A prison film with a touch of Existentialism follows daily routines of a young woman and her fellow inmates: gatherings at the yard, work, hygiene, and quiet stares out of the barred window. Her fate was sealed long before she committed any crime because neither her family, nor our society could give her a hand when she needed it.

In 2011 Russia has started the so-called " borderization" - the installation of artificial barriers such as barbed wire, signs or fences along the occupation line. With this creeping shift of borders, the local population is deprived of their land, crops and homes, and a new wave of internally displaced people is sweeping the country. Moreover, the arrest of local residents for "illegal border crossing" by the Russian FSB has almost become a habit: More than 1000 people have been arrested since the beginning of the observed "border crossing".

The documentary tells the story of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and activist Sasha Kolchenko, who were detained in Crimea during the conflict in 2014. Despite international protests, they were convicted of plotting terrorist acts and sent to Russian prisons. The film accompanies Sentsov’s sister, following the same route endured by the Ukrainian prisoners after their detention four years ago.

A non-narrative, poetic film examines different ways our hands can be utilized – they can show aggression, but also create beauty; they can help children to explore the world, and they can be raised as a sign of surrender. Images are juxtaposed to underline the importance of what is outside of the frame – the human agent.

Faded photos of young women in Red Army uniforms. One of them is Tamara Trampe’s mother, who gave birth on a snowy field in Voronezh in the winter of 1942 and managed against all odds to keep her baby alive on the frontline. The girl was never to meet her father, an officer, and grew up in the GDR with her mother’s German husband. By that time her mother had locked her war traumas away deep inside, from where they haunted the children like bogeys. It was not until shortly before she died that she was able to talk about the war, in front of her daughter’s camera.
The daughter starts to track down her mother’s old female comrades in arms in the Ukraine. They are hard to find, unwilling to speak. No one wanted to hear their stories in a society that is keeping alive the myth of the Great Patriotic War even today. Pictures of war museums and student nurses who imitate frontline habits provide a sparing commentary on those of the old women in their humble dwellings.
The film, however, never refers the problem to “those people” in the East. On the contrary, a power structure that is running through history even today emerges from behind the allusions and perhaps elisions. Like every good film, this one hurts. It’s the pain about the untold stories, in the families, in society. The saddest sentence is spoken by one of the old women: “I will soon have forgotten myself.”
Grit Lemke

The film follows hard work of a group of woodcutters who dwell in the forest far away from civilization. They live in silence which is interrupted only by sound of chopping axes and falling trees. A haunting soundtrack to their toil was composed by a pioneer of electro-acoustic music, Ilja Zeljenka.

More than 200 million migrants work outside their home country. They send an annual 400 billion US dollars to their families to help or support them. Companies like Western Union or MoneyGram play a pivotal role in this system: in most cases, the money earned by the migrants is sent home by this apparently simple, quick and independent route. But the mechanisms behind the industry, the profit oriented machinations of the money transfer institutions and the sometimes morally dubious and even criminal-seeming business model of the money transfer companies are hidden from their customers. Monika Hielscher and Matthias Heeder have investigated the privations suffered by those who want to support their relatives and friends. Their main focus is on how and by which routes the money travels from one place to the other – and what’s really left of it in the end. The result is an alarming and sobering picture of the state of our planet, where wealth is often created through the poverty of others.
Kim Busch

A traditional, multigenerational family gathers in front of a partially built country house at various occasions. Metamorphoses of the building itself, family growth, amusing and sad events, all of it calls for collective photography. Admiration of simple man’s diligence complements ironic emphasis on a paradox of grand illusions vs. everyday reality – comforts of socialism which came at a heavy price.

The political era of Vladimir Putin began shortly before the millennium celebrations on 31 December 1999. The children who were born on that day and around the turn of the millennium in the giant empire are now of full age. They know only the ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin in the heaven of power. How does the generation Putin think and feel? How would they like to live in this apparently strengthened, but nevertheless unstable country?

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

The tower was a landmark and popular meeting place in the village of Kuisi. After the Russian-Georgian war in 2008 it was separated from the village and the inhabitants were resettled. Now they can only watch their village from the top of the tower. The film is part of the project 08.08.08., which collects stories of war experiences.

This directorial debut by a pioneer of ethnographic film is a survey on technical monuments utilizing water drive as a source of their power. A look back into the world of yesterday using suggestive montage of images and music composed by Ilja Zeljenka based on electronically preserved original sound of water engines.