What did the Corona lockdown look like from a window in the residential towers of posh East London in the spring of 2020? The reflective two-week observation shows serious shifts in the everyday coordinate system of a privileged urban population at an immediate level. Meanwhile, the vacant apartments in the district, which were deliberately caused by speculation, represent a warning sign for the future of investor-friendly urban spaces.

Loneliness has many faces in Berlin. Young and old are afflicted by it, men, women, single and married people. It’s normal. Nonetheless there’s a stigma attached to this mixture of emotions that makes sufferers stay silent. Director Nicola Graef tries a different approach in her film: She lets the lonely inhabitants of the capital city speak, listens. The result is varied and quite often surprising.

Berlin is a city for extroverts, Tessa thinks. The young woman’s mind, however, is on the opposite site. The consequence is loneliness and that “is quite draining”, she says. 85-year-old Efraim, a photographer and flaneur, has found a confident way to deal with those nagging feelings: He’s “not the type for marriage” anyway. Artist Thomas, on the other hand, suffers from the end of a long-term love affair and wonders whether “the icing sugar is all kissed away by the age of 50”, but also says: “There is a market for everything, even for broken cars.” Poised and affectionate, we move through the expanses of the city in Graef’s film, where stories sprout like weeds between the cobblestones. From the corner pub to the artist’s studio, from the parks to the sports club and, time and again, into the silent flats – she encounters her witnesses to emptiness everywhere. Their reports are moving, but they never make us feel hopeless.

The biography of the female elephant Bibi, who is considered to display abnormal behaviour, is marked by misfortunes: Born in Zimbabwe in 1985. Lost her mother shortly after birth. Imported by the East Berlin zoo in 1989. Deported to the Halle zoo in 2008. On the basis of an empathic reappraisal of these traumatic events the film reflects on the significance of social issues and how to deal with exclusion today: a therapy by proxy on film that will hopefully have a long-distance healing effect on Bibi.

A controversial filmic parable on the loss of homes and the destruction of nature in the name of industrial progress: Between 1979 and 1982, the village of Magdeborn, which was regarded as an obstacle to brown coal mining south of Leipzig, is demolished. The locals are resettled, mostly against their will, to Grünau, Schönefeld and Borna. Those portrayed in this cinematic requiem rarely mince words when they call themselves pawn sacrifices and bargaining chips for the economic needs of the state. Officially, Tetzlaff and his team were attested an unacceptable emotional closeness to the people.

What’s growing in that empty space there? On 17 December 2010, the Tunisian grocer Mohamed Bouazizi burns himself to death in public – the Arab Spring begins, the fire spreads through the Internet. A fast-forward trip through the interior architecture of a modern revolution, right into the dispersed character of the event: from the planet’s surfaces to digital de-spatialization.

58-year-old Erwin introduces himself as “old but horny”. He has declared the mobile home in his front garden his favourite refuge, where he has everything he needs: a computer, a bed, a coffee machine. Two webcams link Erwin to other men who satisfy his carnal desires. In this tiny space, Jan Soldat comes close to him, of course. He learns of love affairs, as great as extinguished, of a complicated family web and worries about the future.

A virtuoso filmic reflection on automatisms in art and an encounter with Margaret Raspé on a Greek island, where the artist and filmmaker spends part of the year. Considered to be a pioneer of feminist German film, “I know where I am” is how she sums up her feeling on the island. Orientation in space, control and letting go are all central categories in her artistic practice.

Everyday observations from Buenos Aires, shot on black-and-white 16mm film material, alternate with twenty-year-old Hi8 colour shots from New York. The perspective of a father who collects memories for his daughters. The perspective of a son who records his father’s reminiscences. Richard Shpuntoff’s multi-layered montage film is a clever essay on cultural identities, on cities and languages.

When we watch a subtitled film, we look, listen and read at the same time. We assume that the three levels are congruent or at least add up to form a whole. “Even the best subtitles suck”, the subtitles of this film announce, however, because “You are still reading instead of looking at the images.” Translating means rewriting. Therefore, “Everything That Is Forgotten in an Instant” tells parallel stories in images, words and writing: of urban development and power structures in two distant metropolises, of identity and its transgenerational transfer, of three continents and three languages which draw equally dividing and connecting lines through a family. The insecurity caused by the discrepancy between the filmic elements turns into a school of selective perception. Images, languages and texts are no dictate, after all: They leave us a choice.

The riots that were to spread across the whole of France in 2005 began in Clichy-sous-Bois outside the gates of Paris: young men on the barricades, burning suburbs. The division of society became painfully tangible. What has happened since then? This complex, finely woven documentary look at the Banlieue shows how consciously young people today deal with discrimination. The age of machismo seems over – at the school theatre workshop or while playing soccer. Women rule the world …