“I remember everything”, says Mohammed Imrani, who is hardly seen in Florinda Ciucio’s short film. But we hear him. And we follow Imrani’s hand, which draws a version of a Gaza in full knowledge of the fact that it only still exists in his memory. Ciucio’s setting is pared down to the greatest possible degree: a light pad, a few sheets of white paper, a pencil. Streets and buildings start to appear already, the famous “Al-Baqa” bar, where Imrani kissed his girlfriend for the first time and where drinks made from mangos and strawberries are served alongside coffee. There is the sea and the statue of a phoenix, which means a lot to the people of Gaza because “it doesn’t die”. Imrani’s sketches are at once detailed and abstract. In quick, tender movements, his drawings open up a space that doesn’t just come across as a personal portal but also as an invitation to us: to not forget.

Carolin Weidner

What is the dominant feeling of our current era? Disquiet, fear of the future, boundlessly amorphous flows, a nostalgia for the simpler things of the past? Timely, perpetually shifting and oddly comforting, this first solo directorial work by editor and cinematographer Iva Kraljević seeks to tap into the mood of the zeitgeist and translates it into pure cinema, creating a free-flowing essay where form and content gently intertwine. Taking its bearings from W. G. Sebald, Naomi Klein and Robert McFarlane while possessing a wit and lyrical timbre all of its own, the onscreen text draws shimmering lines between dream, memory, historical event and present atrocity and the perpetual solace of nature, as archive footage and home movies bleed into new 16 mm images, superimpositions abound and photographs and animation infect the frame. Wood and water, rock and fire, mushroom clouds, again and again; if what we excrete comes back to consume us, at least here we’ve been fed a hearty meal.

James Lattimer

An institutional portrait in the form of an elegy: after more than sixty years, the fate of the Les Lilas maternity clinic already seems sealed. Having not worked in a profitable enough manner, this private institution is now to have the subsidies it relies on withdrawn. Alain Kassanda’s film accompanies the clinic’s last flicker of resistance, showing heated internal meetings and the public protests aimed at saving it. The interactions between the purple-uniformed staff and their patients come to the fore at the same time: offering caring guidance across the entire birth process, precisely explaining the specifics of an imminent abortion or advising a young couple confronted with an unplanned pregnancy. Everyday life in the Maternité des Lilas is both eventful and moving. And it can look back on a long tradition: deeply anchored in the second wave of the women’s movement, the clinic made history for its progressive approach. Everyone was supposed be able to give birth in the way they saw fit, the patriarchy was banished from the delivery room and operating theatre – “mon corps, mon choix”. This inconspicuous place retained this forward-looking approach to the last. Alain Kassanda’s lament is far from maudlin. It is the unsentimental depiction of a loss only justifiable on paper.

Carolin Weidner

Minneapolis has become a battlefield: clouds of poisonous green billow over the wintry streets, there are wounded people, screams, vehicles that resemble tanks. Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller capture the work of the immigration authority ICE and its paramilitary operations from different perspectives and combine them into a horror film. Parts of the population organise themselves in order to stand up against and protocol the illegal actions of the perpetrators, most of them in masks. Gradually, a network of gigantic dimension is revealed, which extends to the kidnapping of minors, secret scouting trips and a steady stream of deportation flights. “They’re Here” is a genre-fluid documentary dystopia, whose darkness is only heightened by the score by Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails).

Carolin Weidner

The planning phase began at the start of the pandemic, for a new highway intended to pass right through the centre of Xiangzidian, a village in Shaanxi province. Born and raised in the village and marooned there by Covid, director Hu Sanshou could thus document the process from the start, in lingering wide shots and gentle pans of an unostentatious beauty, their all-enveloping focus punctuated by comments from the villagers wandering through the frame and Hu’s own voiceover commentary. Compensation notices are posted and graves relocated before construction begins, which stretches over years and numerous changes of season. Once the surface of the road is laid out, it does indeed resemble a stage and the local inhabitants move around on it as if being directed from afar, which is not inaccurate. Yet the great expanse of white pebbles is also akin to the pages of a vast book, which Hu fills with novelistic detail, narrating countless anecdotes about friends, family members and acquaintances that begin in the present and stretch way back into the past, capturing the cadence of that amorphous in-between phase between tradition and modernity which the traffic will soon drown out. If the violence of village life leaves little room for nostalgia, it is a sad story nonetheless. Whether tales of joy, hardship or simple endurance, folk memory and its loss touch us all.

James Lattimer