The letters on a departure board turn into grey figures with trolley suitcases hurrying through the high security airports of this world. A red wall abruptly puts an end to the journey of a restless man whose wide-spread arms melt like Icarus’s wings. Reality is punctured and the fatal contradictions of our globalised world are metaphorically exposed. Michaela Müller spent six years condensing her original sound sketch stills into a work of art.

Nadja Rademacher

For more than 20 years, the tortuous civil war in Congo has transformed an area the size of Western Europe into hell on earth. This permanent conflict, also called World War Three because of the direct or indirect involvement of all superpowers, has killed about six million people so far. Director Milo Rau managed, for the first time in the history of this war and in the middle of the combat zone, to hold a symbolic tribunal involving many of the participating parties. His recordings from remote villages and nearly inaccessible mining areas and his factual and focused observation of the trial in a courthouse built specifically for the shooting paint a complex portrait of this exemplary economic war. This documentary examination of a global conflict is not about winning or losing but about the question of what we are willing to pay for the wealth of the First World.

Ralph Eue

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Honorary Mention in the International Competition;
Nominated for Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize, DEFA Sponsoring Prize

The bird wants to be left alone, the caterpillar wants the leaf and the fox wants to eat the bird. In the end the butterfly will save the bird’s life.

Lina Dinkla

You take a risk when you leave your sheltering cocoon to step into the glaring light of the outside world. Especially when this world is made of long, stele-like white forms which move in unpredictable ways and threaten to grasp you. Herma meets a far bigger creature that speaks her language here. Each of them manages to climb a stele. Can their peculiar dialogue be continued despite the distance? A stylised puppet animation about self-liberation and its limits.

Nadja Rademacher

A first person singular film which begins where it should, which is right at the beginning: after nine months of snug peace the filmmaker had fought her way through her mother’s pelvis and the first thing she touched was the latter’s curly pubic hair.

Anka Schmid uses a playful biographical approach to tell her hairy story, which is also the story of a whole generation. She jumps from detail to detail, or from moustaches to full beards to shaving one’s legs and armpits. And, last but not least, to the very special haptic pleasure you feel when you stroke the even stubble of a buzzcut. If this makes your hair stand on end with pleasure, you are already in the midst of the next volte-face. And if not, there’s no help for you anyway! Anka Schmid discovers the enormous potential of this most delicate body part in life and in art. And at the end of her ingenious collage of real, archival and animated footage one feels thoroughly combed over and certain henceforth that there is a whole cosmos hidden in hair.

Ralph Eue

The young woman’s tongue loosens under the shower. When she throws her clothes on the tiles, takes the soap and wrings the water from her long red hair she allows us to participate in her transformation. What started out as shyness has become a passion. And the images, too, unfurl like a kaleidoscope.

Carolin Weidner

Fränz Röösli keeps cursing out loud. The fire has eaten a hole in his charcoal kiln, it’s the middle of the night and he is trying to contain the damage, making the embers, smoke and fire glow, smoke and burn as they should with a few stabs of his stick. Fränz Röösli is a master of fire, a vanquisher of fire – almost the only expressions that will do justice to the archaic beauty of his trade. The only commercially operated charcoal kilns in Western Europe today are found in Entlebuch in the canton of Lucerne. It takes about five weeks until a kiln is stacked and burnt and the charcoal is shovelled into bags and loaded on trucks to be sold.

With a mimetic interest in the temporalities and rhythms, the cyclical work processes and eternally repeated movements of the charcoal burning trade, Swiss director Robert Müller shows us how wood is transformed into charcoal – step by step, layer by layer, shovelful by shovelful, curse by curse. Having watched this film it’s easy to understand why this remote craft has no recruitment problems.

Lukas Stern

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Nominated for Healthy Workplaces Film Award

A box full of VHS tapes makes Justin Stoneham re-examine his life so far. For a long time he tried to escape his memories: of his charismatic mother, who suffered a stroke when he was four and has been handicapped ever since. Of his own childish self to whom this person was always a scary stranger. Now he risks a first step, with the camera as his shield and transmitter, and meets a woman who has lost her language, but not her sense of humour.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Who hasn’t wondered whether everything is okay after leaving their flat?! Ruben also agonises over this question as his trains of thought become more and more absurd.

Franziska Bruckner

People who go to their house bank for a personal consultation have either too much or too little money. And speaking of “house banks” – that sounds like a special bond, the “financial doctor you trust”. In any case, this special need for consultation arises from disparities: between dreams and income, investment needs and risk forecasts, personal circumstances and objective constraints. This in turn gives rise to a special culture of conversation, one that follows similar rules in Bolivia, Switzerland or Pakistan – that, at least, is the thesis of Sebastian Winkels’ film. And it doesn’t matter into which financial institution in this world we follow him and what language we hear there: superimposed upon each other, the images and soundtracks of the consultations become a sound that the bank customer as a collective subject knows only too well. Oh, the shame about one’s financial impotence! Ah, the confessions one feels constrained to make. And, oh dear, the helplessness with which one must surrender to the rows of numbers.

The camera takes sides – not on a moral level, but on a dramatic one. It is always placed behind the tables where the skilled rejecters and form explainers are sitting, of whom we rarely see more than a sleeve, though. And it faces up to the looks of passing applicants and consultation-seekers like an experienced anthropologist: incorruptible but touchable.

Sylvia Görke

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Nominated for ver.di Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness, Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize, DEFA Sponsoring Prize

When the little man loses his home – a suitcase – he jumps straight into a blind man’s pocket and henceforth lives there as his navigator.

Lina Dinkla