Audrius Mickevičius puts the horribly disfigured face of his murdered brother at the start of his film. He’s interested in the question of how someone atones for such an act. With regard to this particular crime one could say: far too short, because the murderer is released after only five years on the grounds that he proved himself to be an exemplary prisoner. Mickevičius doesn’t confine himself to this individual case, though, but raises his film to a more general level: “Exemplary Behaviour” is almost a meditation about the question whether a final act like murder can be atoned for in a temporal order – and whether the passing of time allows the victim’s family to forgive.

Mickevičius uses the example of two lifers (one of them gets married and wants to have children, the other pours his whole passion into an idea of craftsmanship) and a philosopher with prison experience (Bernhard Stiegler) to make that strange state of suspended life comprehensible. The elegiac undertone is finally reinforced by the information that Audrius Mickevičius fell ill and died during the production of “Exemplary Behaviour”. The film was completed by Nerijus Milerius.

Bert Rebhandl

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Awarded with a Golden Dove in the International Competition Long Film, with the Prize of the Interreligious Jury and with the FIPRESCI Prize.

This film is flanked by two men: Silvio Berlusconi, who in 2008 became Italian Prime Minister for the fourth time, and Donald Trump, who was sworn in as president of the United States a little less than a decade later. Manuela, a member of the Italian Parliament, and Daniela, a local politician, see this period, marked as it is by men, as the epitome of political regression. Both have spent years fighting for more sexual equality, better laws to protect women from domestic violence and a more diverse body of political decision makers.

Is politics dead? This brutal question guides Claudia Tosi’s long-term observation of the developments of the past decade in Italy. With a loss of 6.7 % of the votes, the democrats were clearly defeated by the populist and Eurosceptic Five Star Movement. Neither Manuela nor Daniela ever thought that democracy, civil solidarity and the desire for progress would one day be challenged to such an extent or that Berlusconism, which they believed was overcome, would have such pervasive after-effects.

Lukas Stern

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Awarded with a Golden Dove in the International Competition Long Film, with the Prize of the Interreligious Jury and with the FIPRESCI Prize

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

One nut alone doesn’t make a sound when you carry it in your pocket. But many nuts clatter. And so the small community where nine-year-old Siddharta lives with his 65-year-old father Fabrizio calls itself “Noci Sonanti”, the “Ringing Nuts”. The two of them live without electricity or any of the comforts of civilisation in a house situated in a remote Italian region. Occasionally people arrive who become part of the tribe for a while before they move on. Like Erica, who we sometimes see absorbed in meditation with Fabrizio. But Siddharta and Fabrizio aren’t completely isolated. There’s a change every month when Siddharta moves in with his mother Sofia and her new family. The boy also maintains a friendship with a girl from the village, near his father’s house, where he gets in contact with things Fabrizio has ruled out a long time ago: highly sweetened ice tea, for example. Or remedies for lice.

Damiano Giacomelli and Lorenzo Raponi observe the life of the “Noci Sonanti” over one summer marked by sun-drenched days and newborn cats. The directors eschew any pointed judgement, but still skilfully edit together the different models of life between which Siddharta moves and quite often mediates.

Carolin Weidner

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