Between 1959 and 1981, the Franco regime had over 33,000 bodies transferred from more than 500 mass graves across Spain to the Valle de los Caídos – a monumental mausoleum erected to glorify the fascist victory. Decades later, relatives are still searching for the remains of their loved ones. Three families follow in the footsteps of the disappeared and encounter bureaucratic, legal and social obstacles that persist to this day. Drawing on director Manuel Correa’s own research as part of Forensic Architecture, a research agency that investigates state and corporate violence, the film reconstructs in meticulous detail what the regime sought to conceal. Digital maps, citizens’ archives, official documents and new forensic technologies reveal what remained hidden for decades. The result is a topography of terror that visualises the extent of systematic violence and brings to light the history buried beneath fascist monumentalism.

Seggen Mikael

It speaks from the thick smoke, first with one voice, then with two. I already knew you, it says, when you still had no form, I see you. The voice is deep, it regrets its biggest mistake: creating civilisation, which has multiplied, spiralled out of control, become all-encompassing. Christopher Galinos’s atmospherically charged experimental film moves back and forth between a lament and a (bad) dream. We don’t know who we’re supposed to sympathise with here: is it the 3D creature akin to a wooden sculpture whose long hands hold a small ball? Or is it the male figures that come forth upon the shimmering fabric, eventually covering its entire surface? Are we these figures? Galinos confronts us with these questions and ideas about creation myths and releases us again, lost in thought.

Marie Ketzscher

While taking care of her young daughter, the director makes jelly. She reflects on the birth of her child and her own excessive perfectionism, which also extends to her artistic practice. The simple dessert develops into a “zoetrope pudding”. Once she lets go of her need for precision and allows relaxed playfulness into the working process, she succeeds in making a multi-layered cinematic dish. Its ingredients: sugar, silicon, plastic filaments. Kateryna Voznytsia manages many things at once here: to intelligently bridge the gap between contemporary working methods and historical techniques from the early cinema era and sensitively question her role as a mother, woman and filmmaker, all while also maintaining a loving bond with her daughter.

Franka Sachse

In an attempt to come to terms with the greatest act of violence that can happen in a father-son relationship, the cinematic first-person narrator initially comes to some logical conclusions: The Chinese once invented gunpowder, which can be used in the form of fireworks to drive out an evil spirit. Fireworks are a precursor of film animation; therefore, animation serves the same purpose. Intense brushstrokes and the material structure of the animated drawings, repeated runs through the sequences and the impressive interplay between visual and acoustic abstraction and figuration, in order to find an expression for the unspeakable, powerfully convey the emotional turmoil. However, the laborious process of drawing the single frames for this animation also creates an unwanted intimacy between the narrator and his evil spirit. Drawing from a personal story of trauma, Juan Camilo González develops an incredibly well-designed experimental setup, which, in its failure, brings back the horror all the more violently.

André Eckardt

The roles at the École nationale d’administration pénitentiaire, ÉNAP for short, are clearly allocated: the trainee prison officers on the one side, the teaching staff on the other. Guillaume Massart’s film maintains this separation in aesthetic terms too. Usually captured from the perspective of the pupils, “Detention” provides a look at a curriculum that is not for the fainthearted: how does one command the prisoners’ respect and obedience? What mental strains go hand in hand with the job? Can these trainee prison officers actually gain legal advantages in potential conflict situations? Over the film’s two-hour running time, a remarkable effect takes hold: as the pupils’ critical voices gradually fall silent, the prison system appears ever more questionable from the audience’s perspective. Can even a “proper” training lead to the abuse of power if this is not explicitly addressed and problematised? How does a uniform shape a person? Having spent a total of one year at the school for “Detention” and undergoing the training himself, Massart finds a unique tonality to convey an ambivalence that is both unsettling and claustrophobic.

