This both raw and tender work of memory ploughs through reflections, feelings, anecdotes, photos, and drawings, an attempt in cinematic images to capture the grief over a beloved grandfather who fell victim to cancer, make it manageable. Sonia Leliukh takes the liberty of speaking from a deliberately subjective perspective, refusing to tone down her statements with seemingly valid rules of language or etiquette. With her desktop documentary, which seems playful only at first glance, she confronts radical grief with equally radical honesty. By putting the old computer games her grandfather used to distract himself from his pain on screen, she does not only put herself in the role of the terminally ill, but also the audience. When my finger twitches to move the Solitaire cards to the right spot or click on another box at Minesweeper, I am already in the midst of things and must ask myself how I deal with grief, love, or rejection. In the present, but also and especially when the people who inspire these emotions have gone. Sonia Leliukh’s work is a cinematic refusal to allow these feelings to become objects in the sediment of the past.

The discrepancy between a bleak, dreary provincial town and an imaginative woman in her prime who longs for adventure bursts forth as a stirringly animated cri de coeur. Maria Dakszewicz’s protagonist immerses herself so deeply in a Bollywood film that in her imagination she becomes the main character of the colourful and divinely joyous love story. This makes her return to the empty, cold “reality bar” all the more painful – with its annoying neighbours, depressing weather and the mocking slogans for self-improvement on advertising boards and in women’s magazines.
A high-proof cocktail of tragicomedy, garnished with enormous power, humour, love, physicality and melancholy. The last brushstroke is the equivalent of the unattainable, shimmering figure of the Bollywood sultan in the Bar Croquette reality – which also brings a kind of contentment, albeit of a quite different nature … With this film, Dakszewicz creates a distinctive, original and wild aesthetic: The clay figure, still warm from fingerprints, blends seamlessly into ink drawings –incongruous at first glance and yet as harmoniously fused as dreamt sensuality with an Indian sultan in the grey Polish province.

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.

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze recognised „a new type of actor” in the films of the Nouvelle Vague: professional non-professionals who do not just recite dialogue but act as a medium for our perception. Two of them were uppermost in his mind: Jean-Pierre Léaud and her, Bulle Ogier. The French performer has appeared in nearly 100 films over a period of more than 50 years. However, the masterpieces she was involved in were often not appreciated as such by her contemporaries but, as critic Philippe Azoury puts it, regarded as child’s play.
This is what makes this cinephile biogram, which, apart from a few conversations, consists mainly of archive material and a wealth of intelligently selected and edited film clips, so special: Eugénie Grandval’s portrait recalls a time when cinema was bursting its bonds and anything seemed possible. Playing parts that were never repeated and yet followed an astonishingly consistent arc, Bulle Ogier not only became an icon of that period but something of a co-author of the directors she worked with, whether they were called Barbet Schroeder, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras or Jacques Rivette. Rarely has a film about film sparked such an appetite for rediscovery.

Days spent at your parents’ home are not always the easiest. Director Małgorzata Goździk knows what she is talking about, because today her loving relationship with her father is mainly documented in childhood recordings. Nowadays, Mirosław has mutated into a grumpy man who spends his time reading the news and answering quiz questions. In the course of “Dance with Me, Dad” it becomes clear that his dismissive behaviour hides a substantial depression. And that father and daughter may have more in common in terms of mental health than first assumed. In her film, Małgorzata Goździk ventures a bold intervention that exposes long-simmering painful issues. Could this radically honest exchange at the round family table mark a new beginning?

A granddaughter visits her grandmother in her house in the country, her grandmother is close to 100. We never see the granddaughter, as she is the one behind the camera, and we only see the grandmother fleetingly, moving through the shadowy interiors, gathering herbs from the vegetable patch to make tea, watching a mantis perch on her hand. But this is as much a portrait of her as it is of the space she inhabits, although we never see the whole of that either, just carefully selected fragments in compositions that play with focus and shade: knick-knacks and trinkets, photographs, textures, glimpses of sky through the window, ants, butterfly wings, resting pigeons, a wasp nestled in her palm, the fur of the last remaining dog.
Sounds ebb and flow through this hushed bestiary of the everyday, the voice of the grandmother talking in voice-over of family, spirits and canine reincarnation, the noises of the places in the photos, the television blaring in the background, the different layers of rippling silence that reassert themselves when everything else goes quiet. How do you capture a whole life in just 20 minutes? By listening to its echoes in space.

How are art and social reality connected? How can art respond to the horrors that happen in this world every day? At what point does art become political, at what point corrupted by the market? Leon Golub (1922–2004) works on huge canvases in his New York studio, uses press photos as models, distils gestures from them, applies paint, removes it, scrapes free what was hidden. The process has a violent side – like the martial motifs of his works. They show shootings, tortures or grotesque figures that enjoy their inhuman acts. These are motifs usually unearthed by investigative journalism in times of war. Now they are hung in an exhibition room supposedly free from the banal – and shock the viewer.

