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.

“Are you with us or against us?” Nothing less lies in the air, unspoken. No nuances, no discussions, hardly any choice. Did the tired man expect such life decisions after work? Unlikely. He just wanted to chill out and watch mindless television when suddenly an alien world on the screen catches up with him in the comfort of his home: A cult-like community lives next door, their behaviour ape-like, their faith fanatical, determined to convert him. Their flat is decorated with forests and deserts. Anyone who tries to look behind the painted wallpaper, to separate scenery from reality, commits treason and deserves banishment or death. Plato’s Cave Analogy in a radicalised version for the 21st century.
Freedom and truth or stability and a sense of belonging? Is the price of accepting a distorted reality just to be allowed to live too high? And most of all: Is there an alternative worth living? The world outside, behind the window, remains vague, its threats only implied. In this parable about passivity, curiosity and free choice, Alexandre Sousa touches on the urgent questions of our time: questions of isolation, echo chambers and the impossibility for humans to stay unpolitical. Do we even have a chance to resist?

Bela from Leipzig is a real fighter – on the judo mat and in life. When he bravely defeated leukaemia with chemotherapy, he lost all his hair. Now he regularly has to go to the hospital for blood tests. It is not so bad, Bela thinks – as long as he is allowed to go to judo training. He wants to get even stronger there to become a real judo master one day.

A man throws off the shackles of slavery, lays the traditional Kente cloth aside, puts on a business suit – and starts to walk towards the future. Or towards what he thinks is the future, because this is not a pleasant walk: To the cheers of the people, the man pushes into the backroom of an Asian restaurant where he flogs plots of land, moves to the next backroom, money case in hand, to bribe the pastor and ultimately ends up on stage to give a state-supporting speech as President – against corruption, of course. The career of our nameless protagonist – whose sunglasses-covered face, interestingly, we get to see only in the limelight – takes him right through the streets of an African metropolis, past protests being suppressed, through a dilapidated infrastructure, criminal gangs, and even natural disasters.
Nobody has thrown off the shackles of slavery in Francis Yushau Brown’s relentlessly critical film. Instead, a few individuals have chained themselves to nepotism and keep the rest of the population poor and backwards. His film is a 3D indictment brimming with rage, including of the Western and Far Eastern (neo) colonizers. And far above hover the enraged gods, waiting for the people to put an end to this situation at last.

Contemplating your naked body, drenched in tomato sauce, on a frozen pizza – that is the epitome of alienated wage work. Especially if it is the mass product whose quality has to be checked hundreds of times a day at the assembly line. Is it this alienation, the multiple daily consumption of precisely this meal or simply the absence of significant human relationships that make Frankie feel terminally ill and ready to say goodbye to an existence he feels is worthless and empty? Nobody cares, until his body transforms into a wild planet where evolution happens in fast-forward mode: the genesis of life, miniature Frankies performing absurd penis dances, cannibalism, Darwinism, mutual destruction, the eradication of other species – and finally the Frankie planet itself burning out.
Levi Stoops makes us laugh out loud – and yet we feel the bitter taste of self-destruction on our tongue. Will Frankie have the courage to risk a change of life after this apocalyptic experience? Or does the system have him so firmly in its claws that wholesome nature documentaries of exotic flowers are comfort enough – instead of cooking shows where the stone-baked pizzas are tossed into the air with verve?

A creative person suffering from writer’s block is sitting in an artists’ residence. Outside, construction workers are busy, inside, nothing happens – until the landline rings. A supposed Microsoft employee wants to access her allegedly broken computer. She begins to talk – about heartbreak, emptiness, procrastination. The scammer listens and – without realising it – is ensnared by a scam baiter.
“Cold Call” is the tale of an unexpectedly real, almost comforting conversation between these two strangers – and of how easy it is to become part of the structures one believes to be questioning: digital vigilantism, racism, global inequality. Stefanie Schroeder explores a phenomenon that reveals its multiple layers only at second glance. One of these layers is scamming, an attempted fraud based on deception and manipulation that is often committed not out of free will but by slave-like “employees” of small businesses scattered across the globe. Scam baiting turns out to be similarly ambivalent, a counter movement on the internet pretending to be a protective power that seeks to stop fraudulent activities by personal exposure and humiliation, quite often through racist stereotypes. Schroeder approaches this melange with minimalism and humour, masterfully unfolding the complexity of this subject in the process.

More than three quarters of the 650,000 inmates released from prison in the United States every year end up back behind bars within five years. Former drug dealer Coss wants to beat the statistics. After a long prison sentence, he returns to his family on New York’s Lower East Side in 2014, determined to build a legal existence for himself. Together with other former inmates, he opens a gym in his old neighbourhood which is rapidly being gentrified. If a guy like him can master this extreme challenge, can other ex-convicts do the same?
Filmmaker Debra Granik observed Coss’s efforts over a period of eight years. Through her camera, we experience frictions and obstacles, setbacks and successes, and learn what enormous stress it is to succeed against all odds in a racist environment that knows no mercy. Like a Bildungsroman – Granik explicitly refers to the social-realist literature of Charles Dickens –, the film is divided into chapters. The long form enables her to follow several narrative strands and focus on a variety of protagonists. This generates an increasing pull that soon makes us forget the time, lament every failure, and cheer every small victory.

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.

In the 1970s, the free spirits of the Clara Mosch artist group from Karl-Marx-Stadt declared the GDR a happening zone. A poetic film portrait about the power of art.

“Which side are you on?” sings Florence Reece, an icon of the miners’ movement in Harlan County, Kentucky, with a brittle voice into the microphone at a union rally. Barbara Kopple’s long-term observation of the 1973 Brookside strike might even be called a music film. Because aside from Reece’s classic strike anthem, song and speech, folklore and politics, rhythms of speaking and editing are combined throughout: a successful attempt at partisanship that appeals to all the senses, where slogans are absent – or put into song. “Harlan County, USA” was presented in a special screening at the Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche in autumn 1977, its fame having preceded it: It had already won the Oscar for Best Documentary Film in April of that year.

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 …

In the beginning, humans seem so very far away, the only sign of them the twinkling lights of Montreal on the horizon across the water. Deslauriers Island is home to one of largest colonies of ring-billed gulls in the world, and initially it feels like a realm for them alone: a whole legion of elegant white birds gathered together on the grass, flapping, crouching, calling, mating, the camera right in their midst, right down at their level, seeing as they do. But this non-human utopia is evoked in order to be progressively undermined, as markers are placed in the ground, traps set and specimens captured. Some will be released with leg rings or daubed-on markings, but others won’t be so lucky.
The sky over the landfill site is thick with beating wings and when the beaks screech as one, the sound is deafening. No wonder the voice on the radio says they’re losing control, although that hardly justifies the solution they find. Birds hunt birds in the wild, but there’s something particularly savage about seeing it be guided by human hand. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ring-billed gull was nearly hunted to extinction, but their life circle continues unabated here – who can blame nature for finding a way? Yet the stakes are different now, and the old laws no longer apply. Will the meek still inherit the earth?