In the opening image, there is a grid between the camera and the world, conveying the field of vision of an Israeli soldier deployed as a cameraman in the Israeli-occupied territories between 2007 and 2010. The filmmaker’s self-critical comments today ask what he could and could not see then. Leaving the country and arriving in Germany triggered a learning process that he traces here in a multi-layered and very personal research: “I learned I can’t trust myself to do the right thing.”
Complex camera pans show current German street scenes that bundle up signs of a precarious coexistence, while family and friends drift apart over the so-called Middle East Conflict. Ron Rothschild now lives in a country that his grandmother had to flee at the age of seven to escape from the Nazis. Even in old age, she could still recite Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” from memory. Once arrived in Haifa, she became a soldier and part of the establishment of the state of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians. The yearning to belong creates ambivalences and open questions in the family’s history, which the grandson confronts without resolving the ever-new distances emerging between the camera eye and the world.

In her documentary experiment, Yulia Lokshina addresses the issue of how the institution of school is used by the Russian state to justify its aggressive expansionist actions, either by exterior military violence or by interior ideological violence and persecution of dissidents. The story revolves around a young Russian teacher who speaks out against the war in class shortly after the invasion of Ukraine. A pupil secretly records her statement and denounces her. Soon afterwards, the young woman finds herself the focus of official investigations. She flees to Germany and begins to work as a teacher again. Together with her Berlin class, she reconstructs her own case to understand why this betrayal happened and what consequences censorship and persecution have for the individual, but also for communities.
What is the connection between school and politics, what should it be? How does political oppression feel, and what forms of resistance are possible? These are the questions the children in Berlin-Moabit grapple with. In addition to observations of the class, the film uses archive material, found footage, documentary scenes, and 3D animations to make the situation in Russia, characterised by fear and surveillance, tangible and comprehensible here as well.

This both raw and tender work of memory ploughs through reflections, feelings, anecdotes, photos, and drawings, an attempt in cinematic images to capture the grief over a beloved grandfather who fell victim to cancer, make it manageable. Sonia Leliukh takes the liberty of speaking from a deliberately subjective perspective, refusing to tone down her statements with seemingly valid rules of language or etiquette. With her desktop documentary, which seems playful only at first glance, she confronts radical grief with equally radical honesty. By putting the old computer games her grandfather used to distract himself from his pain on screen, she does not only put herself in the role of the terminally ill, but also the audience. When my finger twitches to move the Solitaire cards to the right spot or click on another box at Minesweeper, I am already in the midst of things and must ask myself how I deal with grief, love, or rejection. In the present, but also and especially when the people who inspire these emotions have gone. Sonia Leliukh’s work is a cinematic refusal to allow these feelings to become objects in the sediment of the past.

Sardinia, 1940. The harmless term “horsing around” takes on a very serious and ultimately tragic meaning for 14-year-old Michele and his 11-year-old friend Ventura. When they learn that the peasants have sold their best horses for serious money to the state and thus to the military for the approaching war, the two boys take a decision that is as naïve as it is intuitive: They free the herd in a daring nighttime operation. Their happiness is short-lived. Betrayed by a villager, they are caught on the way home and Ventura is shot dead. A senseless death? Or a sign of special bravery, as the ambiguous Sardinian film title suggests?
Director Giovanni Columbu, a Sardinian himself, has dedicated his late animation debut to his grandmother who once told him the story. He took the liberty of adapting it with brushstrokes on paper, his style drawing primarily on the charms of historical painting schools, animation techniques and cinema genres. Columbu’s associative visual language, marked by shades of black, white, and grey, is animated by impulsive hatchings, countless dots, and generous elisions. The soundtrack, too, sets rather sparse nuances – subtle illustrations that draw on Sardinian cultural traditions while opening a space for universal metaphors.

Bela from Leipzig is a real fighter – on the judo mat and in life. When he bravely defeated leukaemia with chemotherapy, he lost all his hair. Now he regularly has to go to the hospital for blood tests. It is not so bad, Bela thinks – as long as he is allowed to go to judo training. He wants to get even stronger there to become a real judo master one day.

The Indonesian word “bendungan” can have various meanings. It is a term for very different structures that can contain, hold back, or block water, a dam for example, an embankment or shoreline stabilisations on rivers and oceans. For this experimental work, Jee Chan, a representative of an artistic practice between (dance) performance and expanded choreography, has talked to three persons who live near water in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Both countries are linked by the European colonisation of Southeast Asia and the ensuing crimes. Each of the incidents shared in this film reflects a different perspective on this period and its consequences, tells another story without seeking explicitly to “write history”.
Jee Chan addresses the question of how memory and knowledge become manifest not only in our memory but also in our socio-spatial environment, in waterscapes and the human body. Using choreographed gestures in tranquil long takes, oral history, and interventions in space, they make memory tangible as a multi-layered activity tied to its environment.

An empirical dream of enhanced vision, of seeing with a machine. “Blindspot” is a poetic unfolding of what we could but cannot yet see, filmed using neuromorphic event-based camera systems which are able to visualise beyond our fallible eyes. Unfolding as a dance between human and machine, the film imagines the future of vision as hybridised.

