The Russian tricolour is already blowing in the background as Saxony’s Minister President Prof. Dr. Kurt Biedenkopf visits a Soviet armoured regiment on Christmas Eve 1991. Those were truly turbulent times – a few months before, tanks had been rolling across Moscow’s Red Square during the August Coup; only days later, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned.

A green lawn like an unused carpet, encircled by a neat forest edge, in the background the steaming cooling towers of a coal power station – impressionistic camera images from Lusatia. They summarise in one pan how a used-up utilitarian landscape is trying to recultivate itself. Can ancient identity and language be re-discovered amid this strange artificiality? The director travelled through this region in search of her origins. She was born here, in Lusatia. This is her home and that of the smallest of all Slavic peoples: the Sorbs.

She thinks about the assimilation of this cultural and linguistic community with the indigenous people, about its history of oppression in the various German systems, about a region caught up in structural change and the identity-shaping power of words – even if one has to learn them anew first. She meets a German Anna who becomes a Sorbian Hanka. She encounters people dedicated to preserving the traditions. The younger folks especially see their Sorbian-ness as a commitment to a community spirit, if not – like the artist, Hella – as an alternative way of life. Accompanied by old and new Sorbian sounds, along the filmmaker’s offscreen reflections, the many-voiced portrait of a nation within the nation emerges who reclaims its culture out of the local museums back into its everyday life.

Tröglitz in 2015: The mayor organises a shelter for refugees. He and his family become homeless themselves, because many residents believe that strangers do not belong in their Middle German home. With an interview with the mayor on the soundtrack, the drawings and 3D animations make tangible how the immense hatred corrodes the fabric of the community and tears the people apart.

Siren-like singing and rhythmic light reflections segue into a lyrical text and sketched silhouettes of coastlines and waves. Delicate lines and soft shadings on superimposed transparent foils form many-layered networks of shapes and structures. What is offscreen creeps into the frame through reflections and blends in with the visual design of the film. Then and now meet and merge into a poetic narrative about a childhood in Stralsund, at a time when the city was still part of the GDR. A fenced-in, circumscribed childhood, framed by nocturnal floodlights, the bawling of drunk sailors and the crumbling plaster of facades and walls gone grey. The narrator manages to leave this oppressive fortress behind, but she can never escape completely. The memories that have settled like grey dust on her interior will stay with her forever.

In only ninety seconds Marcus Grysczok tells a touching personal story of loss and takes us to great emotional depths. Tune in: an electronically distorted outcry. The protagonist talks to himself and to someone who no longer lives in this world, but all the more in his heart. He looks for a way out of this state of powerlessness, assuming a stranger’s role, a free-roaming paper dog that runs between real shelves and across tables, races past people on black-and-white photographs and everyday objects, chases himself on a plate rim. The images convey a feeling of home – a home for memory and for life. Tune out? As soon as the dog stops, reality puts an end to this restless racket and brings the awareness of enduring loss. Poetic in language and design, the film formulates a moving but clear-eyed farewell to a brother.

Clown*esses are more than jesters; they hold a mirror up to society. They move between the worlds and like to break rules, albeit with a wink. At the same time, clown*esses are contradiction experts by nature, because they know on the one hand that life is far too short to be sad, and on the other hand use their art not only to entertain us but to make oppression and violence visible and attackable.

The artists portrayed in this film, for example, look closely at patriarchal structures and learned social behaviours. When Gözde in her unerring performances questions and satirises the images of women still prevalent in Turkey, this critique is rooted in her own experience – and that is precisely what makes it so funny. Lokke from Germany, on the other hand, emphasises the transformative aspect of clowning that allows them to try out different identities and characters, to refuse being pinned down and to ridicule stereotypes. Jana Rothe’s cogent short portrait presents these and other clownesque attitudes towards the world. It makes you wonder how in the world we ended up sacrificing fun and subversion to rationality in our daily lives.

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 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.

A tracking shot along the objects on the shelves of a film prop warehouse will trigger stories in our minds. The orange-coloured telephone takes us to the futuristic 1970s, plastic salmon canapés on artificial lemon slices invite us to a party, cut and thrust weapons herald mortal danger.

Experts from various prop companies explain their craft of storing and archiving. But under which keyword are folkloristic masks, African or pseudo-African objects to be catalogued? Enter Thelma Buabeng: The German actor and BIPoC activist slips into the documentary-like role of a doctoral student in Postcolonial Studies who does research for her thesis in the Prop Department Studio Babelsberg. From her perspective the objects take on a different context, enter into a dialogue and raise questions of their own. Meanwhile, a staff member is looking for a suitable frame for the Baroque painting “Portrait of an African Woman Holding a Clock” by Annibale Carracci. But can this frame even exist?

