A pupil and a teacher, alone in a bare classroom. On the surface this is about the girl’s hairdo. But what exactly is it that unfolds around the long pigtail: a power game, a showdown, or just a fantasy? Virginia Mori spent a year drawing with pencil and ballpoint pen on paper. Her 3,000 drawings, set to Andrea Martignoni’s music, are condensed into a melancholy and dreamlike chamber play about power and submission.

Nadja Rademacher

When the flood of refugees began to cross the Mediterranean, the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa became a projection screen for paranoid xenophobes and a symbol of an inhumane asylum policy. In the winter of 2014, theatre artist and filmmaker Jakob Brossmann travelled to the island to find out what life there is really like. The tourists and media are gone and the inhabitants’ real problems come to the fore: the old ferry, essential for their survival, burnt down and was replaced by an even older one. That’s why the fishermen go on strike. A group of refugees who have been stuck on the island for months want to cross to the mainland. They are on strike in front of the church. Because there’s no ferry, waste is piling up and food is running out. In the midst of this tense situation two women, the mayor and a dedicated lawyer, are fighting for humane solutions out of deep personal conviction. Brossmann’s observations are unobtrusive and precise. He confidently guides us through the events of this crisis while introducing places and people that are linked to the immigrants’ fate. What’s remarkable is that the inhabitants and refugees refuse to be instrumentalised against each other. Both groups are victims of the same cynical policies. Showing this clearly is the great strength of the film. Matthias Heeder

Once more, Roberto Minervini travels the American South, this time Louisiana. Life and the people here are rough, the images, however, are dazzlingly beautiful, almost tender. The ambivalence is deliberate. It’s the tenderness of “I love you, bitch”, spoken while high on drugs. The sultriness of a summer of quick sex in the trailer, alcohol and crystal meth. A physicality bordering on intimacy determines the poor whites’ life in this film. All that’s left of the American Dream are drugs, racist slogans and slurs on Obama.

Even if this world of the underdogs is uncomfortable – it’s there and has a ghostlike existence in the shadow of American history. Like the protagonist Mark, whom Minervini shows in a dream sequence, naked on a country road as if he was already on the other side. But then he allows this Louisiana ghost, who is supplying his family, girl friend and friends with homemade drugs while on the run from a prison sentence, to become a human being of flesh and blood.

Some shoot up, others shoot: paramilitary groups train in the forest for the worst case, to save America from its own authorities. What seems like a film within a film is united by the slogan: “To protect our families, our freedom.” But which families, which freedom?

Lars Meyer

A winter landscape in Spain, hunters are crossing the field, bare shrubs stand out against the sky. In her atmospheric animation Isabel Herguera gathers a dreamy company of humans and animals around the table, set to the melancholy sound of a guitar. “Love me without talking” – silence unites, even evokes the mythical past and, quite in passing, joins painting and cut-out. A passionate appeal to listen to one’s interior and not to the murmur of the world.

Lars Meyer