Music can trigger the deepest and most secret emotions in us, be a physical, mental or spiritual experience – for the musicians who create it, too. Aspiring singers take private lessons to reach the highest level of classical singing. The film follows three renowned voice and singing teachers and their students over the course of a semester. It is tough physical training, hours of practice, breathing, finding the exactly right positions of tongue and jaws. Because ultimately the magic of extreme emotionality can be produced only on the basis of technical perfection, by pouring ones personality into it, by an interplay of effort and the ability to let go.

Though we learn little about the singers, listening primarily to their voices, we feel the intensity and intimacy that arises between teacher and student in these kinds of private lessons – an atmosphere in which something great, transcendent is being built. The light and usually quiet concrete building of one of the three music academies visited by Itay Marom for his film seems almost like a Zen monastery.

Frederik Lang

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Awarded with the DEFA Sponsoring Prize.

In a mix of room-scale gaming and live action film Jerusalem can be experienced as a religious epicentre where three world religions overlap. Believers of all denominations work on the narrative of the place, pleading for mutual understanding. The starting point of this intellectual game is the ambivalent term of Abrahamism which initiates a trialogue between Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Lars Rummel, Marie Hinkelmann

An elite soldier of the Israeli army reveals in front of the camera that he murdered Palestinians in a retaliatory operation executed by his commando. What to do and how to deal with this knowledge? By now, director Avi Mograbi has some routine in dealing with the experience of “getting quick applause from the wrong side”. In consequence, he sees his work as fundamentally controversial.

Ralph Eue