In Korntal, a small town of 9,000 souls in Baden-Württemberg, hundreds of children were abused in the homes of the Evangelical Brethren since the 1950s. Forced labour, physical punishment and sexualised violence were the order of the day. To date, more than 150 former children have broken their silence, more than 80 perpetrators have been identified. Because the latter covered for each other and the neighbours looked away, the children were defenceless against the abuse for decades. When the scandal was exposed in 2013, the community and the village were hostile at first: That which must not be cannot be. It was only when the pressure from the outside grew that the community initiated a process of dealing with the scandal. But it is controversial: victims are re-traumatised, their statements doubted. To this day the children from Korntal are fighting for investigation and compensation.

The film focuses on the victims and avoids all dramatisation. What happened was dramatic enough, after all. When testimonies are only played as audio-recordings to protect the speakers, a simple animation fills the visual gaps. When those responsible today speak, the camera stays restrained and does not judge. That is not necessary anyway, because the inconceivable relativisation of the crimes speaks loudly enough – in Korntal as elsewhere.

Mariella lives in Berlin with her family of seven. Her father was trained in kung fu martial arts at the Chinese Shaolin monastery. Today he runs the Berlin-Schöneberg kung fu school and prepares her and her sisters for the next tournament. This has been part of Mariella’s life for many years. But the nervousness before each competition never really gets better.

Most accidents happen at home. That is where a jazz-loving drawn figure is unexpectedly re-confronted with a text by Bertolt Brecht that brings an appeal to their own political responsibility. Something at least must be done to avoid ending up on the wrong side. A trenchant, tidy contemplation that shows some understanding for human indecision.

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.

At the beginning Michelle Bastien-Archer shows and comments on photos of her wedding. The African-American and her childhood friend Jermaine were married in the unhospitable visitors’ hall of Sing Sing in 2007. He had been sentenced to 22 years to life for voluntary manslaughter in 1998. Ever since, she has been fighting tirelessly to prove his innocence. Now new documents have turned up that reinforce doubts about the trial’s decisive witness statement. Michelle becomes more confident. She presses even more determinedly ahead with her efforts to get Jermaine released. The camera is with her as if live, for almost a decade.

It feels like a thriller whose script was written by life and the U.S. American justice system. Daily life under exceptional circumstances, scenes from an unusual marriage. Timed phone calls from prison, countless visits to the lawyer, appearances at solidarity events for wrongly convicted African Americans. Michelle works as a house painter for the City of New York, raising her two children alone. We learn in passing that their biological father was the victim of a brutal crime. The portrait of a confident woman who shares her fears and hopes with us emerges.

What images do we associate with abortion and why? Where do these images and the emotional scripts in our head come from? How do they influence women who (want to) have an abortion, how do they shape the general discussion? Franzis Kabisch’s personal desktop documentary investigates these questions with great precision, clarity and humour (yes, humour, too!).

In the process, she moves from early 2000s girls’ magazines to the late 19th century, sifts through troves of feminist knowledge and checks alleged cultural-historical facts (such as the discovery of hysteria in women) that haunt conventional wisdom to this day. At the end of the film, we have not only seen an exemplary examination of image politics and how they contributed to pushing the issue of abortion to the social sidelines and linking it with shame and guilt. Franzis Kabisch manages, almost “in the same breath,” to break up the false hubris of the documentary and demonstrate that the evidential value of filmic and photographic “testimonies” must always and implicitly be scrutinised. Ultimately, “cui bono?” – the question who profits, must be considered in every media-critical reflection – not just in the age of stock photos, editing software and AI but, strictly speaking, at the start of every documentary image production.

The motorway roars in the background, darkness lies over the service area. One truck driver smokes; another turns on the light in his sleeper cab. A summer Sunday is dawning, everything is standing still. Precisely designed detail shots induce in us a state of waiting. This is what life on the road can also look like. Cooking, dozing, staring into space. Hair is shorn short, words are exchanged. Polish pop songs resound from one of the cabs.

Life seems to have been tuned out. And yet it is happening. One of the men roams the forest, calls home. Suddenly a family is present in the images: The man remembers a swimming trip when the children were small. A strangely beautiful sight. He holds his mobile up in the air so the person on the other end of the line can hear the woodpecker.