Renata Lučić, both director and protagonist, returns to her hometown to visit her father in a small village in the Croatian part of Slavonia, near the Bosnian border. She has always hated the rural area on the banks of the river Sava, “those endless meadows and gardens,” as she reveals right in the opening sequence. Even as a child she knew that she would leave. Like her older brother, like her mother. And like 124,667 other women who “went West” after the war, usually to Germany or Austria, to work – and never to return.
She now hangs out in the almost abandoned and womanless village with her estranged father Tomislav and his best friend Joso. The men follow their routines, working in the forest or eating river fish they caught themselves. Emotional closeness and intimacy gradually form in at first seemingly trivial conversations and despite initial misunderstandings and distinctly different world views. The film project, which started as the story of an emigration, gradually turns into a sensitive study of loneliness, human relationships, friendship and love; about the beauty of the little things that leads to larger insights – not just for Renata.

In the north of Georgia, twelve kilometres from the Russian-influenced region of Abkhazia, a family are realising their dream. Under the optimistic motto “Plant the Future,” the Georgian government has launched a funding programme that enabled the people in this state which has been shaken by wars and crises for years to make a fresh start on their own farmland. With this support Soso, a retired engineer, took the big step in 2021 with his wife and two young sons and began growing blueberries.
Director Elene Mikaberidze and a dynamic camera follow the bold endeavour of the greenhorn farmers as they settle into their unfamiliar new life month by month. In the evenings, they pass the time with games and conversations, while the television is on in the background: images of a Ukraine under attack, news of the escalation in the Middle East remind the adults of the Russo-Georgian War sixteen years ago. Soso, the head of the family, contemplates his homeland in the midst of an escalating global situation. What dreams will still find a place there? Mother Nino is worried about her children’s future. She wants them to have the freedom to go their own way, to travel abroad and leave Georgia behind. Whether these ideas correspond with Soso’s remains to be seen.

The actor Hiam Abbass, who lives in France, is one of the greatest movie stars from the Middle East. She played leading roles in the award-winning films of Israeli director Eran Riklis, acted in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and recently in the U.S. hit series “Succession.” She served on the juries of the big Festivals in Cannes and Berlin, presented her own directing debut in Venice. But she is also a mother, daughter and sister in a large Palestinian family full of resourceful women. In this real role she steps in front of the camera in her daughter Lina Soualem’s work and travels back to her hometown of Deir Hanna in northern Israel – an Arab village in the Jewish state.

“Don’t open the gate to past sorrows,” the director quotes a kind of family dogma. It refers, among other things, to the family’s traumatic expulsion from Tiberias, the city on the Sea of Galilee, in the 1948 Palestine War. But with her confrontation of the family history, Soualem also opens gates to past joys and allegedly discarded identities. Between home videos, historical archive footage, photos and letters, Abbass is a touching and approachable screen presence as she returns to her roots. The long shadow of her origins also falls on a woman of the world.

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.

The landscape presented by Randa Maroufi in the final part of her trilogy about Moroccan cities seems unreal. This is Jerada, where a coal mine once attracted numerous workers to the region. And even though the mine closed in 2001, mining is still going on – secretly and under dangerous conditions. Maroufi interweaves Super8 images of the miners and their families with 3D scans of the area. But the most impressive parts are her re-stagings of the processes and threats featuring the workers of Jerada themselves: In long shots, taken both above and below ground, hard work becomes visible: physical, persistent, carried out with the simplest of tools. Hands with shovels fill coal sacks and load them onto a converted motorbike, a few metres below men crawl through narrow shafts that can collapse any moment. In conjunction with a sophisticated sound backdrop, “L’mina” evokes an almost surreal place. At the same time, documentary images remind us that this mining area is not a walk-in diorama but reality. As Maroufi emphatically puts it in her dedication at the end: “For those who live in the shadows to enlighten us.”

Silence reigns in the Berlin flat, but the film, whose complex montage encompasses the disintegration of Syria and life in exile, leaves no doubt that things are different in director Diana El Jeiroudi’s mind. Archival footage, loose portraits of confidants and an intimate perspective that explores her own position and her way of coping with trauma add up to a multi-layered document.

“Evil has a very loud and terrifying sound,” El Jeiroudi already noted as a child. Growing up in a country marked by surveillance and military parades has left its mark. In “Republic of Silence”, she looks for a way to come to terms with it, condensing old material, some of which shot in Syria, with a written monologue and stories of persons who also chose exile in the course of the civil war. The result is a complex filmic space that reveals the political and social disintegration of a nation. El Jeiroudi increasingly concentrates on showing a present outside Syria, life in emigration. Passing her husband's  nocturnal teeth grinding, birthday parties and disruptions in the international film festival scene, a life between tension and new beginnings becomes apparent.

Traumas have often inspired filmmakers to contrast a documentary narrative with visual alienations. Asmae El Moudir chooses the form of a doll-populated miniature of the Casablanca neighbourhood where she grew up. In 1981, before she was born, a massacre took place there. The police and the Moroccan king’s military forces shot hundreds of participants of the so-called bread riots, who were protesting against continuously rising food prices. The detailed small-scale models – El Moudir’s father, a bricklayer, built the big versions with stone and cement! – may illustrate the events, but they also mark the distance to a history that lacks images and has long been concealed in Morocco.

The lack of images is mirrored in the family context. Why are there no childhood photos of her, the director wonders. Why does her mother finally present her with a single picture which, however, shows another girl? This film, cleverly constructed in every respect, finally gathers the family members around the miniatures of their neighbourhood. The constellation does not promise a collective truth, but, at least, a dispute of memories.

A door that has been closed for seventy years serves as a MacGuffin in Mila Turajlić’s double portrait of her mother and her mother country of Yugoslavia. That very door has divided the bourgeois family apartment ever since Tito’s communists assigned several rooms to proletarians in need of shelter. Srbijanka Turajlić never cared a fig for her neighbours. But when Serbian nationalists began to threaten the unity of her country, she turned into a fierce opponent of the Milošević regime. In a virtuoso montage of archive material and conversations with her mother, the filmmaker recaps the latter’s development while gaining a new perspective on the time of her own youth.

After 62 years of marriage Aïcha Soualem is on her own again. Mabrouk, whom she has left, is nevertheless supplied by her daily with food and sugar cubes. Director Lina Soualem is interested in the relationship between her grandparents, who, as the last remaining Algerians in Thiers, France, look back on an eventful past. An empathic investigation all the way back to their native village of Laaouamer which leaves room for ambiguous emotions.

“Soualem” is the password which not only enables Lina Soualem to unlock the tiny, snow-covered village full of cousins in Algeria, which her grandparents left a long time ago. In a sense, “Soualem” is also the title of this gentle investigation of a granddaughter. And Laaouamer, that little place in Algeria, is only the final destination of a long journey which may be narrated via geographical coordinates but interweaves them closely with biographical and emotional ones. Aïcha and Mabrouk rarely talk about themselves. Instead, self-affixed wall badges speak: “The world’s best mom lives here” or “Welcome to the world’s best grandma’s”. To learn more about the couple, whose lives were shaped by French colonialism, Lina Soualem uses private photos and videos. Her investigation is full of love: persistent, but never prying.