A black chicken and a white chicken are sitting in their living room when the door bell rings. It’s the fox with a raised gun – and a black/white vision deficiency.

At mealtime, Fifi the dog skips under the table to read the newspaper between Dad, Mom, Thomas and Zo. This evening, the atmosphere is electric and reading becomes compromised.

As every Tuesday, Francis and his daughter drive trough the woods after music class. Francis perceives Maria Magenta, a disturbing beauty. He stops the car ... Pedro Almodovar would take much pleasure in the continuation of the story.

With “No Harm Done”, Tunisian director Nadia El Fani follows up on her film “Securalism – Inch’Allah”, screened in the Special Programme on the Arab Revolution at Leipzig last year. While the earlier film still depicted the conflict between enlightened and fundamentalist forces in post-revolutionary Tunisia with humour and in the hope of a secular constitution, the tone in “No Harm Done” has become darker, the director’s attitude noticeably more radical. This may be due in part to her personal history: her cancer, the operation, chemotherapy on the one hand, paralleled by the unprecedented radical Islamist hate campaign against her film in Tunisia, which culminated in death threats against the director published on the social networks. “No Harm Done” links both strands in an overwhelmingly simple and personal image: the cell. Cancer cells attacking her body; Salafist cells, Islamist cells, terrorist cells proliferating in the social body, attacking and destroying everything that is different. Even though this is a universal experience, artists and intellectuals are the first to be targeted. In that sense, the title of the film reads like the defiant creed of a courageous woman and determined filmmaker: for the uncompromising fight for disobedience, variety and artistic freedom. We owe her respect and gratitude for that.
– Matthias Heeder

Simon knows ducks quite well. They make noise, fly, swim, some even roll.
Sometimes, it's a bit confusing and Simon gets lost. The arcane encounter between a boy and a strange bird.

While others are thinking about alternative energy concepts, this remote Moroccan Atlas mountain range has no electricity at all. The life of the clan is ruled by hard work, bitter poverty and a deadly cough. They only get news from the world outside and food supplies when the narrow path to the village is negotiable. There is no street, let alone a school. One day two employees of an energy company turn up and promise to build a power line that will change the villagers’ lives...
Jerôme le Maire follows this adventurous and arduous undertaking over three years: how all the men in the village must pitch in to heave the heavy compressor up the mountain, how the parts are delivered by donkey and the villagers must first apply for identity cards in town before the switches up the mountain can finally be turned on. Because he looks closely, this tragicomic tale gains most of its depth from the conflicts set in motion by the advent of the modern age in the village community. While some illuminate their premises as bright as daylight, others have barely enough for a dim bulb to light their hut.
The first moving images that arrive on the dusty village square via the new television set – a nod to film history – finally serve as messages from a radiant consumer world. One gets an idea where the path out of the Middle Ages is going to lead straightaway.
– Grit Lemke

Phnom-Penh in the spring of 2009. Kaing Guek Eav, aka Duch, was the warden of Tuol Sleng prison, notoriously known as S 21, from 1976 to 1978. He is a defendant before the international Khmer Rouge Tribunal, accused of being responsible for the death of 14,000 prisoners. While his French lawyer François Roux is preparing for the trial, Duch assumes responsibility for the charges, wants to plead guilty and ask for forgiveness. This is the basis on which his defence counsel develops his strategy. Since the trial is going to follow both international and national Cambodian law, though, the international defence counsel is assisted by a Cambodian lawyer who has a wholly different strategy in mind. This defence counsel, Kar Savuth, claims that the requirements of official Cambodian politics play a vital role here. He enters a plea of not guilty and generally questions the jurisdiction of an international court of law. On several occasion the trial threatens to fall apart. Director Bernard Mangiante restricted himself to absolute stylistic severity in his film: he shot an intense court room drama that hardly ever leaves the court, the corridors or conference rooms on its dizzying tour de force through the depths of human nature, the banality of evil and universal questions of the interpretability of fundamental values of civilisation.
– Ralph Eue

Girls in white dancing around a cross, before they tearfully receive “purity rings” and “chastity chests” from their fathers; who lecture about “waiting in purity” and how to modestly cover one’s neckline while serving tea at “purity meetings”. Boys in armour and sword who are knighted as future leaders of the country and the family. White roses and bibles everywhere. It may look like a carnival and mummery, but for 25 percent of the US population this is serious, even sacred.
Mirjam von Arx observed a family of seven in Colorado Springs, the centre of evangelical Christians in the United States, over a period of one and a half years. The Wilsons are the movement’s poster-family, its most zealous defenders, who founded the tradition of the “purity balls” that is now spreading across the globe. A model American family, smart, neat and far from unlikeable. It is one of the achievements of this film that its protagonists are not exhibited as freaks but that the phenomenon is explored in all its complexity, with all political and ideological implications. Because the virgin’s counterpart is the soldier, the GI. He’s fighting in Afghanistan – in agreement with his chaste wife at home – for the “true” values of God and country: against pre-marital sex, people of different colours and faiths, gays, democrats, etc. The private has rarely been so political.
– Grit Lemke