Porto Maurizio, where the director, who lives in France today, grew up, is located on the Ligurian coast. The village is the starting point for a cinematic journey into the past that spans a surprisingly wide arc to a time when Muslim pirates, the corsairs, haunted the Mediterranean and took Europeans as slaves. To this end, the film light-handedly draws from the rich fund of film history and its iconography.

Adventure films from the 1940s and historical murals depict the naval battles of the early 19th century in powerful images. The director ingeniously combines such visual finds with analogue new recordings of a journey with two friends. Their seemingly loosely told anecdotes and chance encounters combine to form a coherent whole, forming a geopolitical system of coordinates around the Mediterranean that deals with eurocentrism, colonial history and religiously motivated conflicts between Christian and Islamic countries. The subjects couldn’t be more topical.

A blue wooden house at the edge of the forest, lonely, but not peaceful and quiet. This is where Lydia lives, a transgender ornithologist who presents herself in high heels and a pearl necklace one day, in cargo pants and functional wear the next. Director Sasha Kulak calls her film a documentary fairy tale, and the borders between reality and fiction are blurred indeed, because Lydia loves play, staging, the uncanny – and David Lynch.

Lydia has watched “Twin Peaks” more than thirty times, its characters and plots have long since spilled over into Shcherbinka, a small town south of Moscow. She claims to find bodies in the underbrush and even Lynch’s “Red Room” has been replicated under the roof of her house. Now she’s facing a new challenge: the creation of Lara, a lifelike silicone doll whose voice also guides us through Kulak’s cinematic tale. Lydia works hard at realising her dreams, but she is equally passionate about studying birds and the so-called Nezhulyas, shy eyeless creatures that are exceedingly cuddly and have tantric potential. “A Hawk as Big as a Horse” becomes a vehicle of Lydia’s visions, using three-dimensional animation and various cinematic techniques to open a portal to a very specific fantasy.

Over many years, the director’s father filmed his family life almost obsessively. His daughter’s birth, his son’s first steps, and always Valérie, the young mother. An impressive fund of material which their now grown-up daughter Faustine appropriates to tell quite a different story: that of a woman who sees her role as a mother and its demands take away her freedom step by step.

In the here and now, the director observes her parents in the big empty house in the country: her hyperactive father who is constantly tinkering with something, and her chain-smoking mother who sits at the kitchen table and whose sharp mind can only be surmised from her eyes. What happened? What happened to the energetic and independent young make-up artist? The one who admires witches and wants to take a trip around the world. The one who could easily earn her own living but still gives up her job. “The gaze is important”, the now 60-year-old Valérie tells her daughter once while applying make-up. Yes, the gaze is important. And with her film, director Faustine Cros counters the gaze directed at her mother over all those years with a new narrative.

Theo Montoya draws on casting outtakes, melancholy observations of daily life and decadent party impressions from his friends to create a morbid and yet tender portrait of a young, queer generation in Colombia. In a country marked by violence and repression they can hardly imagine their future, but maintain a close, almost loving relationship with death.

This was meant to be a fiction film: a ghost story in which the dead no longer find cemetery space and consequently coexist with the living, including having sexual relationships – which the state rigorously forbids and persecutes. A clandestine nocturnal subculture emerges where erotic desires for which daylight means annihilation can be acted out. A week after Montoya found his leading actor for the project, the latter died of a heroin overdose. More deaths among his friends follow. They are the ghosts haunting the film that was ultimately made. It retains its dystopian character, but the dangers it portrays are quite real: For these young people, they are part of everyday life in Medellín, which is still deep in the shadow of Pablo Escobar and where the search for pleasure and human warmth takes one through labyrinthine abysses.

What do the Algerian war of liberation and Yugoslavia have in common? Stevan Labudović. In 1959, Tito himself sent his favourite cinematographer to Algeria. The resistance against the French colonial rule needed the eyes of the world, and the experienced partisan Labudović helped open them: His images gave the lie to the propaganda of the occupiers and their Western allies. This is a portrait of the man, the mission and the age – as film, ideological and personal history.

