Dwindling membership, a crumbling club house, penniless coffers: The “Bradford Movie Makers” have seen better days. The active club members, most of them fairly advanced in years, sit there, basking in blissful memories and not mincing their words when they pick at the others’ film ideas over multiple cups of tea. Cineastes have met here every Monday since 1932 and can be proud of a ninety-year history including countless amateur films of all genres.

The “club”, as insiders call it, is a typical British working class film club: watching films together on a regular basis and spending every free minute on elaborate shoots including stunt riders and green screens. But the old veterans are beginning to get frail, the occasional death must be mourned. And then the pandemic comes on top of all this, darkening the only bright spot of the week. But it also brings unexpected surprises … Kim Hopkins manages the feat, despite a number of tragic-sad occasions, of avoiding the tear-jerker trap and gives us equally astonishing and funny insights into this pastime that’s far more than just a hobby. This quiet, funny and touching portrait of a band of film buffs – male and female – pays tribute to the need we all have to spend time together.

Five young people from Ukraine talk about their lives after the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all of them fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the war, however, shattered their life plans. Representing “Generation Maidan”, they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. Theatre director Roza Sarkisian produces a Hamlet adaptation with them in which they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas on stage again.

For them Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is not just a historical text, but a current and existential dilemma that has no clear answer. The film follows the rehearsals where different biographies, self-images and political positions clash: A soldier meets his first LGBT person, the feminist quarrels with the fact that the war has undone hard-won emancipatory achievements. Frictions and differences are exposed, compromises are strenuously negotiated. Eventually the film’s focus widens and leaves the stage to introduce the five as individuals with their own inner struggles. The result is a many-layered, dense portrait of a torn and yet powerful Ukrainian generation who, due to the Russian invasion, find themselves at war again, only a few months after their production premiered.

You feel welcome on Güler Yücel’s terrace. The temperamental artist presents colourful paintings of the life she knows intimately. Yücel lives and paints on the Turkish Datça peninsula. Her paintings are a chronicler’s narrative. They capture the exuberance of a wedding, follow labourers during the olive harvest, show a flock of goats. They also tell of her marriage to Can, a politically persecuted poet now dead.

When Güler Yücel feels too hot, she laughingly hoses herself down. Even her latest works must withstand the water test. We meet an unconventional woman who, though old, explores her surroundings with a beautiful joy of life. Inspired by the conversations and by Yücel’s works, the camera goes on a journey of discovery, resting on other women who confidently look and talk into its lens, like the goat herd about her time in the city, where she felt other-directed. Now she has found herself. Later, at a wedding party, the young bride proudly strides towards her future. Güler Yücel, too, has lived her life and known love. One of her paintings shows Can and her sitting naked in the sun. She remembers her husband, the political battles they fought together.

In a remote village, whose name roughly means “a cold place”, this film looks for warmth in encounters. The Ukrainian village of Stuzhytsya is situated in the Carpathian Mountains in the border triangle between Poland and Slovakia. The three elderly female protagonists – a farmer, a post office clerk and a biologist – are firmly rooted in a place where hardly any young people are left in 2019, the year of Zelensky’s election victory. Over time, the film crew also becomes, at least temporarily, a valued part of the village community.

Between horoscope readings at the post office, farm work with pitchforks and church blessings of cars in need of repair, Maksym Melnyk, also a native of Zakarpatska Oblast, establishes a growing intimacy with the three women. His documentary style arises from the interaction: In the beginning, he asks off camera questions like a reporter, but as he gets closer to the people, he enters the frame himself. Very few documentary filmmakers today see themselves as a “fly on the wall”. But gifting a pig to a protagonist in front of the camera or letting her cut the camerman’s hair? That’s rather unusual. Taking the single farmer Hanna, who treats Melnyk and his cinematographer Florian Baumgarten – whom she calls “the German” – like sons, as an example, the film portrays a rural lifestyle full of privation that seems to be in decline in the mountain region near the EU border.

In the midst of the Moroccan desert, characterised by rocks, scrubs and immeasurable expanse, two men are looking for celestial bodies. Pacing out this weathered ground is a downright gargantuan task. Both have great hopes tied to the meteorite fragments: While one of them is looking for knowledge, the other longs for a better life. Adnane Baraka’s impressive directing debut traces existential questions in powerful images.

