It’s like an initiation ritual. Every year 25,000 Israeli pupils and students go on a trip to Poland, visiting four concentration camps, three mass graves and two ghettos in seven days. It’s a journey to the dead, their roots, and themselves: as Jews and citizens of Israel. They document everything on their smartphones: hotel rooms, barracks, shooting ranges, themselves, their friends. The material shared on YouTube is the basis of this film – and it’s revealing. The two Israeli directors Sagi Bornstein and Udi Nir set contemporary recordings against videotapes from the 1980s. How will the memory change when there are no more contemporary witnesses? What can the crumbling sites still reveal? When will the rituals become hollow?

The Holocaust is the narrative of Israel, the constituent element of the state, even more than Zionism. That’s what the young people are taught to believe. The concept is historical imagination and immersion. They are supposed to feel the squeeze of the cattle wagons, the hardness of the narrow pallets and the oppression of the gas chambers. Horror 2.0. The video material also shows, however, how much smarter the young people are. There are no stupid questions, documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophüls once said, only stupid answers.

Cornelia Klauß

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Nominated for Young Eyes Film Award

Esther’s, Naomi’s and Hanna’s memories are testimony to the cruelty of a both archaic and brutal tradition in human trafficking: the forced marriage of young girls to considerably older men for “Mohar” (nuptial money). The women, who come from Morocco and Yemen and are now grown old, have their say today in a dialogue with their daughters and sons who grew up in Israel. Their subjects are hushing up the age difference, repeated miscarriages and very early motherhood, being forced to work in spite of the babies at home, legendary escape attempts, self-empowerment by literacy, and always the constellation of raising kids in spite of the unfathomable trauma of having been sold by their parents. The film is most controversial when wounds meet wounds. “Did you never think about the fact that I would grow up without a father?” Avi asks, who became a half-orphan at the age of six.

With great empathy and stoicism the filmmakers manage to open an intimate space in which, of course, there is also dancing, joking and singing. And when the inexpressible manifests itself in pure emotion, there is always the women’s silence – carrying every facet of anger, shame, the longing to be dead, pride and will power.

Nadja Rademacher

Under the surface of Google Land where life is so comfortable there is a world known as the Deep or Dark Net. A virtual data space whose content will not be found by conventional search engines and that remains closed to ordinary users – unless they install dedicated software. Governments, banks or corporations use the Deep Net, as well as all those who wish to keep their online activities hidden. In Google Land we leave traces, in the Deep Net special encryption technology allows us to remain anonymous. Duki Dror’s and Tzachi Schiff’s comprehensive film about the Internet, privacy, surveillance and the vision of a completely new economic structure opens with its worst variation: as a market platform for drugs, child pornography and arms. Is this the reason why governments are fighting the Net? On the other hand it’s the only digital space that offers protection to critical journalists, opposition members in dictatorships or whistleblowers.

The film works its detailed and knowledgeable way through the current developments of our digital world without passing judgement. What’s at stake is individual freedom. The sceptical summary: people want just enough freedom to feel good. Google Land. Who cares if we expose ourselves to constant surveillance that way?

Matthias Heeder