The narrator of the film was diagnosed with proprioception disorder by her physiotherapist: She lacks a normal awareness of her body in space and thus a reference to the world around her. Dancing as a therapy might help. Instead, she takes a ghost train into Finland’s television history, to the 1960s, when ordinances forbade spontaneous dancing because of a Medieval decree.

Young people were robbed of their body awareness, Finland, with its peculiar position between the blocks of the Cold War, stood untethered in the political geography of the time. Connections were made through television, Swiss campaigns for the independence of the West African province of Biafra, the weightless moon landing, U.S. American stars from soap operas and TV western shows. Travelling without moving. Do ghosts have proprioception? Wouldn’t they float out of this world otherwise? Or are they kept tethered to the ground by film and television recordings?

Filmmaker Elahe returns to her hometown of Mashhad in Iran to help her parents move house. Boxes must be packed, old stuff must be rummaged through together. Meanwhile everyone involved discusses what Elahe should wear at the upcoming big party, because Mr. Hossein, the respected and devout patriarch of the extended family, has invited his relatives to his garden.
Elahe will not wear a headscarf, nor a hat, not even a borrowed baseball cap for this occasion. On previous visits, she was willing to make a lot of compromises in order not to shame anybody at home. But those days are over. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement encourages her to force a change. In Hossein’s garden the director has intimate and moving conversations with sisters and cousins. They have all had similar experiences with hijab and chador but found different ways of dealing with it. Elahe boldly confronts her family’s fears and wishes and films the honest discussions.

Nuno has turned twelve and started to become interested in tales of terror. When his father Sergio, the director, suggests they leave Madrid for the summer to stay in a recently shuttered hotel in Lisbon, he jumps at the chance. Devoid of any guests and gradually falling into disrepair, it feels like the perfectly spooky setting for his budding imagination, a new iteration of The Overlook Hotel from “The Shining”.
As Nuno roams the dark corridors, hides behind the fluttering curtains and watches creepy clips on his mobile phone, Sergio reflects in voice-over on what fear means and his own experiences with it: the documentary about a Portuguese serial killer he started making but never finished, the ghosts of cinema past that haunt film archives, the scary historical attempts to categorise criminals according to the shape of their skulls, that one startling encounter on the streets of São Paulo with his estranged dad back when he was a child. Wandering in winningly droll fashion between a meta-horror film, a deliberately meandering essay and a poignant drama of fathers and sons, “A Scary Movie” is a deliciously uncategorisable blend of fiction and documentary which asserts that dread is always part of the everyday. Is there anything scarier than family?

What happens after abuse? Six years after the crime, the director reconnects with her grandmother – not to talk about the act itself, which everyone is aware of. She finally wants to talk about how she felt afterwards: to break the silence, to name her shame and the grief at losing her whole Colombian family – and above all, to demand recognition of her suffering.
In her first film, Matilde-Luna Perotti deals with a personal trauma shared by many women in Latin America. The memory lurks everywhere: in old home videos, in text messages, in fabrics and clothes, in the scars on her own skin. These fragments come together to form a personal and at the same time collective portrait that makes a deeply buried trauma visible – and ultimately becomes an act of self-empowerment.

The powerful interventions of the Indonesian artist, cultural studies scholar and filmmaker Timoteus Anggawan Kusno are internationally renowned. What distinguishes them are the empowering attitude and the breathtaking aesthetics he employs to re-interpret in different media the cultural traditions passed on in his homeland. With “Afterlives”, he delivers another unequivocal reckoning with the representations of history shaped by colonial annexation.
The opening sequence is already a declaration: On the soundtrack we hear screaming, in which both pain and its liberating relief are manifest and united. On screen we see an explosion of colours: Jathilan, a ritual Javanese war game, is being performed. Men are dancing on horses made of plaited bamboo until they fall into a trance or the evil spirits are driven away. The impressive precision of the editing to tribal trance music by Setabuhan makes the colonialist archive images expose themselves – and fade. Those of (dance) performances in which the Javan tiger, killed multiple times in historic rituals, is symbolically reanimated come to the fore. In the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, it now guards – in the shape of a re-interpreted colonial sculpture – the empty frames that once gave (representative) power to the governors-general of the Dutch East Indies.

