16-year-old Krzysztof was last seen on a bridge over Poland’s Vistula River in 2023. The CCTV camera briefly turned away, and by the time it returned, he had vanished. Following his disappearance, his father Daniel launches a relentless search in Poland’s largest river. As time piles up, the searches persist. Any tech that proves useful gets pulled into it, from drones to metal detectors, trackers, and even loaves of bread, sent floating down the current in the hope of locating the body. The camera matches these rhythms, dredging the river’s depths and combing its banks. The searches, showing the father’s restless energy and the sheer labour of this endeavour, mix with vérité scenes with his family, as well as news snippets about Krzysztof’s alleged sightings. Social media streams are scoured too, providing unsettling insights into the boy’s inner states. Director Michał Marczak – and by extension his camera – accompany Daniel, taking the audience along in a boat and into the heart of a family’s unresolved grief. As closure remains out of reach, Daniel starts assisting other searches, and sombre discoveries are made of other lives lost in the waters.

Sevara Pan

Haiguang dreams. Of his dead grandmother, his birthplace Lěng Shuǐ Jiāng in China, his performances and art projects and his job at a wholesale warehouse in Leipzig. But Haiguang not only dreams, he also films. Himself and his surroundings. Persistent, stoical, sometimes with a handheld camera, sometimes using a tripod – knowing that there is another layer under one’s everyday life that can only be perceived if one dares to search for meaning beyond the visible. If you dare to lie down on a crossing in the park and wait for what happens. If you dare to address the pressure to perform in Chinese society through a performance dragging a car tyre through Beijing. If you dare acknowledge your own fears and doubts and reveal them. Stylistically confident and constantly shifting between places and levels of meaning, Haiguang interlaces his life and dream in eight vignettes in which emotions condense and take on a form that goes beyond the personal. He interweaves the elements of his everyday life between the art academy and his parents’ coal shop in Changsha with equally precise and poetic descriptions. Thus, a puddle by the roadside can become the very place that connects him with his granny across space and time.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

„A little flame that lit up and inspired people to tell different stories about the GDR.” This is how a protagonist describes the 1977 book “Guten Morgen, du Schöne” (Good morning, beautiful) by the writer Maxie Wander, a collection of records in which a wide variety of women talk about themselves. One of the most successful books in the GDR and one of the most influential in German literary history: It affected generations of women (and men!) and encouraged them to question their own lives – ample reason for the director to let a few of the women look back on the book and their lives today. It is about equal rights and emancipation, life plans and rebellion, dreams and failure, love and sexuality, mothers and fathers, men and women, happiness and loneliness, death and, above all, the hunger for life. With respect and great tenderness, Susanne Schüle films faces and bodies on which time has left its mark. Age and beauty, fragility and strength. On the visual level, the stories are subtly commented on by amateur footage: bodies marching in step to the ideologies, Hitler salutes and mass rallies. Again and again contrasted with naked bodies, the wild and non-conformist life beyond the dictatorships. War, peeling potatoes, kisses, children. This is how it was. This is how it is. In the end, the monologues of the past lead up to a contemporary dialogue between the sexes and generations. A flame.

Grit Lemke

György Kurtág is a renowned Hungarian composer and a major figure of the post-war avant-garde. Born in 1926, he has now reached the age of 100, yet his mind remains wonderfully active. Living in an attic flat of the Budapest Music Center, he continues to work tirelessly with some of the world’s finest musicians who open their creations up to the humbling process of collaboration. Traversing geographies, the film takes us from his birth town of Lugoj to the different places that shaped him, from Transylvania to Budapest to Paris. It traces his early steps into the world of music, which began with dance and four‑hand piano sessions with his mother — something he later continued with his wife and pianist Márta. It then follows his life and many artistic collaborations, including with Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson and British cellist Steven Isserlis. The film also weaves in the work on his magnum opus “Fin de Partie”. “The map is not the territory; the notes are not music…” To pianists Halla Oddný Magnúsdottir and Ólafsson, Kurtág has “found a way of writing music that is impossible to play without going beyond the notes”. It’s a sentiment shared by Kurtág, who remarks that it’s not about his ideas but about whether the piece, played by a musician, truly “happens” to them. A portrait of a man who lives and breathes music, composing entire worlds brimming with emotion.

Sevara Pan

Alberte and Nicole are mother and daughter, three decades apart. At 55 and 87, they still live together in a villa by Lake Geneva, having settled into a codependent dynamic: Nicole is reluctant to leave her mother, while Alberte struggles to let her go, fearing living alone. In a house filled with memorabilia, cats, and too many clocks, the familiar feels safe for the mother‑daughter duo who often doze off like synchronised swimmers. However, as time passes, the family grows concerned about Nicole’s autonomy. Nicole is considered neuroatypical, “ambivalent” regarding the perceived condition, and few facilities are equipped to provide adequate support. Nicole’s sister, Danielle, then decides to assist her in a search for a flat and a job. These scenes unfold alongside the family’s daily life and the intimate conversations in front of the camera. Nicole also embarks on a playful creative exercise with her filmmaker niece Lauren, imagining life’s many scenarios.

Sevara Pan

On New Year's Eve 2023, Thomas Heise begins to shoot his new film. It is to be called “Übergang”. His idea: A film in the “Heimatfilm” tradition revolving around Berlin’s Schönhauser Allee, where he has lived for decades. The author is to be a character in the film. A few months later, Heise falls seriously ill and dies. The small team continues to work on the film, unearthing unpublished texts and images from Heise’s estate and archives. “Images are […] encompassing”, Heiner Müller is quoted, but dreams curdle quickly. As soon as the personal story becomes a false image, it is gently but persistently put into perspective. A touching email exchange Heise had with a female high-school graduate in Karlsruhe who is searching for truth contains a whole primer for documentary filmmaking: “See what you would not otherwise see. Stay patient. […] Never expect financial security. Be happy about that. Because it won’t change.” Peter Badel and Chris Wright have not produced a hermetic artist tribute, but have, utterly in the spirit of Heise, pieced together fragments of lived history.

Jan Künemund

Alba Zari was born in Bangkok inside what was said to be “a hippie community” that her grandmother, Rosa, and her mother, Ivana, had joined. But she doesn’t recall much of her childhood. Longing for answers, Alba delves into the painful work of remembering: trying to understand her grandmother’s decision to join the Children of God sect, the far‑reaching consequences of her mother’s indoctrination, and her father’s identity. In conversations and everyday moments with her grandmother and mother, Alba learns more about the cult, the ‘Flirty Fishing’ practice, and widespread sexual and psychological abuse of its members, including children. The traces of pain are still tangible years later, showing in Alba’s tears rushing out before words, in the trembling of hands, and in her mother’s constant over-apologising. Alba “lives the questions”, hoping to find answers; however, as the journey unfurls, she realises it may not be about answers but about accepting absence as a constant presence, and not being defined by it. A film about family wounds, memory, and the resilience of ties that bind us.

Sevara Pan