The setting and cast of characters seem like the prelude to an unusual fairy-tale. An elderly man, a hermit living in a remote cabin, is visited by a young woman, almost a girl, who can understand and imitate the language of birds. Deep in the forest, Jean and Mana record and catalogue the calls of the different species day by day, night by night. But then they hear the voice of an unknown animal and set out to find it.

The focus is on birdcalls and their classification. But instead of making the meticulous analysis of sound events look like a quirky hobby, the film inspires us to listen closely. The two scientists’ unperturbed curiosity is catching, and as we watch, we are gradually infected not just with their enthusiasm for their object of research but also with their childlike desire to discover a secret.

The four people introduced by Aren Malakyan and Vahagn Khachatryan in their debut feature-length film embody the contrasting faces of Armenia today. Some of them are making plans for the future that might even be realised, others strive for seemingly unattainable ideals. What unites them all is the dream of a self-determined life – a near-impossibility in a country where the government tries to control everything and everyone.

Melania, in her mid-sixties, works as a lift operator in a Yerevan hospital and longs for a late career as a cosmonaut. In a way, she seems to be an anachronistic remnant of the Soviet age. The deep country, still ruled by ancient traditions and ideas of happiness, is represented by the farmer Karen, who is looking for the best of all possible wives. And Amasia and Sona own the night over the roofs of the capital. They are part of a new generation ready to fight for a future in which some liberties can be obtained despite a suffocating patriarchy. Occasionally amused, but never judgmental, the two filmmakers watch their native country dream.

An overcrowded dog shelter in Serbia. It’s hard to see how many animals are kept here behind wire mesh in desolate kennels. They are cared for and trained by prison inmates who are shown doing their job without further comment or explanation. However, the camera never focuses on the men’s faces. Observations take place at eye-level with the dogs. Especially shaggy Vanja and his training progress are at the centre of Dejan Petrović’s short study of freedom. The uniform, concentrated shots leave plenty of space for questions, above all whether this (dog’s) life is really unfree or whether the desire for freedom must take a backseat under these circumstances, since there is a roof over one’s head and a task that fills the day. While we are still thinking about this, Vanja with his alert eyes and engaging nature has already found a place – not just in the heart of his initially rather dismissive trainer.

A huge, glowing structure bearing the face of Rocky Balboa drifts through the night, mysterious and seemingly from out of this world. Its actual size is revealed only gradually. Sissel Morell Dargis tells the incredible story of the “baloeiros”, an underground culture in the heart of Brazil’s favelas. These loosely-knitted groups are dedicated to building, launching and chasing hot air balloons. This does not sound very spectacular? Anyone who sees the giant objects made of fine tissue paper, which often depict popular figures like Karate Kid or Superman, will be amazed! Such a balloon launch, sometimes preceded by years of welding and gluing in secret workshops, is not just a complex logistical endeavour. It is dangerous, too, for the “baloeiros” whose passion does not earn them one centavo, are prosecuted as a criminal organisation.
It takes a while for Morell Dargis to win the trust of this secret community. The balloons also serve her as a metaphor for a country that finds itself in a politically fragile and deadlocked situation in which those who struggle at the margins of society can barely assert their rights. An intimate, multilayered and action-packed film that turns conventional notions of life in the favelas upside down.

Summer, dust, a burning sun. It is stock car race season, a loud, aggressive show that leaves only smashed carcasses of cars in the end. After each lap, the dents are worked over with heavy hammer blows before the damaged racing cars are sent back on the smoky track. The audience are standing at the edge of the sand pit and can’t get enough of the pile-ups.
From off screen, the director gives a matter-of-fact account of the violent relationship in which she got caught up at the age of 18 and from which she only managed to free herself two years later. She analyses precisely what happened to her back then, using the dented, destroyed vehicles as a powerful metaphor for her injured body. The interplay of images and words is spot-on – like precisely placed knife stabs.

Trucks crawl along the road, decorated with garlands of flowers, loaded with the mortal remains of people who were murdered at the Srebrenica massacre. The bereaved receive the coffins to bury the only recently exhumed and identified dead in the sprawling cemetery of the city which also doubles as a memorial. This is the overwhelming opening of a film that goes on to concentrate on three of the few survivors of this mass murder which claimed the lives of thousands, mainly men and boys, within a few days in that small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 1995.

Srećko returned and now lives in the woods on a hill above the town. Mirza escaped by wandering through the mountains for days and now resides again with his wife in their old house. Mejra has lost her husband and sons and, aged 85 now, still supports herself only from her field. Their quietly observed everyday activities alternate with poignant archive material which shows the inconceivable events in minute detail. Shaky and blurry videos contrast with clear images of fieldwork and an enchantingly innocent nature. The past still weighs heavily, but the tenacity of the human spirit in bearing up under the most horrific circumstances emerges.

While studying in Belgium, Daryna Mamaisur witnesses Russia’s attack on her home country Ukraine from a distance. It is getting warmer, the chestnut trees are already in bloom, here in Brussels as well as there in Kyiv. Because she cannot find the words, she makes a film that records this spring – in the distance and nearby. She starts a visual correspondence with Tanya in Kyiv who would rather talk about an argument with her partner or the singing of the birds than the droning of the bombs.
The filmmaker, too, is searching for a way of speaking commensurate with her helplessness and shock. She takes voice lessons and interweaves the shots of recital and vocal exercises with the observations she exchanges with her friend. She directs our attention to the fragility of everyday life – and the experience of war that weighs down even the most relaxed, banal moments.

