A waking city, presented in majestic black and white and equally sparse and elaborate percussion sounds. Les Mureaux is a banlieue west of Paris, built in the 1960s to house the people coming from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb as close as possible to the great Renault production facility in Flins-sur-Seine. At the time, the formerly state-owned car manufacturer’s hunger for labour was insatiable. You could, if not live well, at least work well here as a labourer. Later, in May 1968, Flins was the site of one of the longest-running factory occupations ever to take place in France.

Today Les Mureaux is ruled by a strange synchronicity of traditions and breaks. Manon Ott and Grégory Cohen meet their protagonists, who exist as contemporary pragmatists, on equal terms, thus bringing out their individual vitality. And what an ear! Testimonies, stories, statements that want to be more than just information, want to be sound, or let’s say: life as lived. Their film creates a collective discourse on the critique of daily life, from the labour struggles of the past to the social insecurity of the modern slaves, unemployed and temporary workers, which is at the same time a condensed testimony on the European social and labour history of the past half-century.

Ralph Eue

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Nominated for the Healthy Workplaces Film Award

A summer in the Camargue. Théo is a holiday intern on a farm for half-wild cattle. Monosyllabic and still lanky and boyish he explores a men’s world, tests his strength against the “elemental force” of a young bull, dreams of a future as a Manadier – giving his mother cause for concerns about his health and less romantic career prospects. A quiet and honest film that takes a 14-year-old’s romanticising perspective on a holiday world bathed in warm sunlight and a changing corporeality.

André Eckardt

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Nominated for the Young Eyes Film Award

In his supernova of objects, Alain Biet gives the spotted surrealist screw one more turn with a drawn screwdriver. Deceptively real ink drawings of mundane mass products merge into jolly, large formations. Pincers, pliers and screwdrivers perform an obsessive Busby Berkeley show of symmetrically choreographed individualists, delivering, in passing, an ethnographic study of the world of still tangible consumerism.

André Eckardt

Jorge León uses the dramatic story of the Iranian psychoanalyst Mitra Kadivar, who was locked up against her will in a mental hospital in her home country, as the starting point of a complex art project which first gave rise to an opera production and later to this multi-layered documentary film.

In his film León challenges the supposedly clear boundaries between lunacy and normalcy, disease and health by artfully interweaving various layers of reality, documentation and stage production. Time and again he shakes the audience’s self-assured perception through contrapuntal combinations of his material and challenges us to perceive our own perspective as one that is always and fundamentally limited.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Is the “Speakers’ Corner”, as a successor to the ancient “agora”, an institution that will reach democratic perfection in the Internet age? The voice of the people is louder than ever, because YouTube and its ilk have for years been offering spaces for any skin ready to be sold to the public – whether it’s product packages, let’s say for lipsticks, or whether it’s furry hides, let’s say of cats. And sometimes, as in this case, it’s teenagers’ epidermises strained to breaking point – light- and tear-permeable for the desperate straits of self-definition.

Denis Parrot has travelled the Internet. He found places, or rather posts of every film-aesthetic variety in which adolescents confess their sexual orientation and gender identity – home-made, artistically (almost) raw. Coming out with one’s inner life, dealing with the reactions to a gay son, a lesbian daughter or a child that is simply the way it is. What Parrot compiled here was uploaded between 2012 and 2018: filmed telephone calls to mothers, rope skipping tutorials followed by an outing, ambitiously produced film confessions and static speeches directly into the camera as well as gritty smartphone camera revelations. The kids who speak, cry, talk in monologues here are digital natives – and media savvy natives of a world that refuses to give up its binary codes.

Sylvia Görke

Secrets live in the realm of the unsaid. They are like an enormous volume of water pressing against a dam, often linked to fears or consuming desires excitingly trimmed with fear. Sometimes an exposed secret can cost a life. On a backdrop of animated collages of bold cut-out photos nine persons talk about the protean power of the concealed. A fascinating surrealist miniature.

Ralph Eue

No birds in the treetops, no animals in the soil. A lifeless place: mute and light and dry. A forest warden guides us through a forest in the Limousin, a region in southern central France. What do we hear? Nothing! At most the wind that cuts the slender trunks which struggle up at standardised distances here. This is what a forest forced to follow the rhythm of the globalised economy sounds like. This is what the dream forest of the forest industry looks like: monocultures, chemically fertilised, sprayed with pesticides, growing only to be clear-cut.

Quietly and attentively, “The Time of Forests” investigates the logics of modern and standardised industrial forestry. Steel monsters with greedy gripper arms that sound like robots are rolling through the forests. Trees fall, are debranched, sawn apart, loaded, transported – loud, almost shrill. But traditional forest management and the centuries-old know how of sustainable forestry could not be supplanted. Resistance is stirring.

Lukas Stern

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Nominated for the Healthy Workplaces Film Award