way to deal with those nagging feelings: He’s “not the type for marriage” anyway. Artist Thomas, on the other hand, suffers from the end of a long-term love affair and wonders whether “the icing sugar is all kissed away by the age of 50”, but also says: “There is a market for everything, even for broken cars.” Poised and affectionate, we move through the expanses of the city in Graef’s film, where stories sprout like weeds between the cobblestones. From the corner pub to the artist’s studio, from the parks to the sports club and, time and again, into the silent flats – she encounters her witnesses to emptiness everywhere. Their reports are moving, but they never make us feel hopeless.

The deadliest refugee route in the world claims thousands of lives every year. In the first half of 2023 alone, almost 2,000 people died in the Mediterranean because the European Union’s border policy systematically violates existing laws. Instead of helping shipwrecked persons, Frontex practices illegal pushbacks, finances the violent operations of the Libyan coast guard and takes massive action against private sea rescue missions that act where the EU fails. All this has been documented in the media and yet remains incomprehensible to all who were never forced to live through this situation themselves: How can one deny assistance to hundreds of people in peril of life, even threaten and criminalise the civilian helpers?

Jonathan Schörnig was concerned with this dilemma of lack of perception and decided to bring a sea rescue to the screen as a real time documentary to show how agonisingly long it takes to rescue 104 persons from a sinking rubber boat. One by one, step by step, the film follows the action with several parallel cameras. When the Libyan coast guard turn up, the situation comes to a head. The rescued persons and the crew are stuck on the high seas for days because no Mediterranean country gives them permission to dock. It is only after a heavy storm that one port takes pity on them. What sounds like a bad script is actually – daily – reality.

“Imminent danger, fear, catastrophe,“ the Austrian-Jewish composer Arnold Schönberg wrote on top of his film score in 1930, to which – except in this collage, swaying like a battered boxer between austere reading document, black film abysses and roaring tempests of images – no film was ever made. Schönberg’s letters articulate the forebodings of the disaster the National Socialists were to bring upon the Jews, describe anti-Semitism that was becoming systematic, marginalization and defamation. Inserted in between, as a look back and forward at historical continuities: bombers approaching Vietnam, the shot Paris Communards in coffins arranged like letter cases.

His mother starts drinking when he is eight years old. Jan Koester projects photos from his childhood on his own body that tell of loneliness and helplessness in toxic relationships. These Rorschach-like superimposed images put physical abstractions in relation to their violent and alienated surroundings. Shifting between fluid and halting movements, telescoped pixels tugging at each other deconstruct predominant gender norms.

El Shatt in Egypt, in the middle of the desert, was both a haven and a projection. This is where in 1944, based on a deal between the Yugoslavian partisans led by Tito and the British allies, not only a refugee camp for the families of anti-fascist fighters from Dalmatia was built. This is where a model was created for the future Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – a state that was to build its founding narrative on the people’s liberation fight against fascism and declare collectively organised self-administration its social ideal.

Director Ivan Ramljak offers us multifaceted insights into this long-forgotten piece of primordial communist history spelled out in reality. After painstaking research, he combines hundreds of historical photographs and some (few) film recordings of interviews with contemporary witnesses. The lively voices of those who were children back then and are over 80 today tell their stories offscreen: of the struggle for survival, solidarity and lived ideology, in short, of a daily life that included self-organised schools, workshops, canteen kitchens, even a newspaper. Ramljak, tongue firmly in cheek, takes up the thread of history and juxtaposes his skilfully arranged archive material with staged scenes played by the ensemble of a theatre that was founded in El Shatt at the time.

The biography of the female elephant Bibi, who is considered to display abnormal behaviour, is marked by misfortunes: Born in Zimbabwe in 1985. Lost her mother shortly after birth. Imported by the East Berlin zoo in 1989. Deported to the Halle zoo in 2008. On the basis of an empathic reappraisal of these traumatic events the film reflects on the significance of social issues and how to deal with exclusion today: a therapy by proxy on film that will hopefully have a long-distance healing effect on Bibi.

In the midst of a blue-violet tinted mountain range are the remains of a lonely pavilion. Accompanied by the music of Max Cooper, this setting becomes the stage of a dance performance – in which our hands play the leading roles. Intuitively we let the rhythm take them over, move them playfully, form graceful gestures. At this hypnotic place everything is possible for the dancers.

Róża Berger-Fiedler’s walk through the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee in search of her grandmother’s grave turns into a walk through the chequered Jewish history of the whole city. Interspersed are impressions of Chanukah celebrations at the “Restaurant of Nationalities” Café Moskau in Karl-Marx-Allee in East Berlin, light-drenched and devout. The film artfully interweaves the past and present of active Jewish life with memories of expulsion and annihilation, brings private and historical perspectives together and thus creates a sensitive approach where in the GDR formal distance was long dominant.

A controversial filmic parable on the loss of homes and the destruction of nature in the name of industrial progress: Between 1979 and 1982, the village of Magdeborn, which was regarded as an obstacle to brown coal mining south of Leipzig, is demolished. The locals are resettled, mostly against their will, to Grünau, Schönefeld and Borna. Those portrayed in this cinematic requiem rarely mince words when they call themselves pawn sacrifices and bargaining chips for the economic needs of the state. Officially, Tetzlaff and his team were attested an unacceptable emotional closeness to the people.