Once, Myrid Carten’s alcoholic mother Nuala disappears for two weeks. The daughter recognises her, curled-up in the middle of the Belfast pedestrian zone, by her shoes: the only street-drinker in high heels. She does not know what to do, keeps the camera rolling for a few minutes and leaves. How do you behave towards a mother who needs mothering herself? Carten tackles the question by making a film about it – as an intervention, exorcism, declaration of love, manifest of powerlessness.
Nuala is the centre of a complex, fragile family dynamic that revolves around the run-down family home where the camera obsessively crawls upside down along the walls again and again. The material is haunted in myriad other ways: scattered traces of past art projects, nerve-racking phone recordings and faded television images stand next to childhood memories on MiniDV cassettes that diffuse almost seamlessly into the present. At one point the mother’s voice even seems to take complete control of her daughter. Carten’s creative exuberance is enormously compelling, kept together by a fluid montage that lays bare the deeply sincere emotional core of the film.

A film commissioned for a school education programme. The goal of this programme is to teach children about their own history and that of their country – especially on the background of the recent wars. The hope is that this knowledge will also be applied to the future, that it will bring colour to the black and white, a smile to the gloom.

The project “Germany 09” brought the upper league of German auteur filmmakers together to take stock of the Berlin Republic in individual film contributions. Dominik Graf contributed to this collage of the German image a reflection about post-1945 urban architecture shot on old Super8 stock: provisional, slipshod ensembles of pretty-ugly public buildings, fenced-in urban wasteland, draughty storefronts and uninhabited housing blocks in Munich, Duisburg, Frankfurt am Main, West Berlin, all of them testimonies to an unplanned through traffic for social and migrant milieus. A thorn in the side of the reunited mania for cleaning up, renovating and decorating.

It is a stroke of luck when a film manages to simply observe the flow of life and almost casually show us the miracles found in life’s corners. Ann Carolin Renninger approaches people and things with great serenity and a palpable joy of searching for and finding images.

Rovin lives on a remote farm on the Baltic Sea and explores his surroundings with insatiable curiosity. He is interested in the universe, planets, unknown creatures – and in tardigrades, those tiny multicellular organisms that look like dust bags on legs and are real survival artists. Quite unlike humans, as Rovin points out, because the latter are sure to die out one day. He sees this as a logical fact, not a threat. And when you open yourself up to the grainy, earthy images and the calm narrative, you eventually stop wondering, too, why that should be a problem. After all, as long as the wind blows through the trees and scatters the tardigrades, everything is in good order. In addition to the captivatingly alert boy, Renninger meets Marie, who knows everything about rocks, and Christopher, who decorates a place with these rocks. They are all on a quest and every day find a piece of what one cannot hold onto: the present.

In a dilapidated village in south-eastern Turkey, a Syrian Orthodox nun endures alone with her animals. However strong the hostility of her predominantly Muslim neighbourhood may be: she won’t be driven out, for she has sworn to protect the church and not to leave the sacred place. This quietly filmed observation of everyday life focuses on an isolated woman who carries the pain of a whole community inside her.

The population of the village was tortured and driven away in the 1990s. The nun Dayrayto came here only afterwards. Today she rarely receives visits from passing believers. She usually spends her days doing maintenance work on the church and taking care of the animals. Right now she is worried about her old dog. Has he been poisoned? What to make of the provocations and threats she talks about? Dayrayto is always vigilant, even when she’s resting. From her elevated dwelling she looks far across the landscape, registering every vehicle, however distant. But she is in no way distracted by the presence of the film crew. The unobtrusive camera follows the nun – not at every turn, but as a constant, protective companion as she endures on her “bastion”. Loneliness, worries and fear shape this sparse life. They made her suspicious, but also fearless.

Felix Leffrank deals with the ups and downs of an artist’s life in colourful, computer-animated images. During his ordeal between depression, writer’s block, anger and urban loneliness, a story-teller is accompanied by three weird birds who sometimes appear as annoying neighbours, sometimes as inner demons. Jung, Freud and the psychologist Dr. Breuer in the shape of a grey cat promote self-reflection, but the most helpful thing is probably a beer with friends.

Before photography and film were invented and constructed the “Wild West”, the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis, whose travels made the westwards expansion of the still young USA possible, died under mysterious circumstances. The present-day narrator of this film, a distant descendant, portrays him as the tragic hero of a speculative gay love story. The potential lover, Meriwether’s “Louisiana Creole” servant John Pernia, is historically documented. But the archive material, which favoured the white folklore of the so-called age of pioneers, lays no trail to this romance.

Ben Young wilds the early Western imagery and queers the nationalist historiography from the perspective of people who are missing in the tales of glory and whose originally free space was occupied by the settler movement and its subsequent legend formation. He uses associative montage and gossip to rehabilitate John and Meriwether, the undocumented romantic couple, as the real pioneers. And they have a score to settle with the U.S.

