Every year in January, the Swiss village of Davos provides the backdrop for the World Economic Forum (WEF). This conference is a meeting of the global economic and political elites. It’s true, the public debates and press conferences have been streamed on the WEF website for a while now, in the spirit of a transparent, albeit suspiciously semi-official, audiovisual protocol – but never in the now 49 years of the WEF’s history was an independent filmmaker allowed any insight into the machinery of the event or behind the facades of the institution.

Over a period of three years, director Marcus Vetter observed the workings of this machinery. He cast a few but highly concentrated looks at the history of the Forum, founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, and now very confidently combines individual biographies, historical moments, logical connections and matters flitting about at the periphery to form the complex picture of a global fabric. Klaus Schwab, 79 today, is pleased with the fabric metaphor, since he himself has repeatedly said that the threads of the world may be coming together at “his” WEF, but that its knots acquire meaning and purpose only when the threads are later redistributed responsibly. This film is about no less than those threads and thus the meaning and purpose of the WEF.

Ralph Eue

Fahed wants to change his life. It’s been almost twenty years that he left Algeria. At the time he was full of hope when he arrived at the British seaport of Grimsby, which was long past its heyday. His dream of prosperity evaporated. In order to survive financially he works two jobs in a 50 hour week. It’s true that he now has a residence permit and leads a well-integrated life in a workers’ flat share, but now, at middle age, he longs to go back to his Algerian home, in order to be closer to his mother. And he has marriage plans! But will Fahed manage to settle back in there and find his role after such a long absence? His family don’t quite believe his intentions to return and tease him because his engagement remains a mystery. He has probably gotten too used to the British mentality, an aunt assumes.

So where is Fahed’s home now? Unprejudiced and with an eye for humorous details, Karim Sayad follows his taciturn cousin’s dithering back and forth. A film about personal and not least social turning points, because in the background the two countries England and Algeria are moving towards political upheavals.

Annina Wettstein

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of cooperative economy. It spreads fear because it gives the small cogs in the giant economic wheel the power of decision over the sense, purpose and speed of the whole machinery. It is one of the last great emancipation projects: liberation from the frustration of knowing that your destiny lies in the not always skilful hands of strangers. The cooperative tea refinery Scop-TI in Gémenos in southern France, founded in 2016, was created by such an act of liberation: For 1,336 days, the employees occupied the production facilities of the Fralib tea factory to extort a new start under their own management from their “employer” global corporation.

What precisely this management looks like and whether it is capable of translating the revolutionary spirit of machine kidnapping into a working production routine that secures everyone’s livelihood is the basic question of Laura Coppens’ film, which turns it into a kind of statement of accounts – about income and spending, insights and exertions. She sends us on an assembly line through the cooperative daily working routine which requires more maintenance than some people expected. A portrait of Che Guevara is hanging in the manager’s office; a credit application is pending at the bank. The fight continues.

Sylvia Görke

Parents separate, the children are left with questions and gaps: Dad cheated on Mom, so she threw him out. But didn’t Mom cheat on Dad, too? Life now happens between two homes, between two worlds. After an argument, the mother leaves for a “holiday” that is still going on a year later. It’s never mentioned. Brother and sister end up in a home after they tried to leave their mother. Their father had badmouthed her to them again and again. Taking the children, though, doesn’t cross his mind.

Coping with such experiences makes you grow up early. Surprisingly analytically and eloquently, five children of separated parents talk about their stories, only to turn back into children the next moment. With atmospheric images, sometimes impressionist and experimental, sometimes perfectly lighted like the stars on the big screen they become for a short while, the director manages to transcend the everyday life her protagonists talk about: By now, they probably know where they belong better than all the adults around them. It’s up to them and us to find out what normality means. Best to do it all on their own.

Frederik Lang

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Awarded with the Young Eyes Film Award.