Since the Kosovo War over 25 years ago, Mitrovica has been a city divided along ethnic lines. The north is primarily inhabited by Serbs, the south is Albanian. Everywhere in the city, there are impressive, yet dreary ruins with blossoming cherry trees before them: the war and the division it caused are at once omnipresent and invisible. In his poetic experimental film, Marko Grba Singh captures this paradox in static shots. With no dialogue, but featuring two wonderful poems by Latif Berisha and Aida Šečić Nezirević, the film conveys the experience of saying goodbye to one’s own mother and painful, enduring loss in general – with trilingual subtitles reflecting the geographical divide: Serbian at the top, Albanian at the bottom, and English in between. Right in the middle of it all, left alone with the historical and urban heritage of their mothers and fathers, are two young people who seem lost, standing alone in the landscape. It makes no difference in which part of the city one might now place them.

Marie Ketzscher

Chinese expat artist Viv Li ends up in Berlin during the pandemic. Her inquisitive attempts to enter the city’s queer subculture sound different when she tries to tell her Maoist-influenced relatives in Beijing about her experiences – the film smoothly navigates between cultures, in search of where the boundaries of adaptability lie and where individual identity starts. Yet Li is never interested in playing one world off against the other, choosing instead to approach both of them with frankness and a healthy dose of humour and playfulness. She places songs by Trio and Juliane Werding over impressions of Chinese sights, stages the escape from Beijing’s tightly-knit surveillance network as a virtuoso gangster ballet and has Mao rise up from behind a mountain range to ask with fatherly concern: “Are you okay?”

Felix Mende