There are framed wedding photos on the wall, open albums of holiday memories on the table. This is a household of gestures rehearsed for decades. The filmmaker meets life as lived in her grandparents’ Luxembourg home. She tries on her grandfather’s coat and her grandmother’s rings. Out of boredom? Or is it an appropriation of history? Time seems to stand still and yet moves inexorably forward. He takes a nap in a sleeping mask that has open eyes printed on it, she sits at the kitchen table and talks about the onset of her dementia. She enjoys a cigarette by the window to the fullest, letting her granddaughter paint her nails pink. Perhaps to look good on camera, while the grandfather swings his hips to the music from the radio. The couple wrest touching moments from the sense of transience, while a pas de deux tells of love and attachment.

An oily liquid oozes across the frame. Wafting windows in the black mass draw the eye to the levels below. Everything is in motion. Hypnotic music enhances the viscosity of the soft body until we believe that we see a “Liquid Light Show” from the 1960s. But these are the dark revenants of psychedelic hippie visuals that put us into a black trance.

A creative person suffering from writer’s block is sitting in an artists’ residence. Outside, construction workers are busy, inside, nothing happens – until the landline rings. A supposed Microsoft employee wants to access her allegedly broken computer. She begins to talk – about heartbreak, emptiness, procrastination. The scammer listens and – without realising it – is ensnared by a scam baiter.
“Cold Call” is the tale of an unexpectedly real, almost comforting conversation between these two strangers – and of how easy it is to become part of the structures one believes to be questioning: digital vigilantism, racism, global inequality. Stefanie Schroeder explores a phenomenon that reveals its multiple layers only at second glance. One of these layers is scamming, an attempted fraud based on deception and manipulation that is often committed not out of free will but by slave-like “employees” of small businesses scattered across the globe. Scam baiting turns out to be similarly ambivalent, a counter movement on the internet pretending to be a protective power that seeks to stop fraudulent activities by personal exposure and humiliation, quite often through racist stereotypes. Schroeder approaches this melange with minimalism and humour, masterfully unfolding the complexity of this subject in the process.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Tehran and other major cities seem far away from the place where Sara lives. But in her rural community in northwestern Iran, the protagonist of this film advocates the same feminist values in a practical, everyday way. Again and again, we are reminded by the images that her father once taught her to ride a motorbike – to the disapproval of the whole village. A small favour with big consequences: For Sara, it paved a way outside patriarchal marriage. Mobile on two wheels, she works as a midwife and has delivered many girls for whom she now wants to fight: At the start of the film and in middle age, Sara decides to be the first woman in the history of her community to run for the local council. A step which earns her enthusiastic support on the one hand; on the other, she must endure open hostilities and an interrogation by the moral enforcers of the Islamic Republic. In “Cutting Through Rocks”, Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni capture these power structures and their individual impact as precisely as the gestures of solidarity and self-determination.

“There was this great doctor who stitched me up with such gentle accuracy.” Catholicism and mental distress are entwined in the mother’s life. The grainy 16mm material shows scratches, other, physical scars are mentioned in voice-over. In this resistant miniature, respect for decisiveness triumphs over criticism of moral judgement. A few images, a giggle and a song sung together suffice to achieve this. References remain open, the ambivalence arising between the black-and-white images of interiors, medicinal and devotional arrangements, between on and off, is allowed to stand. Even in the bible there are people who have lost the strength to live. At the end, lotion has softened the skin, and images, text and singing are gently stitched together.

The breakbeats that drive the flowing surfaces and shimmering textured shapes of this experimental music video seem heavy and fragile at the same time. The soundtrack evokes 1990s drum and bass music, but remains hypnotic and soothing. The appeasing images and sounds seem made to accompany the last hours of a sleepless night.

We have all been there: A noise escapes in the bus, followed by an unpleasant smell – and everyone knows where it came from. But why are farts so embarrassing? At least that is what fart star Pongy Pippa wonders. She dances with tubas and trumpets in time with our digestion to show how much work and skill goes into making such sounds. A musical show for the most human of noises.

The Super8 material that has been stored in a private archive since 1982 is a conundrum, showing art, demolished buildings, and squatted houses in early 1980s West Berlin. A so-called Artificial Intelligence is consulted to explore the connections between the images. Interestingly, it comes up with references to the ancient capital of the Median Empire and later royal residence of the Achaemenids. We also learn surprising things about the significance of red turtleneck jumpers for gay emancipation and discover the functions of broom and hose. Accompanied by a confusing sound collage, the graffiti on the walls of a much-described city point to an exciting subcultural tradition. A young man looks into the camera. It is the artist Gerhard Faulhaber.

A tinted nitrate fragment of the company film “A. Gutberlet & Co., Leipzig-Mölkau, Spezialfabrik für Falzmaschinen und Faden-Buchheftmaschinen, gegründet 1901“ (specialist in the manufacture of folding machines and thread book stitching machines, established 1901) was an exceptional find. It could be restored in its original colour tones by analogue methods in 2024 and then digitised. Combined with the dupe negative of another version, it now offers insights into the factory halls and the work on the machines.