In the 19th century, dioramas were a kind of predecessor of the movies. Taxidermy animals from distant countries were to be presented in the most lifelike environments possible. The US scientist and sculptor Carl Akeley is considered the father of taxidermy. He created groundbreaking dioramas for the New York Museum of Natural History in the early 20th century. In the 1920s he was the first man to film mountain gorillas and changed from hunter to dedicated animal protectionist. His biography reflects both the social changes in our attitude to animals and technical progress.

Based on a portrait of the pioneering Akeley, “Curiosity and Control” addresses the different ways animals are presented in natural history museums and zoos, critically exploring various perspectives. What is man’s relation to the fauna? It’s marked by curiosity and control: the former drove early scientists to collect, own, and systematise animals since the early expeditions – and preserve them from extinction. Ownership, however, also generates dominance. Is it permissible to keep other species in cages? No matter how “natural” and humane the zoo architecture is: “You will see something that looks like an elephant. But it’s not behaving like a wild elephant,” a zoo director says. Another dilemma.

Annina Wettstein

When Karen Winther comes across a few old boxes during a move she finds herself confronted with her past. On top are some swastika stickers, next to a tape labelled “Blitz” and “Hits”, and a lot of stuff decorated with the imperial eagle. Twenty years ago she joined a right-wing extremist organisation in Norway, looking for adventure and like-minded people. “It’s embarrassing to look at,” she comments in the voice over.

“Exit” is her film, her story, and yet the plot soon points in other directions, refuses to be constrained by its own structure. Winther travels to the US to meet women who also used to move in right-wing extremist circles. She sits in the car with a former left-wing extremist activist, talking about a formative encounter many years ago. She meets Ingo Hasselbach, “The Führer of Berlin”, whose career in the East German neo-Nazi scene is the subject of Winfried Bonengel’s film “Führer Ex”. And she meets a former jihadist who served a sentence in a Paris prison. In addition to surprisingly similar motivations and experiences, what they all have in common are the difficulties caused by their “Exits” – feelings of guilt, but also threats from still active members.

Carolin Weidner

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Awarded with the Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize, the Young Eyes Film Award and the Gedanken-Aufschluss Prize from the Jury of juvenile and yound adult prisoners of JSA Regis-Breitingen

A family selfie in front of the “Three Fists”, a monument to the victims of the Second World War in Niš, the third largest city in Serbia today. Three concrete fists from the era of Titoism, are raised to the sky: the father’s fist, the mother’s, a child’s. Marija takes position, her mother and father next to her, her brother presses the button. This photo records nothing less than the whole identity history of Yugoslavia and Ex-Yugoslavia, rich in conflicts and contradictions – a history that still resonates and that Marija Ratković Vidaković, supported by her co-writer Dinka Radonić, investigates in this intimate family film.

Marked by parents and grandparents who have internalised the real-socialist ideas and values of the Tito era on the Balkan, the thirty three-year-old filmmaker must cope with a paradoxical inherited identity that has very little to do with her private world and life in Croatia. Marija knows that she doesn’t want to pass this heritage on to her son and she knows that in order to achieve this, it must wither in herself. Filmed over years, “IKEA for YU” is the testimony of a trip into her own family history, deep into its most intimate nooks and crannies where a long history full of twists and turns is deeply entrenched. And a trip far away from Croatia.

Lukas Stern

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Nominated for the MDR Film Prize

“Love is …” the stickers used to say, bordered by hearts – gewgaws. In this film, however, the question is asked by a personality who stands out from the sundries of world literature because she listens to the “simple people”, records their individual patterns of speech and in the end combines them in a kaleidoscope of voices. The Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich approached “red”, “socialist man” and his ideas with this method and was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Now she is on the track of universal issues, interviewing her compatriots about love and relationships. A well-meant question, and difficult to answer. At one point she concludes that the book about death and age will probably be easier because people seem reluctant to talk about happiness. But of course that’s wrong. It’s amazing how the interviewees open up, whether happy or unhappy in love. They lie down in the beds of their deceased spouses for whom they danced the tango. They still rave about their partner’s grey KGB suit. They dedicate their life to a handicapped child that’s not their own. They go for walks that last hours and catch cystitis because a lavatory is nowhere to be found. Another kaleidoscope of an idea, another elegant cross section of (ex-Soviet) society.

Barbara Wurm

Must great artists be flawless as persons? Upright art lovers may prefer it, but sometimes the world just doesn’t work this way. While we ordinary mortals have only a tiny little voice that just won’t stop whispering in our ear that we could be better persons (if only we wanted!), Ingmar Bergman has a talking lipoma on his right cheek – a terrible nuisance. At least as annoying as Ingmar himself. Animated blasphemy, as good as it gets!

Ralph Eue