In life’s holding pattern: Shannon, a young woman, three-year-old Nolan and five-times grandmother Suzanne all need an organ donation. A race against the clock and against death, which approaches rapidly and relentlessly while they slowly move up the waiting list step by step. For patients and relatives, this time of waiting is an ever-changing mixture of the fear of loss and the hope for a future. From this existential state of insecurity, worry and hope, “A Transplant” takes us in delicate but explicit images into the operating room and into the body that is being renewed by a team of doctors and helpers – practiced and level-headed, but also aware of the risks and the responsibility weighing down every movement. A film about the, if you will, uniqueness of life. And about the miracle that occasionally and in dire need it can even escape this uniqueness.

Lukas Stern

Galloping at breakneck speed through the tempestuous delirium of Oskar Kokoschka. After his failed amour fou with Alma Mahler he plunges into war as a dragoon in 1915, is wounded and comes to terms with things by creating the expressionist drama “Orpheus and Eurydice.” Elizabeth Hobbs takes up the dynamic quality of Kokoschka’s drawings and the turmoil of his emotional ecstasy. Restless ink strokes are entwined in a powerful and brightly coloured mesh of short-lived scenes of passion and suffering.

André Eckardt

In August 2013, a more than 2,000 year old bronze statue of Apollo turned up in Gaza. A Palestinian fisherman is said to have discovered the 750 kg statue on the ocean floor and, with a lot of effort, recovered it. Photos showing the well-preserved, greenishly shimmering god of light, the arts, medicine and oracles lying on a cloth with a Smurf pattern began to circulate. Though only a few saw the “Apollo of Gaza” with their own eyes, it instantly became an object of mercantile and geopolitical interests and speculations. There were offers and bids, negotiations with museums, suspicions and wild rumours. Then the statue suddenly disappeared, seized by the Hamas government – that’s what people say before they add that they’re not at liberty to discuss the matter.

“The Apollo of Gaza” traces the story of a spectacular find of, if nothing else, some symbolic political weight in a mixture of mystery and investigative research. What’s left at the end are the hopes of a region marked by war and blockades that expects the beautiful bronze god to enable them to reconnect with a buried cultural past.

Esther Buss