“I have no visual memory. I remember emotions.” In their remarkably artistically dense documentary Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo combine various statements of contemporary witnesses into the personal report of an Italian who entered Switzerland in 1965 as a migrant labourer. At the core of this representative of many economic refugees from Southern Europe of the time lies the feeling that she is an “outlaw working body”. She feels humiliated and controlled by procedures at the “border health check”, by massive underpay, dangerous working conditions, psychological pressure in the factory and openly expressed, wounding resentment against the foreigners.

The film is a collage of memories given a voice by a female narrator and kept deliberately vague on the visual level. Vague, but extremely effective and openly sceptical about the reality promised by visual evidence. Besides distorted details and negatives of a few surviving photos it’s the restful contemporary video recordings, for example of an abandoned building with all the traces of use, which offer a suitable poetic space to the narrator’s audio report and a voice performance.

André Eckardt

Extremly condensed, meticulously researched and journalistic study of Liberia’s recent history. Seven former warlords of different ranks talk in interviews about cruelties they committed on their own or following orders during the first Liberian civil war in the early 1990s. Memories of brutal orgies of violence are recited with almost bureaucratic precision, interrupted only by precisely framed shots of the beautiful landscape in which – as we gradually realise – the now invisible horror took place.

Lina Dinkla

Only four survived. The other 127 were dead when the Germans hastily buried their bodies. Antonio Ceseri, one of the four, could hardly breathe under the sand. Sebaldushof near Treuenbrietzen was one of 40,000 labour camps in Nazi Germany. “The Sandmine” is a journey deep into a forgotten part of German-Italian history. In six chapters and 24 episodes the web documentary employs a distinct mixture of animation and documentation to uncover war crimes that seemed long buried under the sand.

Lars Rummel

This Mecca is in the West, on Coney Island Beach, Brooklyn. This is the place to which the maestros of pleasurable idling have for years made their pilgrimage to indulge in a shared passion: American handball. The men, most of them freaks of rather advanced age, take turns as players or spectators. In one scene two protagonists are arguing about the right title for the film they are part of. It should be about handball, says the first, who takes the game seriously and believes that its spirit is sacred. The second wants it to be about the fauna of characters that grows like weed around the game: the lives of Mecca.

That’s Patrick, the second one, something of a serene pantheist philosopher. Sometimes he dictates the music that booms from an old ghetto blaster, and he serves as the therapist to this friendly little spot, seconded by the boasters and the taciturn ones, children and old people, the perturbed and the unperturbed. Each of them is a gifted performer of their own story/ies. What this is really about: the diversity of the margins. The chaos of everyday life. The full energy of the sport. And the total relaxedness of this neighbourly get-together.

Ralph Eue