Spiritism is rampant in Venezuela. All kinds of warlocks, shamans, priests, soothsayers offer their services in labyrinthine alleys. They evoke their African ancestors to fall into a trance, smoke fat cigars in whose ashes they read the future, occasionally spit heartily and perform ritual protective ablutions with chicken blood. The catholic cult of saints and Voodoo have formed a strange alliance on their altars and shrines. Healer or shaman? Whatever – many people who feel lost depend on them, including the two protagonists. One of them can’t get over the violent death of her son 16 years ago. Was it murder or suicide – or maybe even her own fault, as her sister claims? The other feels haunted by an evil spirit who forces her to thrash about, curse, and drink alcohol.
Their desperate search for the truth drives them from one redemptive ritual to the next. Through them, we take part in this sometimes shimmering, sometimes bizarre world of occultism. But where black magic is a natural part of life, there also seems to be black humour. Which is what the two women never lose despite all setbacks, and which gives the film a tongue-in-cheek quality.

Lars Meyer

Finistère roughly means “the end of the earth”. It’s a place in France, at the tip of the Breton peninsula. In any case, the man with the small, mischievous eyes who leaves his tracks in the sand in this place speaks of the end. He never accepted his daughter’s death, he says, and is not afraid of his own. Daniel lives in a small boat on the beach, enjoys his cigarettes despite having lung cancer, writes poetry and likes to quote Léo Ferré. He “would rather be lonely than in bad company” and philosophises about carrying on, even though the end is as near as the sea. And Daniel does carry on. We see him in quiet moments with the water crashing against the rocky shore and the roaring ocean, a symbol for an unstoppable flow of energy. Daniel Andreas Sager discovered a truly amazing personality in this man who bears the same name as the filmmaker, giving us hope that Ferré may be right when he assumes that the silence of the ocean is a cursed pitching and tossing that will deliver our heart.

Claudia Lehmann

“Reconquering public space”, that’s what one might call the young French artist JR’s project. He has been travelling across the globe since 2001, preferably to places that are destroyed, scarred, hard to get to, places whose streets are dominated by large-scale pictures of dictators or proliferating billboards. He places large portraits of the inhabitants between the crumbling walls of Havana, Islamabad or Port-au-Prince – photos of wrinkled faces, marked by life, in harsh black-and-white contrasts. Their direct look at the camera asks: who owns the city? The investors? The politicians? The propagandists?
JR’s idea of not claiming a monopoly on his art is infused with the same spirit. He has published appeals to join the “Inside Out” project all over the world. The film shows three stations. What starts like a happening soon reveals its deeply political character. The project meets with fierce protests in Tunisia; the situation even threatens to escalate. The artists are treated like intruders. In North Dakota, juvenile suicides are the topic, in Haiti we see adolescents eager for life who refuse to lose their optimism among the ruins of a city destroyed by the earthquake. “Inside Out” is not an artist film but a vision of what art can be when it’s released and set free.

Cornelia Klauß

Every day thousands of people across the globe leave their homes. One day, Abdu from Mali joins them – Europe glitters in the distance. On his odyssey from the River Niger to the barbed wire of the Spanish refugee camp of Ceuta the young man encounters some harsh realities. How many of his dreams could possibly survive?

The Nile, the cradle of Egyptian culture, is said to be a gentle mother, Paris-based writer and director Safaa Fathy says about her home country. But the Nile is an old, sick man, humiliated by those who owe him their lives. The river is polluted, the hospitals crowded with dialysis patients they can barely take care of. Like Mohammad, Safaa’s brother. A kidney disease is gnawing away at his health. But he refuses a transplant for ethical reasons, because organs are a gift from God. The sister who follows him with her camera finds this hard to accept. He is 42, has two children, and looks for new hope every day. He dies on the eve of the revolution. But his story continues posthumously as a dialogue between sister and brother. “It’s a shame for you to film me when I’m melancholy.” The evenings on the Nile depress Mohammad. He feels like a boat drifting on the shoreless waters. Safaa, on the other hand, remembers the legend of Isis, who collected her brother Osiris’s pieces from all over Egypt after he had been hacked to death. So she tries to fit the pieces together and understand this Egypt and its ailing health system, which remains blocked even after the revolution. She does this in an essay that is both personal and political.

Lars Meyer

Sister and Brother are very close. But their carefree time by the sea is disturbed by the presence of another boy. A subtle film about growing up.

A brief, intoxicating, chocolaty homage to Tim Burton. The fine art of patisserie meets masterful stop motion, not to mention a small nod to Eadweard Muybridge, the father of Zoopraxis-scope. Culinary cinema of the finest quality, not just for cineastes – for the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

This job requires at least eight years of training. The precise details of execution, for example how to position the noose correctly, are passed on like secret knowledge. Ashmawi looks back on 16 years as the executioner of Cairo. Almost 700 condemned people went “through his hands”. A number that makes him feel proud, since it shows unlimited confidence in him and his skills. Ashmawi is at peace with himself. He does his job as thoroughly and perfectly as possible, that’s a question of honour. He has never felt compassion. Why should he? An Imam once assured him that as “God’s hand on earth” he had his blessing. But the condemned men and women, too, speak in this film, which consists mainly of a series of carefully balanced interviews. Some of them have lived nine years in death row and want nothing but Allah’s forgiveness. All this creates an imaginary bond between the executioner and those waiting to be executed. Director Layth Abdulamir’s montage confronts people who in real life meet only on the day of execution, when Ashmawi estimates their weight to choose the right rope and calculate the necessary drop height. He brings redemption, for waiting is even more unbearable than death. Capital punishment is still practiced in 57 countries, an insert tells us. So people like Ashmawi are always needed.

Cornelia Klauß