First we hear a crackling sound, then a diffuse orange light glows in the darkness. A siren growing louder and the sound of a helicopter instantly mark the scene as a place of danger. There is a fire. First in the distance, a moment later everywhere. Trees and palms go up in flames. The fire’s power is immense. The firefighters and everyone else who is fighting the wildfires around Los Angeles act with remarkable calm. Nobody is running, the communication chain is working smoothly, TV reporters are broadcasting live, helpers are setting up emergency shelters, taking care of injured animals, cutting fire lines in front of neighbours’ homes. A tried-and-tested routine, efficiency and a great willingness to help. The crisis seems to bring out the best in the people. This uncommented observation is also a tribute to their commitment. But the longer it goes on, the more the question arises why solidarity and sustainable action seem to work in emergencies, while it seems impossible to tackle the crisis before it becomes an inferno. The film’s cinematic meditation on pyropolitics takes a look at our age of multiple crises. The permanent global fire management makes it easy to forget that behind those fires lie geopolitical causes that must be dealt with – not with water, but with political decisions.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

A queer auto-narrative about longing in three acts that addresses seemingly chaotic but systemically functioning cycles of attraction and revulsion, fear and desire, consumption and withdrawal, ecstasy and regret. While the film creates a timeless immediacy, the first-person narrator's commentary, in contrast, sounds like overthinking rather than an unquestioned moment of just-being-there. Whether at the club, by the lake or in the student cafeteria – one’s own judgement is always quicker than the question of how one is actually doing at that moment. But gradually something begins to change: An initially barely perceptible frequency shift sets in. The fragmented staccato of the first comments gradually gives way to a tale that gently settles in the interstices between dune, dream and reality.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

“My life is a prison”, Adelina says. The young woman is smoking and looking into the camera, her parents sitting on the sofa to her right and left. In black and white and the narrow 4:3 ratio, this family scene feels oppressive: Adeline spent eleven years under house arrest here, with a father who refuses to accept her identity and a mother who seems loving but powerless. In Georgia, there is neither freedom nor security for trans persons like Adelina. Anti-queer attacks happen in broad daylight; the legal situation of the LGBTQ community has recently deteriorated further. When the protagonist at last leaves her parents’ village to go to Vienna, the style of Rati Tsiteladze’s debut film also changes. The lipstick glows red, the lights of the big city neon yellow. A different, freer life seems possible. But the freedom brings new challenges: financial and health problems, communicating in a foreign language – and loneliness. “A Song Without Home” is the intimate, impressionistic long-term portrait of a person who wants to define herself and clings to an unshakeable conviction: “No law can erase who we are.”

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

Raúl Ruiz was part of the militant cinema movement that put itself in the service of the Chilean Popular Front, but remained an outsider. He employed experiment and irony to dissect social contradictions. In “Abastecimiento”, Ruiz addresses the supply problems under the Unidad Popular government, confronting the views of a woman from a bourgeois background with those of the socialist Minister for Economic Affairs. He follows this with a depiction of the activities of the Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios (JAP), locally organised committees for the control and just distribution of food and everyday goods. The provocative juxtaposition paints a picture of an impossible dialogue. The film was banned at the time and was believed lost for ages. It was only recently rediscovered. Leipzig was not the place for the feature film director who emigrated to Paris after the military coup, but Ruiz was a frequent guest at the Berlinale Forum.

Florian Wüst

Boi tries to be quiet, but the glasses are shaking in his hand. You must not disturb Papa! Because when Papa is disturbed, the angry man in him wakes up and beats his beloved Mama. In “Angry Man”, there is no hiding from the violence that creeps into every fibre of daily life in the form of nervous anticipation or paralysing panic. Yet despite his fear, Boi does the only right thing: He goes to get help. But Killi’s film is not just the story of a brave boy who breaks the spiral of domestic violence: Her work radiates empathy in every direction, including even the father. Because he has a monster inside him – a drawn one that grows and creeps before it pushes its way out, where it erupts as a cut-out angry man. He needs help, too. “Angry Man”, the adaptation of a picture book by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus, conveys in a humanistic and credible manner that people can free themselves and change. All without a romanticising happy end.

Marie Ketzscher

What is left when everything fades away? An old photographer tries to reconstruct people and events by means of old photographs, but they keep slipping away from him, vanishing in the dark, washed away by the waves. In his 2D animated film, rendered in black and white, Anton Dyakov not only shows how memories are lost, but also how they sometimes haunt and overwhelm us – for example in the shape of a disturbing archive fragment of blurred war photos. “Black Box” deals with loss and grief from a personal, yet universal perspective, while referencing the culture of remembrance in the digital age which is increasingly managing – or seeking to manage – without the haptic assurance of a printed photo.

Marie Ketzscher

Created using still and moving images sourced from NASA’s STEREO satellite solar observation mission, “Black Rain” turns unprocessed scientific data into a raw and glitched-out perspective on nearby interplanetary space. Embracing the artefacts, the film gives us an unmanicured and almost voyeuristic view of space, distant from the glamour of sci-fi or the carefully colourised images normally released by NASA to the press, as we track solar winds, coronal mass ejections and passing comets, sometimes recognisable only as blurs of lines and pixels, across a monochrome background of stars and the milky way.

Ben Sassen