What’s the worst thing that could happen to a jubilant young father? A visit from the in-laws. What’s worse, they are citizens of Mother Russia, while the filmmaker father’s native language is Spanish, which means that the baby isn’t named Alyosha but, exactly, Carlos. It’s for him, “Carlushka”, that he wanted to record this hilarious and painful new family constellation unfolding between national chauvinism and loving, well-worn marital arguments, the director says. Sharp tongues, skilfully edited.

Barbara Wurm

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Honorary Mention in the International Competition Short Documentary and Animated Film

It’s difficult to decide whether one should resent the slightly-built grandma for being grumpy. Her granddaughter is moving in to cook and care for her. But she is trailing four little children who brazenly hog the tiny average Soviet-era flat, crawl under their great-grandmother’s feet, leave crumbs everywhere and vividly demonstrate the modern school of educational methods. Babushka becomes a stranger in her own home. She tidies and mops up (after them) – it’s a miracle she never stumbles over the stretched woollen threads and diapered bottoms that are everywhere –, she whines and scolds. But the tears only start to flow when her beloved piano is to be “liquidated”, as she puts it …

Lidia Sheinin captures the emotional oscillations in this daily family chaos with a sure sense of closeness and distance. She surveys generations and attitudes in the smallest spaces, studies characters and relationships – and creates, in the midst of this frenzy, almost infinite zones of reflection about what ties us to each other.

Barbara Wurm

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Nominated for MDR Film Prize

The question is not whether we’re afraid. The question is what we do when we’re afraid, says the activist Zhanna, who lives in Murmansk and has been classified as a “hostile agent” by the security forces for the past few years. Zhanna lives with her fear and still speaks out about the present political situation – in Russia and elsewhere. It’s the only way she can reassure herself that we ourselves are writing our story.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Alyosha would rather play than take the garbage out. Especially since the garbage chute is a giant turtle that carries his home on its back.

Lina Dinkla

It’s as if a curtain was pushed aside. But there is no long shot of the stage or any interaction discernible from the distance. In Elena Gutkina’s and Genrikh Ignatov’s film we’re very close to everything. Very. As if a camera had focused on the interior of a doll’s house, standing fixedly still on thresholds and waiting, or lurking in front of a bed. The frame is just big enough to show the lower body and thighs. This is what we get for a while: a young man pulling up his underpants and pulling them down again, making sounds, perhaps singing.

Gutkina and Ignatov take their time. And so do the two men in whose world they are staying, albeit not moving. A father and his adult son, living in a shabby house on the edge of a forest. It’s hard to know what’s going on here. But something is going on, all the time, this much we know: fingers move, hands grasp. The unusual framing makes the content look abstract, even though everyday life is observed here. Gutkina and Ignatov offer no answers to the question of what to make of it.

Carolin Weidner

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Nominated for MDR Film Prize