What happens after abuse? Six years after the crime, the director reconnects with her grandmother – not to talk about the act itself, which everyone is aware of. She finally wants to talk about how she felt afterwards: to break the silence, to name her shame and the grief at losing her whole Colombian family – and above all, to demand recognition of her suffering.
In her first film, Matilde-Luna Perotti deals with a personal trauma shared by many women in Latin America. The memory lurks everywhere: in old home videos, in text messages, in fabrics and clothes, in the scars on her own skin. These fragments come together to form a personal and at the same time collective portrait that makes a deeply buried trauma visible – and ultimately becomes an act of self-empowerment.

Using original sound and war images, this film documents the rise of the anti-war movement within the US military. Soldiers talk about their growing anger. We see them being drilled and indoctrinated – with the consequence that the atrocities they were later responsible for during the Vietnam War were justified by military obedience. The sometimes brutal montages show that both the Vietnamese people and the American soldiers were victims of a ruthless military machine whose true profiteers, the film argues, are the arms industry and military administration. It closes with an appeal of a member of the National Guard on domestic duty to his fellow soldiers to fraternise with the protesters they are meant to keep down.

In his early twenties, Mwita Mataro set himself three big goals: become a rock star, make a film, and then found an art school in Tanzania. He has already accomplished the rock star part – he is the frontman of a band. And this film is his directorial debut. There was a choice of many subjects, something beautiful like friendship, for example. But there is one thing that bothers him more than his white film colleagues, and that is the colour of his skin. So what does it mean to grow up as a Salzburg native with Tanzanian roots, as a Black Person of Colour in predominantly white Austria? To investigate this, he has teamed up with young BPoCs to create the animated fantasy world Greenland: a place where all the potato creatures are green except Bluekid and his blue family. They paint themselves green to be less conspicuous, but since this does not always work out, Bluekid experiences rejection and marginalisation.

In his documentary essay, Mataro reflects on a daily reality based on colours: racism, alien attributions, otherness, blues experiences in Greenland. He listens to children and adults, lets the audience participate in talks with pedagogues, psychologists and politicians and opens up in front of the camera at home. With “Austroschwarz”, Mataro also comes one step closer to his third goal.

Two quarrelsome brothers with impressively full beards live on a remote farm in the Bohemian Forest, surrounded by a rugged landscape: At one point, Franta and Ondra themselves become aware that this setting has an almost Old Testament feel to it, but cannot agree on who might be Cain and who Abel in this scenario. They rarely agree in any case: Daily squabbles are the big constant in the life of the identical but otherwise dissimilar twins. When Franta embarks on another breakneck adventure, Ondra wants nothing more than to smoke in peace. Nonetheless, they occasionally exchange hugs and nose kisses. In their early 60s, Franta and Ondra spend their time working in the fields, playing jokes with the animals, or competing in left-hand arm-wrestling duels. The facts that Franta lost his lower right arm in an accident or that the twins took part in the 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia belong to an apparently distant past. With a domestic cow as narrator, the leitmotif of a huge mirror, and a classical soundtrack, Miro Remo finds a wonderful form for the portrait of these idiosyncratic people.

“Why should I move? I was born here.” While a senseless war is waged in Vietnam and million-dollar rockets are shot to the moon, there is not enough decent housing in New York – and worse, the poor are being forcibly evicted from their homes, says an angry protagonist of this activist film which introduces the New York squatter movement. Latin Americans in particular are forced to leave the lucrative Manhattan housing market, but the protesters do not accept this without putting up a fight. “Break & Enter” is a spontaneous and encouraging film document about self-organised communities based on solidarity.

In 1974, the Maternity Center, located in a low-income Chicago neighbourhood, is acutely threatened by lack of financing from its funding body, North Western University. Resistance begins to form in the predominantly Black community, since this is an institution with a 75-year-old history that has provided countless woman with safe and affordable home-births. “The Chicago Maternity Center Story” uses this civil protest as a starting point to tell the story of the rampant commercialisation of medical care in the USA, including its sexist and racist connotations. A film that approaches the issue sometimes gently, sometimes with agitprop vigour.

