Women are subordinate to men. They are born sinful and have no legal claim to their own body. Misogyny is more than a phenomenon observed across continental divides all over the world and in some cases the cause of abuse and crime. It is structurally inscribed – literally – into the core of all social systems founded on religious beliefs. In the bible, for example, we read: “I find woman more bitter than Death […] The man who is pleasing to God eludes her.”

In this lucid film, which takes a global perspective, five female protagonists talk about misogynistic behaviour they experienced, hostilities they were exposed to, crimes committed against them. Rokudenashiko, a Japanese artist, is on trial for the obscenity of her art. Deborah Feldman escaped with her son from a Hassidic community in Brooklyn, leaving her husband to whom she was forcibly married. Leyla Hussein, Doris Wagner and Vithika Yadav talk about rape and mutilation, lack of legal protection, homophobia, shame and the strange feeling that one’s sexuality and body are associated with sin from birth.

Lukas Stern

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Awarded with the Special Prize of the Interreligious Jury

A film about water. Beauty, power and threat are mingled in Victor Kossakovsky’s latest work: the peace of the ice on Lake Baikal is treacherous. Under the surface it’s bubbling, melting – much earlier than usual. So a group of rescue workers is kept busy, pulling car after car from the frozen masses and recovering the drivers.

Icebergs are sinking in the sea here, storms drive torrents of rain aground in Florida, whole oceans are crashing down the Salto Ángel in Venezuela. 40 years after his debut as a filmmaker, 30 years after he graduated from the Higher Courses of Film Writers and Directors in Moscow and about seven years after his documentary “Vivan Las Antipodas!”, which measured the globe in geographical opposites, Victor Kossakovsky has produced another film that makes the landscapes of the world its protagonists. “Aquarela” shows bodies of water all over the world, in all their manifestations, in all their changing aggregate states caused by comparatively tiny differences in temperature. The camera maps on boats, dives under the surfaces, rises in the air to capture the expanse of space. Kossakovsky composes a visual symphony of primeval powers set to Heavy Metal music. The powerful images provoke awe, wonder flows from the screen like sea spray.

Fabian Tietke

What do 2017 Manchester and the Russian Revolution 100 years earlier have in common? Friedrich Engels. Before he wrote the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, the philosopher and entrepreneur had lived for a few years in the northern English industrial capital of the 19th century. Taking Engels’ communist theories as a starting point, the artist Phil Collins reflects on their topicality: What is the “condition of the working class in England” – the title of one of his main works – today? Wouldn’t Engels be more likely to write about the “working poor”? What are the differences between the past and present “tyranny of capital”, which still seems to have our societies, our life, thinking and actions firmly in its grip? Is that why communism has become a conceivable ideal again?

And Engels himself, too, gets to return to Manchester, in the shape of a statue whose transport from a Ukrainian village to its new home in the former industrial capital of the world the film follows – a many-layered socialist road movie from one of the outer edges of the EU to the (soon to be) other.

Frederik Lang

The Einstürzende Neubauten are playing “Mela-Mela-Melancholia”, questioning the state of the nation. Between the somnambulistic scenes played out in the border area between documentary and fiction, deep-seated intimacies that concern us all are addressed. The project – the winner of this year’s Golden Bear – is experimental: many of the protagonists are “real”, play themselves; others, like Laura Benson and her fellow actor Tómas Lemarquis, pick up on scripted sketches but let their roles come so close that they penetrate their own lives. They talk about and perform sex, about inhibitions and visions, fears and ways to overcome them. Their goal, the goal of this unusual film: (self) liberation.

The director enters the frame occasionally, sits on the couch with Christian Bayerlein, the “kissability” blogger, or with the transsexual Hanna Hofmann, letting us know that she is taking part, looking at things but resisting voyeurism as the camera floats above a group BDSM session or follows a touch therapy workshop, some of whose participants are physically severely disabled, at close range. She speaks, too, about her own boundaries of shame, far removed from the “Likes”-obsessed narcissistic Social Media egos. A transgressive critique of norms, aesthetically and politically correct (which is a good thing). And extremely bold into the bargain.

Barbara Wurm