A green lawn like an unused carpet, encircled by a neat forest edge, in the background the steaming cooling towers of a coal power station – impressionistic camera images from Lusatia. They summarise in one pan how a used-up utilitarian landscape is trying to recultivate itself. Can ancient identity and language be re-discovered amid this strange artificiality? The director travelled through this region in search of her origins. She was born here, in Lusatia. This is her home and that of the smallest of all Slavic peoples: the Sorbs.

She thinks about the assimilation of this cultural and linguistic community with the indigenous people, about its history of oppression in the various German systems, about a region caught up in structural change and the identity-shaping power of words – even if one has to learn them anew first. She meets a German Anna who becomes a Sorbian Hanka. She encounters people dedicated to preserving the traditions. The younger folks especially see their Sorbian-ness as a commitment to a community spirit, if not – like the artist, Hella – as an alternative way of life. Accompanied by old and new Sorbian sounds, along the filmmaker’s offscreen reflections, the many-voiced portrait of a nation within the nation emerges who reclaims its culture out of the local museums back into its everyday life.

Three directors prepare a film about the chemical factory in the Cologne district of Kalk, on whose former grounds a shopping mall has been built. With some self-mockery they talk about their investigation and search for sources, their capitulation to the resistance of the material. Meanwhile, an archivist struggles with a mis-spooled 16mm film. Historical images splutter across the monitor of his analogue editing table. The silhouette of the factory with its towering chimneys is discernible. Site plans are shown, chemicals are blithely mixed. In an album, the filmmakers discover faded photos of female forced labourers. Suddenly, questions arise: Which stories are kept, which forgotten? Throwing away is part of his job, after all, the archivist explains in the finest Rhenish accent. What does this statement mean for the directing trio?

In 2018, thousands of people from Latin America set out together, fleeing from a lack of perspective, poverty and violence to the U.S. Among them Lilian, a single mother from Guatemala, who found the courage to leave her violent husband. The caravan was her only chance to achieve this act of strength. Nevertheless: 4,000 kilometres with four small children, walking, hitchhiking and travelling north on “La Bestia”, the freight train, are still extremely perilous.

The film contrasts the media coverage with a sensitive view that deliberately focuses on one family. It registers inconceivable hardships, but also great helpfulness, Lilian’s power of endurance and her ability to make the exertions seem like an adventure trip for her children – at least occasionally. Despite this lightness, though, the struggle remains as present as the fact that the US is simultaneously building a wall to prevent anyone from crossing the border. When Lilian and her children reach the border after weeks of fear, she breaks down. Suddenly the question arises whether her goal is really this rich country. Isn’t it rather about finally standing up to male dominance and traditional gender roles? It’s very obvious that one thing remained on Lilian’s arduous way: Fear has yielded to a new self-confidence.

The calls of the swifts fill the air. A sound that is the epitome of summer. The sun shines down on a chunky building. Surrounded by this shimmering and seemingly carefree atmosphere, children practice German vocabulary, explore empty rooms, and draw with chalk on the ground in front of the house. But not playground designs like hopscotch. Again and again, they write on the curb: “Putin, stop killing people.”

A former Wehrmacht barracks, later used by the U.S. army, this bright yellow complex now serves as accommodation for refugees from Ukraine. The directing duo’s poetic film captures an instant in the lives of these youngsters: a short and yet decisive moment between two worlds, one of them already left behind, not quite arrived yet in the other and a vague future in sight.

In 2020, the biggest protests against the government to date formed in Belarus. The protesters were met with violence and restrictions, many of them were given draconian prison sentences. A dangerous climate that sought to nip political activism in the bud took hold. For “Who, If Not Us? The Fight for Democracy in Belarus,” Juliane Tutein filmed and researched for three years in a country that had not seen a change of elites with its supposed independence in 1991. She discovered mainly women at the forefront of the courageous protesters. This portrait is dedicated to three of them: Nina Baginskaya, in her mid-seventies and active in the fight for an open Belarus since the 1980s, Tatsyana “Tanya” Hatsura-Yavorskaya, founder of the human rights film festival “Watch Docs”, and Darya Rublevskaya, the youngest at 22, who works for the “Viasna” human rights centre founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski. Tutein develops a polyphonic collage in which Minsk’s intimidating architecture has the same haunting impact as Hatsura-Yavorskaya’s escape into a Ukraine attacked by Russia.

Does farmer Ly have dealings with the Chinese, who have recently been tampering with the infrastructure of the village of Sitabaomba, not far from the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo, director Nantenaina Lova asks as bluntly as mischievously. Ly denies it. However, it becomes increasingly clear in the course of “Where Zebus Speak French” that the various development measures, often introduced by foreign initiatives and fuelled by corrupted politicians, also affect him.

Focussing on Sitabaomba, Lova shows over several years how the village population attempt to defend their farmland. Their fight is reminiscent of David against Goliath but doesn’t lead to despondence. Because in Madagascar, a very unique form of artistic, especially linguistic expression has always been cultivated which, at its best, allows people to maintain an inner independence. The commentary is therefore spoken in the style of “Kabary.” This polite, rhetorically sophisticated and sometimes mocking form of speech elegantly circumvents criticism, thus stating it all the more clearly. An artist also visits the village repeatedly and makes stones speak with the children, confirming an attitude Nantenaina Lova describes as follows: “Laughing at injustice rather than crying, resisting rather than pitying.”

The small town of Marinka lies in the Ukrainian Donetsk Oblast. Almost 10,000 people lived there, even though the town was under constant attack by pro-Russian separatists since 2014. When the war escalated in the spring of 2022, however, Marinka came under heavy artillery fire and practically all residents had to leave the town by September. The local police helped get them out. One of the policemen is Vasyl, the protagonist of this film. In a white van, soon christened the “white angel” by the population, he and his colleagues pull civilians out of the line of fire, recover the wounded and the dead. Vasyl’s helmet camera records the dramatic events of their missions: evacuating scared people from their cellars, first aid for the seriously injured, the hasty gathering of personal belongings, the painful and permanent partings.

Six months after the end of Marinka, the Leipzig-based investigative journalist Arndt Ginzel and his crew return to eastern Ukraine. They find the survivors, rescued persons and rescuers, and let them comment the action cam images. They speak of losses, of pain and grief, but also of hopes and dreams. “White Angel – The End of Marinka” is more than a film about war. It is a document of humanity and the longing for peace.

A jumble of emerging history is contrasted with the present efforts to optimise profit through ventures and ominous business ideas. In the midst of this labyrinth is a duo of artists who only want to make films. Their misfortune: the German film funding system allows only those who work in an artistic-documentary style to realise science fiction films. Cause enough to find true science fiction material on real German soil instead of looking for a fiction.

Rothenstein, south of Jena. A mountain, hollowed out and built on. Labyrinthine corridors cast in concrete spread over a distance of more than five kilometres. The film precisely constructs – stone by stone, image by image – a story which, composed as a mirror of German history, touches on archaeological finds from twelve thousand years ago and at the same time projects into the uncertainties of the future. Bizarre energy fields, myths and tales of dragons, plans of U.S. preppers fleeing from the end of the world meet facticities of National-Socialist exploitation and forced labour, stories of flight from the 1930s, and the military history of the GDR.