Narrated by the incarnate ghost of a deceased real hair donor. In the post-war era, the export of real hair wigs contributed to Asia’s economic development, with Hong Kong as a major hub. In its heyday in the 1960s, “Asian real hair” was popular with wealthy U.S. women, but then the USA imposed an embargo on the product, now classified as “communist hair”. This is where the intricate and innovatively realised story begins: Starting with complex economical and sociopolitical contexts, it weaves a thread that runs through various historical and dreamlike staged levels.

Hong Kong was and is a space of in-between-ness – between East and West, between communism and capitalism. Perhaps that is why there are so many spooks in the city, one protagonist speculates. Just like the well-travelled ghost, an eternally wandering entity and contemporary witness of an imperial and colonialist past.

“Words are the only instruments I have”, says Aslı Erdoğan in this powerful audiovisual collage. The writer, physicist and human rights activist who lives in exile in Berlin writes against the disappearance and loss of her own language. As a former political prisoner in Turkey, she knows only too well what autocratic violence and oppression intend: to silence people.

In this sense, this filmic portrait sets itself vociferously against the silence. Words flicker between fragments of the history of protest in Turkey. Working with text, photography and archive material, the film embarks on a vibrant visual and acoustic journey through places and times that shaped Aslı Erdoğan’s homeless life. Taking inspiration from her autobiographical collection of prose, “Requiem for a Lost City”, individual history becomes collective. A many-voiced choir reminds us that language is the thing that nonetheless holds everything together.

At first glance, Brett Allen Smith’s memory worlds seem slightly otherworldly but peaceful. There is a little pug – curious, bouncy and, most importantly, alive, a harmless explorer of lawns and living rooms. At the same time, the director is driven by an inner fracture, an irritation to be illuminated by means of phone conversations with family members: How real are the memories that had such a tremendous impact on him? Like the hill towering in front of Smith’s inner eye under which two dogs lie buried. And there are sunflowers, imposing plants that are impossible to pick for his five-year old’s hands because their roots have bored so deeply into the soil.

Today the director is a father and dog owner himself – there are shots of a baby and a pug – and his thought construct, maybe even something that shaped his identity, is blurring. The phone calls with his sisters lead nowhere. On the visual level, “Au Revoir, Pugs” plays with images, animation and nostalgic effects, while melodies can be heard from far away, sweet and melancholy but also a little uncanny. A compact work of less than ten minutes, a soft-toed sneaky jolt.

Winter on Canada’s Pacific coast – a difficult season for the animal keepers at the wildlife rescue centre in Comox, British Columbia: It is hunting season. Despite massive criticism by animal welfare organisations, hunters continue to use lead ammunition. This is particularly life-threatening for the BAEA – the official Alpha 4 code used in North and Central America for the bald eagle. Because these birds of prey feed on animal carcasses left behind. Their chances of surviving lead poisoning are slim. The treatment, too, is extremely stressful for the eagles. With great patience and loving care, the keepers try to save their charges from death.
In gentle images and with respect for the suffering birds, filmmaker Terra Long observes daily life at the station, contrasting it with shots of nature – only seemingly – untouched by humans. Ultimately, this refuge raises fundamental ethnic questions: How can precisely those humans care for wild animals while preserving their dignity and wildness? And: Is the elaborate treatment any use in view of the meagre chances of a change in hunting laws?

The film opens with the wedding of Garik and Hasmik and ends with a decorated tree for their son’s first Christmas in the new house that his father built himself. Between these fixed points of middle-class family life, nothing is as heteronormative as this bracket and above all the political and religious mainstream in Armenia would lead one to expect.

Hasmik is a lawyer who fights for LGBTQIA+ rights, her husband appears in the media as drag performer Carabina, does sex work and makes his life in a queer-phobic environment the subject of an autobiographical theatre performance. The film, which evolved out of close friendship and is always one step behind the wild energy of Garik/Carabina, takes a precarious, raw, but also utopian-tinted look at current social struggles. The longing for normality, emancipation and responsibility find themselves exposed – sometimes powerless and unprotected – to violent defamation. TV images show the zeal behind the attempted construction of homosexual and trans persons as “Un-Armenian.” Meanwhile Carabina, in a moment of rest from plastering the house, trowel in hand, plays a song by Charles Aznavour, whose family came from Armenia – “What Makes a Man?”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The Bard’s canonical quote looms large over British experimental filmmaker John Smith’s latest short; one of the film’s opening gags even has Smith assert that one of his schoolmates, a certain William Shakespeare Smith, was allegedly bullied as much as he was. Saddled with one of the most generic monikers in the English language, the director talks about how this has affected his life and career over the last seven decades, pairing his deadpan voiceover with photographs, documents, snippets from his films and other pertinent images to often hilarious effect. His wry cataloguing of name-related humiliations also takes great pleasure in the tangential, as class, the state of the world today and mortality come to the fore again and again, with the intertitles providing an extra layer of self-deprecation that pushes the whole endeavour towards autofiction. Political, bracingly witty and quietly moving, “Being John Smith” ultimately suggests that humour combined with rigour and intelligence can transcend even the most fixed of categories; what could be sweeter than that?