The Wall as a symbol. While the deadly border has already been overcome in Berlin, freedom must still be fought for in other states. A piece of the Wall was sent to Riga in 1990 – as a gesture of solidarity. A short cinematic essay in which people’s looks waver between hope and uncertainty.

In this early short, Lee Anne Schmitt and Lee Lynch craft an ambling, quietly profound portrait of a place quite literally close to home: the so-called Wash, a strip of wasteland by the Santa Clara River that backs on to Newhall, California, where the two directors lived at the time. As the duo take turns explaining in voice-over, this in-between space is used by and home to a diverse group of local residents, a balance that is quickly upset once the adjacent hills are turned into an upmarket housing estate. As the natural and the urban blur together, the mood turns pensive. Nostalgia can be felt for even the most unremarkable of settings.

A diver encounters an injured whale. He decides to help the animal and gets a friendly look of thanks. For the space of a few seconds, the border between the two species seems permeable. The whale disappears in the depths of the ocean and leaves the diver wondering whether this was all just a projection of human hopes.

Something is wrong. Something is completely wrong. With the sound and with the image. The notes are crooked, the piano lid squeaks, the movement falters. Corrections are needed to bring everything together in harmony and in tune with Johann Sebastian Bach’s beautiful music.
Six roles of painted toilet paper are worked on by human hands on an editing table, one after the other. The editing device consists of coloured building blocks and a few wooden sticks. It is a game, a trick, it’s entertainment. At the same time, the simple images on the film strip take us deep into the current events of our time. But the material resists sharply delineated representation. It soaks up the paint and blurs the boundaries. It tears. It is limited. Before the story can pick up speed, the roll is unspooled. Narrative is difficult in view of this situation. And yet animation artist Anna Samo manages, with a very light touch, to transform ambivalent feelings, confusion, rigidity and speechlessness into a work of hope and courage.

When Stella Nyanzi enters a room, action is guaranteed. The Ugandan feminist, gender researcher, anthropologist and poet does not mince her words in her fight against state oppression. She went to prison in 2017 for a vulgar poem in which she ridiculed head of state Yoweri Museveni, who has been in office for almost 40 years. After she was released, Nyanzi ran for Parliament without the necessary funds for a campaign, printing and distributing posters and flyers in the slums of Kampala with her children. Her daughter did her mother’s make-up and hair for public appearances. Sometimes her almost adult children longed for more time for themselves. The family repeatedly faced police violence and finally emigrated to Germany.
Using a mobile handheld camera, the film absorbs its protagonist’s power, its rhythm matching her angry lyrics. The result is the portrait of a woman who has made radicalism and provocation her way of life. We get to know an activist who permanently pushes herself and the people around her to the limits. Still, it is hard not to get infected by Stella Nyanzi’s energy.

A girl affected by ostracism angrily creates a little demon that is to follow her forever from now on, comforting her in moments of disappointment, but also keeping her locked in her loneliness. In Budanova’s beautiful animation, mental pain takes the shape of an identity figure that seems impossible to get rid of.

A Soviet figure skater, a female Yugoslav sex partisan, a Vietnam veteran, Father Stalin and the Austro-American orgasm researcher Wilhelm Reich rumble in the belly of this film. Some people believe that Dušan Makavejev invented subversion in the first place. He exploited the gaps of freedom in the Yugoslav brand of socialism and developed an exceptional cinematic model which irritated both the dos and don’ts of the medium as well as those of political unambiguousness. The Western world was amused by this collage of feature, documentary and sexual education that transgressed all boundaries of ideology and modesty, but the tolerance of the Yugoslav censorship authorities was overstrained – at least temporarily. The 1971 screening ban was lifted in 1986. In 1988, Makavejev returned to Yugoslavia from the West.

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.

We’re travelling from luxury kitchen to luxury kitchen with Agnes, from Bergisch Gladbach via Barcelona to the Faroe Islands. The cook’s luggage always includes her backpack containing various knives, cleavers and tweezers. The camera watches over the inquisitive young woman’s shoulder as delicacies are being prepared. Our mouths water. At the same time, we get insights into the different ways of running a restaurant. It’s about team spirit and equality at the stove.

Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels” comes to mind, because this observational documentary is also like a novel of development. Agnes is ambitious, knows her craft. She wants to be her own boss one day. She soon finds her way around every new team, takes her place. It’s a sensuous pleasure to watch how the many hands interlock, how culinary creations are lovingly made, delicately plucked salad leaves arranged as decorations. At the same time, Agnes has to struggle against opposition. Her wages are low. A colleague asks her what business she, who has just finished her apprenticeship, has in a three-star restaurant. Agnes is moving in a male domain, in an environment that tends to pass the pressure down. But in the course of her journey, she also comes across collective forms of cooperation and new visions of cooking.