Carolin Weidner

The legacy: grandfather’s collection of bird’s eggs. 4,500 graceful, fragile works of art created by nature; speckled, elongated, pastel-coloured … An orderly confined enclosure of uniform boxes houses the preserved cocoons of the stolen, thwarted offspring of birds of prey and non-predatory birds, from Norway to South Africa. With the legacy comes the story of the collector: Josef Schreiber from Vorarlberg, Central Europe – a middle-class, white, male biography of the 20th century in which order was lost, slipped, had to be reimagined, both on the grand scale and on the smallest private level. Claudia Larcher’s extraordinary essay film is an unflustered tale of restlessness. Personal photos, views of collection pieces and small AI-generated miniatures are overlaid by electronic sounds that seem to communicate with the algorithms of the shell patterns, and a spoken line of thought that traces, sorts and keeps together almost 100 years of change with breathtaking clarity.

André Eckardt

Keren Kraizer left Israel at 20 to study dance in Belgium, but also to escape her home country and its divisions. A visit to her family at the start of 2023 prompts an unexpected desire to reconnect with where she comes from, a process of considerable ambivalence which she decides to document in a video diary. Plucked from everyday life with a beautifully intuitive grasp for structure and montage, the resulting words and images move back and forth between the personal and the political with an inevitability born of the current state of the nation: a conversation with her mother about the lack of vision for lasting peace; footage of a man being shouted at for waving a Palestinian flag during the protests against Netanyahu’s assaults on the rule of law; the heartbreaking poem in English texted to her by a friend she made on an activist trip to the West Bank who didn’t want to be filmed; the nocturnal chat with her new boyfriend while wandering the streets of Jerusalem about all the tensions boiling under the ground, a chat that turns out to be grimly prophetic. For Kraizer’s diary will soon be overtaken by events beyond her control, and ambivalence will give way to anguish and disbelief. What now? How to contain people’s pain? “We are the ones who walk barefoot on the shreds of hope. We didn’t create war, but we created poems from its ruins.”

James Lattimer

A visit to the place of one’s childhood, where love and hope seem to have made off long ago and mining parades, booze-ups and helpless adolescent rebellion with techno music around the campfire have become ritualized. With an unerring gift for observation and structure, Fidel Sievering and Bennet Staack convey the worn-out quality and smell of a Rhenish town that used to live on mining and where successful structural change refuses to move in. Here, time stood still a long time ago. The people move awkwardly through the narrow streets and corridors, like digital puppets with glitchy motor functions. The only ray of light is the old, discarded plans for the future of the place that are unearthed from a sealed mineshaft as a test of courage. Working with sometimes off-kilter scenes and sounds, found audio-testimonies and an uncompromising digital design, “Glaube, Sitte, Heimat” speaks honestly about decorative wall plates and suppressed pain, but also about an unshakeable belief in the “New Dream”.

André Eckardt

The elephant is dead! But who or what has it on their conscience? Staged as a blend of ecological whodunit and fleetfooted documentary, Krishnamurthy’s animated film brings two different perspectives together. There is the wise voice of the Matti tree, which, like the Indigenous Soliga community, has found its own traditions and rituals for dealing with nature. And then there is the academic, discursive voice which conveys insights in the form of a butterfly. They also each have their own approaches to presenting their ideas about what really happened to the elephant: the Matti tree sings its pearls of wisdom which are visualised by way of drawings and timelapse; the butterfly prefers to make the most recent scientific developments visible as a stop motion sequence in the laboratory. The two of them slowly get closer to each other – for only together will they catch the murderer.

Marie Ketzscher

What starts as affectionate cuddling, hugging and strokes soon morphs into uneasy closeness and ultimately panic. The shift takes place gradually. Some gentle tickling marks the point where a boundary is approached, which is soon crossed. The playful exchange between these two fluffy characters transforms inexorably into a free for all that’s no longer funny. The puppet design, the precise animation, the lighting and the camerawork make intimacy tangible in all its facets, from pleasant to repulsive. A film that gets under the skin.

Franka Sachse

At the Kikomera home for girls, the mood is relaxed. Everyone is looking forward to the holidays. Babura is feverishly awaiting her trip to the hairdresser, but her plans are scuppered by her friend Njuki, who attracts chaos like a magnet. Director Maria Byoma also took on the role of screenwriter, animator and producer for this film and has created a humorous, energetic study for a future series in which African stories of striking visual identities will be told with creative freedom and local voices.

Franka Sachse