“Y” sensually draws the progress of a same-sex relationship from playful beginning to turbulent end. Charcoal strokes become the language in which the filmmaker tells us of the process of growing closer to and away from each other, of intimacy and estrangement. A shared chapter of life is sketched, corrected and discarded.

But the line also explores the female body. The tip of the charcoal wanders through curves, hills and valleys, circling soft flanks like a finger and gently stroking breasts and hips. In the darkness of the cinema, the eye is free to glide along the emerging and disappearing shapes. We become part of an erotic triangle and are given an intimate insight into the protean psychological and physical aspects of this partnership.

The activist in her awakened at an early age. Even as an adolescent, Juma Xipaia felt that she would dedicate herself to her Indigenous people’s fight for the right to exist in the Brazilian Amazon region. For the Amazon is their mother, the knowledge, and the cure. More than ten years later, Juma knows what it really means to be an activist. As the first female chief of the Middle Xingu region, she has survived assassination attempts, experienced state violence against protesters, must discover illegal prospectors who are clearing the forests and poisoning the soil and the rivers. But the 34-year-old also sees hope emerge for the Indigenous people of Brazil, because the 2023 change of government gave them their own Ministry for the first time. Juma becomes an undersecretary of state and has her second child: Yanuni.
The Austrian Richard Ladkani portrays Juma Xipaia and her husband Hugo, a special investigator working for the environmental authorities, after they let him accompany their daily life for several years. Ladkani mixes fascinating landscape shots with the explosive power of “embedded journalism”, using the full potential of the big screen in one moment and intensifying intimate moment in the next. The result is private and personal, poetic and political. Above all, the film transports Juma Xipaia’s message that despite every disappointment, responsibility for one’s life should not be placed in the hands of others but kept close to home.

Yaren’s mother died four years ago. This summer she is excited to go to a special camp: a bereavement camp. All the children here have lost someone close to them. In five beautiful and intense days, Yaren and the other kids deal with what unites them all: their pain. A film about loss, healing and friendship.

Sphere, cuboid and potato figure hang out in the playground of grey everyday life. After a literal short trip of the spherical fellow into the gaudy, psychedelic cosmos where colours and forms blur, the only thing to do is to bring along the friends. The three of them pool all their skills in a rubber ball and jump into the new timeless world.

Shots of ordinary life from seven months in Tallinn, where nothing is ordinary in 1988. In the course of perestroika, the people’s national awareness grows stronger and the return to Estonian identity is celebrated by the masses. Soviet occupation must end. Observations from a country in upheaval, commented on with tender irony.

Yasin El Harrouk is Yonii is actor, rapper, singer, Swabian, Moroccan. This portrait presents him as a lively shifter between life and creative cultures, between the roles he plays in the studio and in front of the camera, and the expectations that family and community have of him. Yonii has two languages and even more worlds – and enjoys this wealth. But on the sofa in his mother’s Stuttgart living room, it becomes clear that this range of different worlds also means a constant balancing act.

Powerful poetry in image, word and sound – Max Ferguson’s work is a rough diamond that testifies to an emotional, unpolished force and whose light is refracted in many colours. Mixing elements from photography, painting and collage with short video sequences, Ferguson finds strong verbal and visual images to mark the tipping point between physical desire and emotional violation.
Rough aesthetics and a gloomy atmosphere reminiscent of early underground films are combined with extreme delicacy and a constantly alert, almost animalistic curiosity. They manifest a very contemporary female self-image. The balancing act between pain and self-respect takes place in a sound cosmos of electronic thunder and nervous buzzing. While the brawny truck cannot leave its lane, the deer follows its instinct and finds a (new) way, even if it must learn from the wolf.

August 2022, a 360° view of a Ukraine that has been fighting the Russian invasion for six months. In the midst of warfare, a shared solidarity emerges which also releases resistive-creative forces: museums hide collections, a street artist finds his calling, opera companies and rave communities raise their volume when the bomb alerts threaten to drown them out …

Looking around with her stepfather. Gentle hills, low vegetation, dry soil, ruins of houses from the 1970s. Ali Ekber Vural once left for Germany from here. At the time he buried his binoculars with the Zeiss lenses and never found them again. Now his stepdaughter’s camera takes a close look. Dêrsim – a name that has disappeared from the map of Turkey, yet still lives on in many people’s memories. The region, a former refuge for Kurds and Alevis, was renamed “Tunceli” in 1935 as part of a national homogenisation process. This landscape has witnessed state violence, forced resettlements, massacres, torture, assimilation policies, and a lack of coming to terms with all this.
“Can you imagine such a man coming from this environment and integrating in Germany?” Ali asks. A narrated summary of his life that starts with the whispered, forbidden language of his childhood and leads to the complex diaspora experience in the new homeland, where, to put it bluntly, he was left high and dry. You have to have been there to understand what happened. Maybe a new, shared view will be possible then.