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

It looks like business as usual deep in the jungle – until one night a lantern lights up and magically attracts countless insects. They fall into a strange trance; even the bat family wake up. While the adults use the bright commotion to hunt, the young bat saves a glowworm, a fly and a moth. The next night, the dangerous light returns. The small bat is determined to try to save her new friends from its spell. A small adventure about friendship and mutual help.

Lina Dinkla

Pesticides wipe out the insects, the oil spills into the ocean, the forests burn: In 1994, director Laila Rakvåg let a bird fly over and through the ecological, human-made hotspots that plague us even today to a far worse extent. Sometimes the bird is able to land in beautiful natural surroundings, but the rest is never permanent, paradise is always on the brink of the next hellish transformation. The further the bird flies, the more human its features become: It becomes a baby that is then actually born – and carries the memories of the bird in its newly opened eyes. We are inseparably linked to nature; what we do to it, we do to ourselves: Rakvåg’s film is an activist plea for more empathy with our planet and a change of thinking, told from the perspective of an expectant mother.

Marie Ketzscher

A tiny fish swims through a huge underwater world. It is loud and hectic at times. He would love nothing better than to hide behind the other fish. Is he too small to see the world as the big ones see it? Drawn in enchanting blue and green watercolours, this animation shows that there is no such thing as too big or too small. And wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all fly up to heaven in a big bubble in the end?

Lina Dinkla

The stories, myths and reality of the Sámi people are always closely linked to reindeer: travelling with them, keeping them as livestock. Where does this close tie come from? Anita Killi takes up – or imagines – a creation myth: Alits, who roams the land and enjoys his idleness, is gifted the close tie to the reindeers in the shape of Joik (yodelling) by the daughter of the sun when she has to leave him again. The singing magically attracts the animals. Killi captures the yearning in these sounds with poetic imagery and in Sámi language: In the embraces of Alits and the daughter of the sun, but also in the moments when they roam the meadows. Everything is interconnected in this sensual and haptic concept of nature.

Marie Ketzscher

What does a person’s library say about them? James Paul Dallas doesn’t just create a portrait of a life, but also shows a present in which possession, memory and identity are all becoming shaky. In early 2025, the anonymous protagonist guides the director via mobile phone through his empty apartment in Brooklyn. What can stay and what can go in what was his home for 20 years? The kitchen crockery is first up, then the books. Giacometti and Basquiat can stay in New York. But please pack up everything between Lequeu and Brick. A course is thus tracked through an intimate microcosm. It’s not just one individual’s paths to wisdom that are being measured out here, but also his desires, preferences and guilty pleasures. The footage gives fragmentary glimpses into a private world, piquing the curiosity and sparking the imagination of all those watching: what were all the things that happened in this apartment? What sort of person lived here? And why does he have to give up all these things, and maybe even a part of himself?

Borjana Gaković

An animated film made entirely out of black and white paper – and told backwards, too! A white she-dog lives in the root cavity of a mighty tree. But what connects the two? Step by step, the film takes us back to their first encounter, when the dog was still a puppy. An equally unusual and strong friendship that withstands even a massive storm.

Lina Dinkla