One of many commemoration ceremonies, eleven years after the GDR uprising. The report combines a Saarland politician’s thoughtful speech with idyllic shots of a high-spirited population: at open air swimming pools, playing cards or on camping sites. “Do you know what we commemorate today?” the reporter asks. The answers are deeply irritating.

“Words are the only instruments I have”, says Aslı Erdoğan in this powerful audiovisual collage. The writer, physicist and human rights activist who lives in exile in Berlin writes against the disappearance and loss of her own language. As a former political prisoner in Turkey, she knows only too well what autocratic violence and oppression intend: to silence people.

In this sense, this filmic portrait sets itself vociferously against the silence. Words flicker between fragments of the history of protest in Turkey. Working with text, photography and archive material, the film embarks on a vibrant visual and acoustic journey through places and times that shaped Aslı Erdoğan’s homeless life. Taking inspiration from her autobiographical collection of prose, “Requiem for a Lost City”, individual history becomes collective. A many-voiced choir reminds us that language is the thing that nonetheless holds everything together.

The history of communism as the story of its crises: The two authors Ralph Giordano and Hans-Ulrich Barth take up various uprisings and protests to demonstrate the discrepancy between the claim to power and the reality in “socialist imperialism.” A more nuanced light is shed on individual uprisings, while at the same time feeding into stereotypical Cold War images of the enemy.

A tracking shot along the objects on the shelves of a film prop warehouse will trigger stories in our minds. The orange-coloured telephone takes us to the futuristic 1970s, plastic salmon canapés on artificial lemon slices invite us to a party, cut and thrust weapons herald mortal danger.

Experts from various prop companies explain their craft of storing and archiving. But under which keyword are folkloristic masks, African or pseudo-African objects to be catalogued? Enter Thelma Buabeng: The German actor and BIPoC activist slips into the documentary-like role of a doctoral student in Postcolonial Studies who does research for her thesis in the Prop Department Studio Babelsberg. From her perspective the objects take on a different context, enter into a dialogue and raise questions of their own. Meanwhile, a staff member is looking for a suitable frame for the Baroque painting “Portrait of an African Woman Holding a Clock” by Annibale Carracci. But can this frame even exist?

On 23 August 1989, the people in the Baltic states demonstrated their solidarity against the Soviet occupation and took to the streets for their sovereignty. They formed an over 600-kilometres-long human chain stretching through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Touching images of a one-of-a-kind event, captured in a lyrical composition.

A quote by the Soviet futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky about Lenin frames the plot of this film: A dead man who is “more alive than the living” today. On a tour through the Union of Soviet Republics, the film team meet friends “in the full sense of the word” without mentioning their names: encounters with people in the Soviet Union in 1970.

A green lawn like an unused carpet, encircled by a neat forest edge, in the background the steaming cooling towers of a coal power station – impressionistic camera images from Lusatia. They summarise in one pan how a used-up utilitarian landscape is trying to recultivate itself. Can ancient identity and language be re-discovered amid this strange artificiality? The director travelled through this region in search of her origins. She was born here, in Lusatia. This is her home and that of the smallest of all Slavic peoples: the Sorbs.

She thinks about the assimilation of this cultural and linguistic community with the indigenous people, about its history of oppression in the various German systems, about a region caught up in structural change and the identity-shaping power of words – even if one has to learn them anew first. She meets a German Anna who becomes a Sorbian Hanka. She encounters people dedicated to preserving the traditions. The younger folks especially see their Sorbian-ness as a commitment to a community spirit, if not – like the artist, Hella – as an alternative way of life. Accompanied by old and new Sorbian sounds, along the filmmaker’s offscreen reflections, the many-voiced portrait of a nation within the nation emerges who reclaims its culture out of the local museums back into its everyday life.

While the communist authorities decide the conditions for an official registration of the Solidarność movement inside, the masses demonstrate in front of the court outside. A contemporary document of the moment when the power of the people seemed to make a lasting cultural opening no longer just a promise but a possibility. At the time, “undesirable” at the Leipzig festival.

“Stay calm and level-headed!” Endless armoured convoys, radio stations broadcasting their potentially last announcements and the Slovak Communist Party meeting Czech party representatives. Shaky images and wailing sirens testify to the tension as Warsaw Pact troops march into Bratislava, too, to suppress the Prague Spring.

Chernobyl, 25 years later. Maja Weiss meets the boy, Anatoli, as a young man. What has happened in the meantime – between the nuclear disaster and the prospect of another tragedy? Where have all the international relief funds disappeared, and where did the millions intended for the reconstruction of the decaying sarcophagus of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant seep away? Where is my life taking me? What legacy will I leave to my son? These are just some of the questions that Ukrainian Anatoly Rizov, now grown up and twenty years after the first documentary portrait about his fate shaken by crises and wars, tries to answer.

Tröglitz in 2015: The mayor organises a shelter for refugees. He and his family become homeless themselves, because many residents believe that strangers do not belong in their Middle German home. With an interview with the mayor on the soundtrack, the drawings and 3D animations make tangible how the immense hatred corrodes the fabric of the community and tears the people apart.

The actor Hiam Abbass, who lives in France, is one of the greatest movie stars from the Middle East. She played leading roles in the award-winning films of Israeli director Eran Riklis, acted in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and recently in the U.S. hit series “Succession.” She served on the juries of the big Festivals in Cannes and Berlin, presented her own directing debut in Venice. But she is also a mother, daughter and sister in a large Palestinian family full of resourceful women. In this real role she steps in front of the camera in her daughter Lina Soualem’s work and travels back to her hometown of Deir Hanna in northern Israel – an Arab village in the Jewish state.

“Don’t open the gate to past sorrows,” the director quotes a kind of family dogma. It refers, among other things, to the family’s traumatic expulsion from Tiberias, the city on the Sea of Galilee, in the 1948 Palestine War. But with her confrontation of the family history, Soualem also opens gates to past joys and allegedly discarded identities. Between home videos, historical archive footage, photos and letters, Abbass is a touching and approachable screen presence as she returns to her roots. The long shadow of her origins also falls on a woman of the world.