For three years, until the Democratic Republic of Algeria was proclaimed, Labudović put himself and his camera at the service of the people fighting for independence. Mila Turajlić found the newsreel footage shot at the time in the Filmske Novosti archive in Belgrade, got in touch with the aged pensioner and followed his trail. From a wealth of archive material, diary entries by and interviews with Labudović, with contemporary witnesses from Yugoslavia, Algeria and New York, where the young Maghreb state, like many other former colonies, struggled for admission to the United Nations, she distils the promising origins of an alliance that stood at the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was to oppose the dichotomy of the superpowers. Thus the bow to her compatriot also gains global political topicality.

The vultures are circling over the Cevennes, the south-eastern part of the French Massif Central. They are part of the holistic cycle of becoming and passing away which shepherdess Nathalie seeks to come closer to. Because the vultures are gnawing at the remains of her beloved animals. She considers herself responsible not only for their lives, but also for their death. Elsa Maury’s film is an unequivocal testimony to what it means to wield the fatal knife oneself.

The sounds made by a ewe when a lamb is born seem almost human. And when a little later the newborn turns out to be unwilling to live it seems as if one could detect pain in the mother’s eyes. The shepherdess Nathalie’s empathic look at her flock was transferred directly to the viewer. Each animal here has its own name, each has a biography that Nathalie knows by heart. And it’s ultimately up to her to finally decide when the end of a sheep is near. In diary-like sequences we learn about her feelings, take part in a difficult process of development which results in new self-confidence, perhaps even new wisdom. Elsa Maury shows a perennial school of killing and death. She leaves the events uncommented, but achieves an intensity through images and editing that stays with us for a long time.

Lebanese filmmaker Dima El-Horr moved to Paris several years ago. Among the friends who stayed at home is the artist Sirvat Fazlian, whom she regularly visits in Beirut until the failed revolution of 2019, the COVID lockdown, the devastating port explosion and finally the dramatic economic crisis put a temporary end to their meetings. So the director decides to give her conversations with Siro a cinematic form.

Ever since the death of her husband, the well-known Armenian actor Berj Fazlian, Siro has lived alone in a flat filled with souvenirs and devoted most of her time to music and painting. In this film, footage from the years before 2019 blends with recorded phone calls between Siro and Dima and recent scenes from Paris, coming together in a densely woven portrait of life in exile. While snow falls in Paris, Siro talks about warm days on the Mediterranean coast and sings Armenian songs. She rails against the permanent crisis in Lebanon, but her nature is not affected. For one thing, Siro personifies the legendary Lebanese resilience. Yet for the filmmaker she represents that part of the heart that people in exile leave behind. So almost inevitably, “Conversations with Siro” becomes the director’s dialogue with herself.

In the summer of 2000 Ugandan and Rwandan troops fought a devastating battle in Kisangani. The International Court of Justice sentenced Uganda to pay one billion U.S. dollars to the civilian victims. After almost twenty years of waiting in vain, some of them set out for Kinshasa to enforce their legal claim. The physical and theatrical power of their mission both drives and radiates from this film.

Dieudo Hamadi has given the women and men he is about to follow down the Congo a visually confident and assured exposition. Gathered on an inky black stage, they look at us and sing: of blood spilled, of money forgotten. Then the march of the maimed sets itself in motion, on crutches, with prostheses, past the nearby pits of the dead and out into the country. Every metre covered is an act of rebellion. When the procession of beggars, who rightly won’t tolerate this designation, finally climbs the stairs of the National Parliament, iconic scenes of Soviet revolutionary cinema seem to shine through. But the crowd that is moving here is different. Its individual bodies push back with all their weight both against the casual shrug of the shoulders of political routine and the carelessly rounded calculations of loss and equivalent value of the arithmetic of war.

The director makes an attempt to locate herself, because historical erosions in society and politics have led to an identity crisis for Cléo Cohen, a young Frenchwoman. Is she Arab? Jewish? She struggles for clarification, aided by her grandparents, who all emigrated from the Maghreb to France as Jews. The questioning is playful, but determined. Cléo awakens memories, confronts, muses in the bathtub.

