Haiguang dreams. Of his dead grandmother, his birthplace Lěng Shuǐ Jiāng in China, his performances and art projects and his job at a wholesale warehouse in Leipzig. But Haiguang not only dreams, he also films. Himself and his surroundings. Persistent, stoical, sometimes with a handheld camera, sometimes using a tripod – knowing that there is another layer under one’s everyday life that can only be perceived if one dares to search for meaning beyond the visible. If you dare to lie down on a crossing in the park and wait for what happens. If you dare to address the pressure to perform in Chinese society through a performance dragging a car tyre through Beijing. If you dare acknowledge your own fears and doubts and reveal them. Stylistically confident and constantly shifting between places and levels of meaning, Haiguang interlaces his life and dream in eight vignettes in which emotions condense and take on a form that goes beyond the personal. He interweaves the elements of his everyday life between the art academy and his parents’ coal shop in Changsha with equally precise and poetic descriptions. Thus, a puddle by the roadside can become the very place that connects him with his granny across space and time.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

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

„A little flame that lit up and inspired people to tell different stories about the GDR.” This is how a protagonist describes the 1977 book “Guten Morgen, du Schöne” (Good morning, beautiful) by the writer Maxie Wander, a collection of records in which a wide variety of women talk about themselves. One of the most successful books in the GDR and one of the most influential in German literary history: It affected generations of women (and men!) and encouraged them to question their own lives – ample reason for the director to let a few of the women look back on the book and their lives today. It is about equal rights and emancipation, life plans and rebellion, dreams and failure, love and sexuality, mothers and fathers, men and women, happiness and loneliness, death and, above all, the hunger for life. With respect and great tenderness, Susanne Schüle films faces and bodies on which time has left its mark. Age and beauty, fragility and strength. On the visual level, the stories are subtly commented on by amateur footage: bodies marching in step to the ideologies, Hitler salutes and mass rallies. Again and again contrasted with naked bodies, the wild and non-conformist life beyond the dictatorships. War, peeling potatoes, kisses, children. This is how it was. This is how it is. In the end, the monologues of the past lead up to a contemporary dialogue between the sexes and generations. A flame.

Grit Lemke

In a large-scale operation, a group of homeless families occupy some wasteland on the outskirts of Santiago in March 1967. When the police attempt to evict them, a little girl, Herminda, dies in her mother’s arms. The eviction is called off, the people are allowed to stay and, without any existing infrastructure, build the settlement that exists to this day: Herminda de la Victoria. “Full of errors and mistakes, [the film] is my first approach to cinema, albeit to a ‘new cinema’, a Latin American cinema marked by underdevelopment. Nonetheless, the cinematic process, editing and sound represent a fully valid experience to me. ‘Herminda de la Victoria’ champions the interests of the homeless in Chile, suffers with them, is both testimony and a ‘document’ that forces you to take sides.” (Douglas Hübner)

Florian Wüst

Documentary films for children rarely venture to this place: prison. Four kids in Belgium take us there. They show us the way from the entrance to the visiting area, where they visit their mother or father, usually twice a week. Prisons are definitely not designed for children and yet there are many who regularly enter them. In Belgium alone, more than 16,000 children have a parent behind bars. This film gives a voice to children of prison inmates who tell us how they cope with a situation they did not choose.

Lina Dinkla

The Chilean folk group Illapu only really became famous under the military dictatorship. The five musicians were allowed to work, but had to “keep a low profile”. When they gradually joined the cultural resistance against the Pinochet regime, they were expelled in 1981. From their French exile, they toured Europe, including East Berlin. This is where Carlos Puccio’s film begins: The Chilean directing student observed Illapu’s rehearsals and concerts for his diploma film project at the Film and Television Academy of the GDR. They talk about their enduring bond with Chile and about what would happen if individual members of the band were given entry permits and Illapu would consequently break up. In 1986, they moved to Mexico together and returned to Chile two years later because of the changing political climate.

Florian Wüst

György Kurtág is a renowned Hungarian composer and a major figure of the post-war avant-garde. Born in 1926, he has now reached the age of 100, yet his mind remains wonderfully active. Living in an attic flat of the Budapest Music Center, he continues to work tirelessly with some of the world’s finest musicians who open their creations up to the humbling process of collaboration. Traversing geographies, the film takes us from his birth town of Lugoj to the different places that shaped him, from Transylvania to Budapest to Paris. It traces his early steps into the world of music, which began with dance and four‑hand piano sessions with his mother — something he later continued with his wife and pianist Márta. It then follows his life and many artistic collaborations, including with Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson and British cellist Steven Isserlis. The film also weaves in the work on his magnum opus “Fin de Partie”. “The map is not the territory; the notes are not music…” To pianists Halla Oddný Magnúsdottir and Ólafsson, Kurtág has “found a way of writing music that is impossible to play without going beyond the notes”. It’s a sentiment shared by Kurtág, who remarks that it’s not about his ideas but about whether the piece, played by a musician, truly “happens” to them. A portrait of a man who lives and breathes music, composing entire worlds brimming with emotion.

Sevara Pan