When the terror alert level in Belgium was raised, the Interior Minister made a pithy statement that he was going to clean up the Molenbeek district – by now a synonym for Islamist breeding ground. Meanwhile a resident of the Schaerbeek district, also predominantly populated by migrants, discovered that mysterious things were going on in front of her window. She informed the authorities and filmed what’s happening … An equally intelligent and amusing essayist look at paranoia and the obsession with security.

Frederik Lang

The title of this film is taken from Charles Bukowski’s eponymous poem. One of its lines is: “I am not like other people. Other people are like other people.” The young people in Volkan Üce’s “Displaced” know the experience of being different and without a home Bukowski talks about. Sinan, Şule, Orhan and Bahar spent their childhood and youth in Belgium and the Netherlands before they moved (back) to Istanbul, their grandparents’ home country. But even in the city they love so much they are strangers at first.

Over a period of four years – from 2011 to 2015 – Üce follows the Belgian-Turkish or Dutch-Turkish migrants on their quest for identity, jobs and personal happiness. In the face of the political upheavals in Turkey, their European socialisation takes on a different significance. While Orhan sides with Erdoğan, taking part in the Gezi protests becomes a meaningful experience and a way to find his place in society for Sinan: “Gezi is ours. Istanbul is ours. The lightbulb has bursted”, the writing on the wall reads.

Esther Buss

A documentary experiment: six women, three housemaids and three employers, who discuss housework and hierarchies, respect and social status, habits and dreams in front of different-coloured backgrounds (red, blue and yellow). Fragmented tales of work and family circumstances make the viewer create their own montage in their heads. Biographies crystallize in front of their inner eye.
All six women, aged between 35 and 64, are played by the filmmaker Inès Rabadán herself. Costumes and masks are identical, so the women whose stories we share are neither marked as representatives of their class (or profession) nor as individual personalities. We hear (and experience!) only their voices and see the actor-director’s magnificent appropriation of their respective personalities through lip-synching and miming. It seems as if Inès Rabadán translated Brecht’s theoretical scepticism of the reliability of simple documentary representation into visual practice: “A recording of the Krupp works or AEG yields almost nothing about these institutes. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. To achieve truth, something must be constructed, something artificial, staged.”

Ralph Eue

The couple live high above the city in the basket of a crane. The woman fire fighter and the magician share the small joys and worries of life in their intimate life together. The world is still as it should be up here. Or is it? Similarities with escapist tendencies when dealing with the chaos of our riotous world are bound to be purely coincidental in this animated satire. The dynamic lines of the drawings are reinforced by a strong soundtrack by Canadian soprano Natalie Choquette.

Nadja Rademacher

“Inkotana” is a verb in the Bantu language Kinyarwanda. It means to fight without delay, never to give up. The official name of the Inkotanyi is: Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Ever since they ended the historically unprecedented genocide in 1994 with a guerrilla war – within 100 days, 1 million Tutsi were killed by Hutu extremists assisted by the population – they have been ruling the country under their close-lipped president Paul Kagame. The film reviews the history of the Inkotanyi in six chapters: from the historic background of the pogroms against the Tutsi, the time of exile and the founding of the RPF in the 1980s to the invasion of Rwanda in 1990 and the four-year civil war through to Kagame’s rule which was attended by counter-violence and oppression throughout. Archive material and interviews with high-ranking military officers and soldiers of the RPF, with journalists, historians and president Kagame form an image of “the best trained and most disciplined rebellion of the African continent”, as director Christophe Cotteret calls it. Last but not least, the film takes a look at colonial continuities in post-colonialism, apparent, for example, in the French support for the dictatorial Habyarimana regime.

Esther Buss

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Nominated for Filmprize "Leipziger Ring"

The rebellions in the Arab world were quickly wrapped with the blue ribbon of the “Arab Spring” – a simplifying bracket that sounds well, a verbal embrace that also suppresses all details. Pauline Beugnies’ film refers to Egypt, explicitly to the “Tahrir generation”. And it refers to the young woman who smiles into the camera at the beginning and has diagnosed a mental disorder in herself and her contemporaries: the great happiness of having been part of it combined with deep regret at having launched the movement.

But is it still alive, that spirit of departure of the early 2011 Egyptian revolution? Or has it adapted already, to the new circumstances, the limitations that quickly grew back, the mushrooming authorities? Beugnies talks to young people who may well be called “old revolutionaries”, even though hardly anyone among them is over 30. She confronts them with recordings of the people they were then – strange re-encounters with old identities they remember like lost friends. She lets them talk about the last years, about the children that were born, the disappointments and the wear and tear of life. But still: they sometimes talk as aggressively and exuberantly as they did in 2011.

Sylvia Görke

The Congolese artist Emmanuel Botalatala is working on his new assemblage. He fixes painted tombs, crosses and tanks made of garbage to a plywood board while a member of his team paints a blood-red street around the “African cemetery”. In the end the work is dominated by the colours of the German flag – an allusion to the European arms shipments that support the wars on this continent.

Before Botalatala started to work as an artist in 1979 he was a teacher and bank clerk. The 68-year-old autodidact invariably points out that he never attended art school. The “Minister of Garbage” combs the garbage dumps of Kinshasa almost daily to collect material for his object paintings. He finds his subjects in the radio news. Resignations, violent dissolutions of rallies and a massacre with hundreds of victims are reported in the run-up to the presidential elections. Botalatala sacrifices a lot for his artistic and educational project, which would be unthinkable without the work of his wife and the self-styled “Vice Presidents”, while his male artist’s ego frequently shines through his socially engaged art. Even a “Minister of Garbage” wants to leave a legacy.

Esther Buss

Giant fourthousanders rise majestically to the skies in the Bolivian Andes. Grey-blue craggy steep faces and white mountain clouds flow into each other. Mining is the sole industry here. People climb down into the stony bowels of the mountains and risk their lives to mine silver and other minerals. The freezing cold, dark mineshafts regularly collapse and bury the workers, many of them still children, alive. They say that the souls of those who die in the shaft must wander for three days, all the time pursued by “el tío”, the evil mountain god. They fight their fear with alcohol and coca; superstitions abound. The men especially live in a loop of work, alcohol and aggression, hoping every day for the big find and trying to propitiate the spirits with sacrifices. Archaic rituals are meant to appease Mother Earth, but a look into the people’s exhausted faces makes one suspect that their faith is shaken with every death.

A visually stunning film that manages to transport the viewer into the breathtaking Andean landscape without turning into a geography lesson. Haunting, alarming and moving – great cinema above the clouds.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

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Nominated for Healthy Workplaces Film Award