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

Schnapps is carefully poured into hip flasks and handed to the men. Their faces are marked by the traces of homeless life. A housing project in Berlin Kreuzberg gives them more than a roof over their head. The people who work here listen to them, accompany them to the doctor and hand out controlled amounts of alcohol. The project’s approach is consistently addiction-accepting – without the enforcement of abstinence and with the goal of relieving the affected persons from existential pressure. In this protected space, the men can breathe freely again after many years of living in the streets, rediscover their own personality and dignity. The camera follows some of the residents and social workers over several years, always at eye-level, showing the work of this institution and leaving space for the men’s personal stories. A fragile community emerges in front of the lens.

Anke Leweke

Sisters Nazieh, Shazieh and Hanieh are from Afghanistan and live with their father at a refugee camp in Athens without any idea of how long they will stay there. Their mother has already arrived in Germany, where a new law now prevents the family from reuniting there as planned. They start growing up in a situation where waiting is the norm. The film accompanies the trio over seven years and shows the fragile normality they establish separately and together in the face of adversity: sport training sessions, language classes and shooting their own film scenes, which are marked by their experiences as refugees. Educator and filmmaker Christos Stefanou got to know the three sisters at the refugee camp, where he worked for five years as a teacher. Aware of the vulnerability of their situation and this phase in life, he follows a collaborative approach in his first feature-length documentary. Drawing on close-up observation, he captures the three sisters’ gestures, thoughts and everyday routines, which reveals their developmental steps and the passing of time not just in physical terms. And while their learning successes sometimes lose any meaning in the face of their constantly changing life situation, one essential question remains: will the family manage to get back together despite all the imponderabilities?

Tina Jany

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

Martin doesn’t dream of a life full of riches. His greatest wish is a 1994 Honda Civic and a driver’s license. He joined his foster family at five months old. At nine, he received a diagnosis of autism, ADHD, and so-called attachment disorder. Then he met Casper, and the two formed a bond born out of their shared love for cars, Trabant jokes, and an understanding of each other’s struggles, shaped by their disabilities and early days spent in an orphanage that affected their self-esteem. Lensed by his brother, director Emil Langballe, with honesty and care, the film follows Martin as he is caught in a spiral of drug addiction and troubles. All the while, he and Casper continue patching up their Honda Civic. A film about ruptures and repairs, of cars and relationships, support systems, and the tenderness of friendship.

Sevara Pan

He is „always sad“, says Uncle Thuận. Connected via mobile phone with his family who are scattered across the world he sings sentimental songs about spring in Hanoi. Meanwhile, his wife Thúy tirelessly looks after the restaurant that the two have been managing in North Rhine-Westphalia for twenty years. They came to the GDR as contract workers at the age of 19. In conversations with their daughters, life stories unfold in which they were rarely expected to decide anything but always to work hard and to function. A role they accept without complaint and justify even today. But the protective shell accumulated over decades increasingly begins to show cracks. And somewhere in the endless routines and tasks of a restaurant kitchen which also structure the film, a question quietly emerges: the question of happiness. In Minh Anh Nguyễn, a post-migrant generation speaks up who regard contract work and racism in the GDR not as a closed chapter but as part of their history. Casual and very close to her protagonists, she tells of colonial legacies that have inscribed themselves into biographies and across generations. At the same time, she shows how this cycle can be broken: By the daughters asking questions which – even outside the Vietnamese community and above all in the East – are long overdue.

Grit Lemke

Jorge Sanjinés’ short film “Revolución” (1963) was one of the first Latin American films, beside the Cuban films, to be screened in Leipzig in 1964. With his documentary feature “Yawar Mallku” (Sangre de Condor), Sanjinés took a step towards a cinema that makes history. Told in flashbacks, the film is based on real events: US American development aid workers secretly sterilise indigenous women. The chief of a Quechua community discovers the crime; the village community takes revenge. He is finally shot down by the police and survives, badly injured. He is taken to town, but the rescue attempt fails: There is no money for a blood transfusion. The film challenges both “Yankee Imperialism” and the Bolivian class society. As a consequence of the initially banned public screening, the so-called Peace Corps had to leave the country. “Yawar Mallku” had its premiere in West Berlin as part of the 1970 Berlinale’s “Week of New Cinema: Latin America”. Thereafter the Friends of the German Cinematheque (today: Arsenal Filminstitut) showned Sanjinés’ film multiple times at the Arsenal Cinema over the years, including under the heading “Birth Control as Genocide” in the context of the First International Women’s Film Seminar in November 1973. It enjoyed the same esteem in the East: One of only three Latin American films found in the “Film-Blätter: Kurzmonographien zu klassischen Filmen" (Film Sheets: Brief Monographs on Classical films) of the GDR’s State Film Archive, “Das Blut des Condors” (The Blood of the Condor) is listed under No. 183.

Florian Wüst