The name of her village stands for a utopia that has shaped Noam Shuster Eliassi from childhood: Newe Shalom (Hebrew) or Wahat al-Salām (Arabic) roughly translates as “Oasis of Peace.” This small community of 300 people from Jewish and Arab families which was founded in 1969, located in Israel at the border with the West Bank, is a test of solidarity in practice. Thus, Noam, who is Jewish, and her Palestinian friend Ranin become ambassadors of mutual understanding even as children, for example when Hillary Clinton or Jane Fonda come to visit. They seem predestined for a career in the United Nations.
In her comedy show “Coexistence, My Ass!”, which director Amber Fares uses as a leitmotif, Shuster Eliassi strikes a harsher tone. Her career shift from diplomacy to political comedy – in English, Hebrew or Arabic, depending on the audience – shows her as a critic of the Netanyahu government, both before and after the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. Her example also reflects the division in parts of the Israeli left: Shuster Eliassi’s deep pain of having lost loved ones herself is followed by anger about the Gaza war. What is humour able, what is it allowed to do in this situation? Perhaps help us mourn the suffering of two nations and, despite everything, not give up the utopia of peace.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Tehran and other major cities seem far away from the place where Sara lives. But in her rural community in northwestern Iran, the protagonist of this film advocates the same feminist values in a practical, everyday way. Again and again, we are reminded by the images that her father once taught her to ride a motorbike – to the disapproval of the whole village. A small favour with big consequences: For Sara, it paved a way outside patriarchal marriage. Mobile on two wheels, she works as a midwife and has delivered many girls for whom she now wants to fight: At the start of the film and in middle age, Sara decides to be the first woman in the history of her community to run for the local council. A step which earns her enthusiastic support on the one hand; on the other, she must endure open hostilities and an interrogation by the moral enforcers of the Islamic Republic. In “Cutting Through Rocks”, Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni capture these power structures and their individual impact as precisely as the gestures of solidarity and self-determination.

Is that a belly or a cell that is in visible turmoil? In any case, in Angel Wu’s film the capitalist hamster wheel is a living organism – though it is not quite clear whether we live in it or it in us. When a young factory worker makes a wooden fetish, prays to it, and then eats it, he is physically and visibly consumed with ambition and work mania. Without further ado, the people around the fire turn into a column of factory workers with a number-crunching management, the free-roaming zebra is put into a cage that is quickly shipped off as a container. But Wu does not just stage this development as a simple series of recognisable capitalism markers but also retains the cryptic, haptic quality of her magnificent mixed media reflection on the content level.
Is the fetish an anvil that symbolises human malleability? Does the worker long for something else? Are the delicately drawn insights into the interior of the machine visions of hell or simply an Anthropocene in its final stage? Based on the physical formula “work equals force times distance,” Wu not only combines 2D animation, photography, collage, and drawing – as well as Taiwanese music featuring some unsavoury retching. Rather, she condenses reflections on working life in (Asian) societies and our imprisonment within it.

The work of Berlin-based filmmaker and artist Jack Wolf is based primarily on investigative research into conflict and environmental issues as well as migration. He also operates in political and social epicentres using state-of-the-art technology and innovative hardware. In this short film he ties all these strands together succinctly and precisely. “I Don’t Think I’m Alone in This” was shot with a time-of-flight camera, which is used in 3D technology and designed to give machines, in the broadest sense, human perception. So visually everything is about data flow, numbers, and transformation. In terms of content, the fate of a young man who fled from Damascus to Beirut as a child ten years ago becomes palpable.
Speaking from the offscreen of a cramped room that is both safe haven and cage, Amjad Bahloul talks about the past. About how wonderful it was to meet all the people in the street, play football, interact with the real world, a blessing. A blessing in the cursed loneliness of a foreign country, as it turned out for Amjad, were Facebook, YouTube, and the like – his only means of social contact. “This lightens the burden,” he says. And now they could help him and other refugees find their way home, because the Syrian regime has fallen. He learned about it from a post …

“It’s nice here, let’s play,” says Fakhri, holding a small loudspeaker for Fadil, the violinist. But there is no audience. The two men are standing in the ruins of Mosul. Three years of occupation by the Islamic State terrorist militia have left the old town almost completely destroyed. Along with the buildings, the 8,000-year history and culture of the second-largest Iraqi city seemed to have been wiped out forever. Life returns slowly. Art treasures are being restored, there are theatres, music again, and Fakhri’s small private museum where he collects anything he can lay his hands on: wooden doors, bronze figures, soap from1910, a ventilator. He has already amassed 7,000 exhibits and is especially fond of an ancient portal with two lions. Damaged, but perhaps still salvageable, it sits enthroned in the ruins of Bashar’s parents’ house like a peace time relic. Bashar visits it almost daily, hoping that reconstruction is possible. But Fakhri turns out to drive a hard bargain – he wants this portal at all costs …
With a steady hand, Kurdish-Norwegian director Zaradasht Ahmed tells a deeply human story, intertwining the darkest and lightest side of the species: the mania of destruction and the strength to go on.

Rich in information, fiercely timely and as dense as it is accessible, Lee Anne Schmitt’s third feature is a biography of John Brown (1800–1859), albeit one that uses the life of the famed American abolitionist as a jumping off point to narrate myriad other stories of Black discrimination and resistance that chime with his legacy. As Schmitt criss-crosses the country visiting sites of protest and remembrance marked and unmarked and referencing Frederick Douglass, Sun Ra and Nat Turner, her own feelings are always present. For, as she states at the outset, “Purge This Land” was made for her son with partner Jeff Parker, whose enveloping soundtrack channels 1960s Black heritage in tying together the film’s thrillingly heterogenous elements.