The barren landscapes of south-eastern Morocco are known for frequent meteorite impacts. Mohamed, a nomad who lives with his family in a tent in the desert, decides to start searching. Like the other men who scour the terrain with him he hopes to find a valuable rock from space that would mean his escape from poverty. On the other side of the country, scientist Abderrahmane analyses meteorites for enclaves of long-dead celestial bodies. To reach the origin of our life, we have to look at the stars.

Quartzsite, Arizona. A town in the middle of the desert which regularly turns into a huge camping ground where up to a million people from the northern US states escape winter. It’s less chilly here, and people of every kind are welcome to rent a plot of dry land for 180 dollars. Ryan Maxey joins them for three seasons in a row, approaching the motley community with an intimate and at the same time soberly observant eye.

Meth junkies, gun lovers, constitution keepers, a trans woman dressed in pink and breeding cuddly pets and white men wearing “Black Guns Matter” t-shirts. People trade everything and help each other. Sometimes it can get rough. But the US-American flag, the ever-present guns and collective prayer are part of life, just like the democratic choice between pancakes and hamburgers. Maxey’s documentary foray takes him through all these lives and lifestyles which he seems to register sometimes with affectionate tenderness, sometimes shaking his head. Despite his critical semi-distance, he is clearly a part of the community he portrays. His film, a collaborative work in some ways, combines shots of this place from different perspectives and different times. Ambivalences persist, which is why all judgement must be preliminary.

The rough, unkempt facades in Prenzlauer Berg – as if the skin had been peeled off the houses, says photographer Tina Bara. Having grown up in a prefabricated building, the young woman was drawn to East Berlin. She quickly got in conflict with the state, just like the artists Cornelia Schleime and Gabriele Stötzer, whom director Pamela Meyer-Arndt questions in her film about memories, traumas and creative genesis.

Stötzer, Schleime, Bara – none of them had it easy in the GDR. One of them ended up in prison for a petition, the other was harried by refused exit permits, all of them suffered psychologically to the point of pain. Spying, abuse and oppression are reflected in the women’s works. Tina Bara’s dark self-portraits, taken in a sparse Berlin apartment, Cornelia Schleime’s paintings denounced as “garbage art”, Gabriele Stötzer’s photo series of women in cut-up dresses and runny make up – testimonies of desperation, but also evidence of the urge for unconditional self-expression. Meyer-Arndt visits the artists, rediscovers places from the past with them and observes the creation of new works. The narratives shock and touch, and at the same time inspire awe for the vehemently chosen paths in life which more than once skirted very close to the abyss.

Inspired by a political protest movement, the Teatr 21 – a theatre company of acting enthusiasts with Down’s syndrome – develops a play in which the participants articulate their wishes and demands and at the same time get to abandon themselves with great joy to creative development. Martyna Peszko attentively follows the creation process as it unfolds in a productively bustling rehearsal atmosphere, with musical accents provided by the improvisations of a free jazz trio.

In 2018, people with handicaps occupied the government building in Warsaw for forty days to demonstrate for more support and recognition. The protest had almost no political consequences, and yet: The revolutionary spark ignited the public. The Teatr 21 project takes up the events, draws strength from the disappointment about the failed insurgence. That leads to discussions about their artistic craft: What does professional acting mean? What has nudity to do with revolution? And why do you always have to understand the lyrics to songs? In exploring the relationship between performance and politics, they reclaim an autonomy they are often denied in life: over their own body, their own stories. The stage direction and dramaturgy provide an unobtrusive and intelligent framework, which is extended by Peszko’s judiciously observant workshop report.

The tumultuous 1960s in China as a collage of archival images, clay figures and interviews. Lei Lei lets his father and his grandfather talk, about bicycles and bank clerks, about life in the countryside, re-education and class enemies. Their memories generate a multicoloured surreal world that is an enchanting fantasy of the time before and during the Cultural Revolution.

In his second feature-length film, artist and animation filmmaker Lei Lei once more takes up experiences of family members and uncovers a piece of national history via private stories. For more than six years, he collected family photos, postcards, propaganda images and old films. On this backdrop he forms and moves his characters made of gum-like pastel modelling clay, whose colourful, almost childlike appearance supports the impression that this is where a grandson imagines the anecdotal memoirs of his ancestors. But this imaginative animation is anything but naïve: It takes the time to accommodate the detours and pauses in the narrative and takes us – by means of a restrained soundscape, too – deep into a universe where one can lose oneself.