Anyone who enters the hardware store in the 900-soul community of Lumpkin in rural southwestern Georgia will find, in addition to tools, animal feed and seeds, a number of unexpected things. Kellie’s small, privately run hardware store is more than a store, it is a lifeline for the region: supply depot, gossip station, refuge. Kellie has a kind word for everyone, employs bored teenagers from the neighbourhood, cheers up lonely seniors, and adopts stray dogs. She meets everyone with warmth, patience, and dry wit. She comments only briefly – and after closing time, of course – on the fact that as a queer woman in a traditionally Republican corner of the USA she does not always have it easy, especially not in a job where dealing with DIY mansplainers is her daily bread.
Kathrin Seward and Ole Elfenkaemper observe this woman of conviction’s everyday life and have great fun immersing themselves in the details of these spaces and the absurd and entertaining intricacies of the social interactions. This very special universe almost makes us forget that next to the atmosphere in the store, open in every respect, there is also quite a different America that is not about friendliness and helpfulness, but about selfishness, aggression, and discrimination.

A piece of land awaits Déni Oumar Pitsaev in the Pankisi Gorge, a Chechen enclave in the Georgian part of the Caucasus. His mother bought it for him, hoping to bring her son, who was socialised in Western Europe, back to his Chechen roots. When he arrives, he realises that the gift comes with strings attached: Relatives and friends from the neighbourhood constantly ask when the 40-year-old Déni with his receding hair intends to start a family. When he counters with his own vision – building a treehouse for adults ten metres from the ground, a childhood dream – he triggers complex debates about the relationship between the individual and society and what historical conditions it is subject to: The region is deeply scarred by the effects of the Chechen War, the wounds extending even to his estranged relationship with his father. In all this, Pitsaev’s manner of confrontation is always extremely delicate, never turning into an attack. With expert curiosity, he approaches a world that is both completely alien and home to him.

Grandfather’s hands making pottery, the vertical linearity of a tower, a train crashing into a car – all of these are fragile, newly born film sketches that crowd each other out in a survival game for the filmmaker’s attention. The sceneries fight against each other, intertwine to form new strands, sink into an endless flood of information, shatter in a sea of open browser tabs. With his authentic voice-over and a mesmerising collection of moving images, director Konstantin von Sichart’s alter ego offers us a deep insight into his creative process. Marked by his neurodivergence, he learns before our eyes to cope with his inability to concentrate on one thing – and to weave meaning from these strands, remain true to his film idea. But how can this ever result in a film?
Toxically coloured images, naively drawn and finely crafted, AI-generated, filmed from a monitor, collaged, worked-on – a wealth of tools and aesthetic approaches translates the described mental overload into the language of design. The film thus becomes more than a self-reflection of modern filmmaking: It is the portrait of a new generation – caught between the compulsion to take everything in and have a position on everything and the urge to stand still or even run away.

The boundaries between dream, memory, cinema, and different parts of the self dissolve to ravishing effect in this latest short by Los Angeles-based Chinese artist Zhuoyun Chen. Moving woozily between diary, autofiction and free association, “It Must Be Because I Decided to Leave” is awash with half-remembered exchanges, infectiously surreal images and the narrator’s desire to make sense of things, which never quite happens. Oneiric motifs of all kinds abound: Rocks are clasped by hands or merge with faces, screens appear in windowpanes or headlights, a gleaming red sports car spins in the California desert, a shadowy figure walks into a cave, and a dog rises up from a pool in reverse, its scrabbling limbs rendered in elegant superimpositions. The narrator shuttles through thoughts of desire, family and dislocation and refers to any number of “yous” and “Is”, although they could easily be one and the same. If “we all have landscapes inside”, this is a journey through them.

For Namir, the realisation that his beloved mother is not immortal is painful. He had actually intended to make a film with Siham. Now he is mourning in the church with his father Waguih and his children, who seem too young to understand death – and allowing himself to be filmed. “As always, I’m counting on cinema to help me.” He is convinced that cinema can turn tragedy into comedy – and preserve memories that would otherwise fade away.
Namir Abdel Messeeh has already worked through his family’s biography between Egypt and France, their Christian faith and love of cinema in “The Virgin, the Copts and Me” (2011). But it was Siham’s wish that her son finally realise a film with acting stars rather than his own relatives. Instead, Namir Abdel Messeeh recounts his mother’s love, her longing, and her mysteries using the power of cinema. A montage of home videos, family memories and Egyptian film classics by Youssef Chahine makes Siham appear almost “larger than life”.