Starting from the children’s party where Zhang Shengjia celebrated his ninth birthday at a KFC fast food restaurant in 2006, the Chinese artist and filmmaker’s essayistic archive film unfolds a cheerful cultural history of the birthday cake from a Chinese perspective. The convention reached China from Western Europe and North America in the early 20th century and merged with local birthday traditions. The constantly growing influence of Western consumer culture since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the 1980s was exemplified in 1990 when almost 13,000 customers were registered on the opening day of the country’s very first McDonald’s restaurant in Shenzhen.
The laconically commented foray through a colourful selection of archival film, advertising and photo footage from several decades takes us from the first Chinese emperor eating birthday cake and early pioneers of cake design to the commercialisation and politicisation of cuisine and food culture.

A mobile coffee truck becomes a cinema apparatus that seems to enable the recording of what is often overlooked and even more often overheard. David Shongo’s nocturnal portrait of Kinshasa in the aftermath of the M23 violent excesses of February 2025 in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo is an idiosyncratic and undercover exploration of a fragile city that has been exposed to a lot of historic and present traumatisation and continues to be marked by instability.
To raise the question of Kinshasa’s future, the Congolese artist and composer re-interprets film-historical concepts and adds new facets: With his practice of radical listening and questioning the limits of seeing, based on strong images, complex sound and inventive performative staging, he creates his own form of “fugitive cinema”.

The painted lady butterfly travels 9,000 miles over several generations. Each generation flies to the next place without knowing the starting or end point of their route. The Hakka people, whose name translates as “guest family”, share this fate of constant movement – their identity is not tied to a specific territory but to their ancestors. The director, Hakka herself, follows her family’s migration history from their roots in northern China to Canada and India. As she traces their footsteps, she encounters Hakka from all over the world who tell their own stories of departure, adaptation, and the preservation of a unique culture.
Archive material, personal reflections, and interviews with members of the global diaspora combine to create the polyphonic portrait of a community whose language, customs, and collective memory are threatened by extinction. The film asks how identity is formed when one’s home keeps shifting – and how roots can be put down at ever new places without losing sight of one’s origin.

A fairly shabby, dark, three-part wardrobe in a hallway: About ten years have passed since Joana Claude suffered sexual violence when it was assembled. Now the time has come to not only disassemble it. Instead, Joana sets out to destroy the artefact of pain completely. The gesture is made with fervour, tearing out the shelves and doors looks like retroactive resistance, what was pent up finds an outlet. At the same time, the ritual is characterised by gradual escalation: At first the director speaks of her relationship with her parents – a big sweat stain on her back already beginning to show –, in the end everything is in flames. The act is short, it lasts only a few minutes. And yet it allows an intimate insight that acquires a universal, strength-giving character as it unfolds.

El Shatt in Egypt, in the middle of the desert, was both a haven and a projection. This is where in 1944, based on a deal between the Yugoslavian partisans led by Tito and the British allies, not only a refugee camp for the families of anti-fascist fighters from Dalmatia was built. This is where a model was created for the future Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – a state that was to build its founding narrative on the people’s liberation fight against fascism and declare collectively organised self-administration its social ideal.

Director Ivan Ramljak offers us multifaceted insights into this long-forgotten piece of primordial communist history spelled out in reality. After painstaking research, he combines hundreds of historical photographs and some (few) film recordings of interviews with contemporary witnesses. The lively voices of those who were children back then and are over 80 today tell their stories offscreen: of the struggle for survival, solidarity and lived ideology, in short, of a daily life that included self-organised schools, workshops, canteen kitchens, even a newspaper. Ramljak, tongue firmly in cheek, takes up the thread of history and juxtaposes his skilfully arranged archive material with staged scenes played by the ensemble of a theatre that was founded in El Shatt at the time.