Cléo wants to find out from her grandmother Flavie whether she’s “sedje”, able to marry. Flavie reacts evasively. Her sister would definitely be, Flavie thinks, and Cléo, too, knows roughly how to go about things. But she doesn’t seem entirely convinced. Cléo Cohen is in the middle of a process of discovery. Her grandparents play a role in this. While some came to France as Algerian Jews, others relocated from the neighbouring country of Tunisia, also as Jews. Cléo is confused. Denise’s native tongue, for example, is Arabic, she knows Arabic cuisine, but she’s not an Arab? Cléo talks to everyone, shoulders her way briskly but warmly into the past. She reads the writings of Albert Memmi, who grew up in Tunis as the son of Jewish parents under French colonial rule; she listens to Philippe Katerine’s song “Juifs arabes”. She travels to Tunisia.

When director Mickaël Bandela was six months old, his biological mother Gisèle, who lived in France, handed him over to his foster mother Marie-Thérèse, who cared for him for almost twenty years. Though he stayed in touch with Gisèle, visits were always irregular. Now Mickaël is 35 and about to found his own family. It could be the perfect moment to include Gisèle into his life as a grandmother. But she decides to return to her old Congolese home.

Mickaël tries to understand – the woman who gave birth to him, the woman he grew up with and himself. His autobiographical film turns into a fragmented search for the traces of memories of his own becoming. Some sequences show moments of extreme disorientation. A loss of balance while revolving around oneself, as one might assume? No, that’s precisely what does not happen to Mickaël Bandela. His work, which counteracts the lack of archive material with visual ingenuity and an idiosyncratic rhythm, is full of empathy. Not only does he shine a light on growing up unprivileged in the French province, he also allows us to understand the actions of both his “mamans” and reveals backgrounds. In addition, he achieves an elaborate analysis of (un)interchangeability: that of every individual, even the often sacrosanct-seeming figure of the mother.

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.

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.

Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, the region of Abkhazia has been acting independently of Georgia. This has turned a massive dam into a border. But the hydroelectric power station also connects the two political entities: Because over a distance of fifteen kilometres the water flows freely, underground, from one side to the other. When a young journalist gets stranded here, stories of division emerge.

On the way back from a reportage trip to the dam, director Maradia and her cameraman’s car breaks down. Ika takes care of them. For decades, the joyous engineer has worked – in cooperation with his colleagues on the Abkhazian territory – on the maintenance of the plant. Maradia, representative of a whole generation of Georgians who know this place of longing on the Black Sea only from stories, becomes curious. But while the workers take the bus across the border every morning, the film crew is thwarted by bureaucracy. Time and again they are denied passage. This turns out to be fortunate for the film, because waiting for the permission, in the cafeteria of the dam, in drives around the river, the stories of people emerge whose lives are shaped by the secession. They talk of legal and clandestine border crossings, weddings and funerals and of life in the here and there.

On Guadeloupe, an archipelago in the Caribbean, the past speaks up. Sylvaine Dampierre has the workers of an old sugar refinery read passages from the transcripts of an 1842 court case, while the machines roar and groan in the background. The testimonies of the slaves from back then in the rusty halls of today give rise to a polyphony both explosive and poetic in nature.

The “Grande Anse” sugar refinery is a monster from a distant past: Flames like long tongues spew from the furnaces, piles resembling bones everywhere. The workers cut them with machetes in the plantations of Marie-Galante, a tiny island that belongs to the archipelago of Guadeloupe. The long bones, the sugar cane, are the scaffold that keeps everything together here. Sylvaine Dampierre is in the thick of it, shows the pulsating factory and the hard labour that goes on inside. Seasonal workers come and go; the men organize themselves. They are free. There are occasional flashes of the peculiar bond with France, of which this overseas territory is an integral part, but Dampierre foregrounds the transcripts of a court case from almost two hundred years ago, in which slaves testified against their violent master. An act of self-empowerment, whose gestus the director brings into dialogue with the present.