The Latvian forest – it’s the time of the blueberry harvest. In other places the fruit with the perfect five point star are sacred because they serve as children’s food in times of draught. For the extended family around Bruno, too, the blueberry harvest is existential. Price negotiations in Latvian and Romani are going on in the improvised camp. Among Roma, however, they tell tales of spirits in the forest that hardly anyone escapes. Family spirits are a fixed part of the history of the country.

Nadja Rademacher

Even in a world-famous boys’ choir, boys are still curious and adventurous. When their supervisor gets stuck in an elevator, they discover the city on their own and have a lot of fun.

Images composed of statics and movement. Something is standing firmly in the landscape (a pylon, a traffic sign, a house et cetera), something else moves, races, clatters, marches through this landscape. There is twittering and squeaking and quacking and cuckooing and slurping on the soundtrack. Colours, moods and seasons change and return. Dust is raised and settles. A delicately orchestrated mechanism of passing and returning.

Esther Buss

In the middle of a grey sea there is a grey island with grey hunters. Life is simple and harsh. Seals and hunters live together in a cruel balance. One day, a photographer arrives to document this life. For him it turns out to be fatally complicated.

The Prague Spring, Soviet tanks, the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops, the epoch-making year of 1968: the starting points of a family history between Czechia, Ukraine and Russia. “The occupation translates to a man with a dachshund being entitled to yell at a young girl in a tram because he can’t tell Ukrainian and Russian apart.”

A series of family album photos from which a man was removed sets Anna Kryvenko, a Ukrainian who studies film in Prague, on the trail of her great-uncle: the “unknown soldier”, to whom so many monuments are dedicated that one almost forgets that this sweeping gesture of remembrance refers to concrete faces, names, dates of birth and death, biographies cut short. After some initial hesitation the filmmaker’s family break their silence and gradually the pieces combine to form a new picture in which family and world history intersect.

Fabian Tietke

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Nominated for the MDR Film Prize