February 2022, the beginning of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine. When the fighting comes closer, director Alina Maksimenko flees from the district capital of Irpin north-west of Kyiv to her parents’ home in the countryside, where she gets stranded with her cat and her camera. It would be better to move even farther away, beyond the border, to be really safe, the daughter urges. Nonetheless, they decide to stay – hoping for the situation to get calmer on the one hand, trusting in the remoteness of their village refuge on the other.
The three of them hold out in an increasingly empty village. Fear spreads, tiredness. The parents refuse to change anything about their usual routines. It is an unbearable limbo that is inherently self-destructive. They try to hold on to their everyday life as best they can. Father Tolya takes care of the animals in the neighbourhood; dozens of abandoned cats gather at the front door every day. Meanwhile, mother Tetyana gives piano lessons over the phone, unless the mains is down again. And Alina, the daughter, makes a film. She is not interested in the fighting. Rather, her documentary of those first weeks of war is a minutely detailed portrait of waiting. The eye is on a microcosm where survival is in question, which makes it universal.

Director Nikola Spasić explains in an interview that in this film he was interested in the fluid boundaries between documentary and fiction, and that he found the perfect protagonist in Kristina: someone with an interesting personal story who can also act. And so she plays herself, Kristina, a transsexual sex worker in Serbia. She lives alone with her cat in a beautiful old house, collects antiques and practices ikebana on the terrace of her garden. She meets friends, visits a cloister, lives her religion, arranges a crucifix.

This idyll is regularly interrupted by the obtrusive ringtone of her work mobile. But the meeting with the client who appears at her door a short while later is well-orchestrated and no contradiction to Kristina’s elegant, graceful and serene existence, which she shapes according to her own ideas. All in all, these flawlessly framed and composed tableaus have an element of transcendence. But with his aesthetic directing, Spasić emphasises the incontrovertible freedom of this modern woman whom he captures in a portrait that is both intimate and daring.

Alyona, Alik and Katya belong to a generation of young Russian women who demand what they are not allowed. They are part of a global youth that dreams of self-determination and freedom. Sybilla Tuxen followed her protagonists between 2018 and 2022, up to the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the three young women find themselves in a new reality. Now more than ever, they are rebelling against Putin’s state and have since lived life on the go.

One of them has made it to Georgia, another goes to Spain, while the third stays at home. They keep in touch by smartphone and social media. One hears from their conversations that they, like many others, don’t believe that political engagement can change anything. Their resistance rather consists in leading modern and western lives in which gender, sexuality, pop music and identity issues play important roles. Tuxen’s darkly poetic debut film is set in nocturnal cars, flats and backyards. The transit in which the three find themselves becomes physically tangible. Their stories allow us rare glimpses into an almost invisible side of today’s Russia and the complexity of lived contradiction.

She left Serbia a long time ago and never looked back. But then Nataša Urban discovered her father’s hiking diary and began to connect his entries to the events of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The 1999 total eclipse of the sun is the central motif, employed by Urban as a metaphor for the way a dark past remains part of the present.

Kitted out with analogue film equipment, the director travels back to find the stories of her family, intimate friends and acquaintances. She listens to memories of inconceivably cruel acts; she watches the wind blow through leaves of grass. Her father, a lean, grey-haired man, hikes through the forest, striding again through the places he once visited. Dreamlike scenes meet sober descriptions of almost unbearable atrocities. Urban skilfully combines 16 mm and Super 8 film with archive material to explore the blurred boundaries between the individual and the collective, the private and public spheres, the personal and the political, resulting in an enchantingly beautiful work of art, a poetic reflection on growing up during the war.

Somewhere on the Bosnian-Croatian border. Green hills, forests, fields, a few houses and sheds scattered along the roads. If the territory of the European Union did not end here, it would be a rather unspectacular, interchangeable region. But the seemingly untouched landscape is deceptive – many mines from the Bosnian war have not been cleared yet; war traumas are far from over. Today the paths of migrants and locals cross here, refugees from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq trudge through the area, braving rain and snow in search of protection and a better life. At night you hear their cries from the forests when they are brutally chased across the border. The villagers on the Bosnian side open the old school building to allow their exhausted bodies a moment of rest. But everyday life continues. Wood is chopped, corn harvested, school kids recite poems. The imam calls to prayer. Everything normal, everything as usual.
As a reporter, Nicole Vögele spent several years researching this border region, reporting on the illegal pushbacks of the Croatian police for the “Der Spiegel” news magazine and others. In her film essay, she now takes the time to observe. She does not ask direct questions, giving as much space to the seasons, the weather and the forest as she does to the people.

The Bytom area was once known for its coal mines, but structural change has caught up with it, too. The decline of the region is vividly demonstrated by the pawnshop of the Silesian city. Probably the biggest of its kind in Poland, the shop has seen better days. Jola and Wiesiek, the idiosyncratic operators, are each trying in their own way to cope with the crisis and revive business.

The closing of the mines and the resulting unemployment in Bytom left behind all those who were unable to adapt to the new age. In the huge hall, they put increasingly absurd and worthless objects on the counter. The once lucrative trade in jewellery, electric devices and furniture has dwindled and however hard the employees work, the till stays empty. The wiring is unsound, nerves are raw and the tone between them gets rougher. Before they know it, the small business has turned into a kind of counselling centre: drying tears, ladling out soup and giving away goods instead of selling them. Jola in her voluminous fur coat always has an open ear and a warm blanket ready. Wiesiek devises one marketing scheme after the other. But will it be enough to save their business? A documentary report from the “Polish Detroit”, observed with delicacy and pitch-black humour.

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.