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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A country that could be anywhere, not precisely localized and yet everywhere. It’s a beautiful summer’s day when the life of siblings Kyona and Adriel changes forever. Their village is raided, destroyed and set on fire. The whole family is forced to flee and experiences many real and surreal situations on their tracks across a whole continent to finally arrive, perhaps, at a more peaceful place.

At the start of the film, Kyona leafs through a sketchbook, takes stock of her life and talks about the end of her childhood. It is only later that the siblings even realize that they are refugees, that like many others they are making their way to the border for a variety of reasons: natural disasters, the consequences of climate change, war, persecution. The two children come across dangerous and helpful people, are separated and find each other again. This feature-length animation, realized in oil on glass, relies on the rapid interplay between fantasy and reality, taking us, on the one hand, into a fictitious, non-real world. But on the other hand, the places, names, situations remind us of familiar things. They show fleeing, exile, setting out as a universal experience.

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.

Eating together with chopsticks, forks, or cheese sandwiches: Heinz Toku-Zen Anneser and his students practice Buddhist rituals without pretension. In his study, which is as precisely measured as it is poetic, Thomas Köhling observes the daily routines of this small, quiet group in the German provinces and finds appealingly bizarre moments when Eastern religion and western culture overlap. The sky above the Velux window is the same as above Mount Fuji.

In a dilapidated village in south-eastern Turkey, a Syrian Orthodox nun endures alone with her animals. However strong the hostility of her predominantly Muslim neighbourhood may be: she won’t be driven out, for she has sworn to protect the church and not to leave the sacred place. This quietly filmed observation of everyday life focuses on an isolated woman who carries the pain of a whole community inside her.

The population of the village was tortured and driven away in the 1990s. The nun Dayrayto came here only afterwards. Today she rarely receives visits from passing believers. She usually spends her days doing maintenance work on the church and taking care of the animals. Right now she is worried about her old dog. Has he been poisoned? What to make of the provocations and threats she talks about? Dayrayto is always vigilant, even when she’s resting. From her elevated dwelling she looks far across the landscape, registering every vehicle, however distant. But she is in no way distracted by the presence of the film crew. The unobtrusive camera follows the nun – not at every turn, but as a constant, protective companion as she endures on her “bastion”. Loneliness, worries and fear shape this sparse life. They made her suspicious, but also fearless.