Cinema turned 100. With his homage Heinrich Sabl went one short step further back into the prehistory of cinematography for a run-up. Individual images are set in motion in a praxinoscope, invented by Émile Reynaud in 1877. A pedestrian seizes this illusion as an occasion to walk out of the magic cylinder through scenes from international film history.

Grandma Berta’s beloved “Zollhaus” is on the verge of ruin. She has dedicated her whole life to this inn and farm. Now her granddaughter Monika, the filmmaker’s sister, is to take over the heavily indebted family farm in the Upper Palatinate. What makes Monika decide to give up her previous plans and move to the countryside to live with her grandmother? The director decides to follow her sister for one year during this apparent labour of Sisyphus.

Monika puts all her energy into the ailing farm and is constantly confronted with its history: Grandma Berta’s schnitzel was legendary. But only the jukebox is left of the merry evenings in a packed inn. Berta had to bury her husband, two of her sons and a grandson. She is not a woman of tender words and unsparingly direct, which soon leads to conflict. The director at first watches her indefatigable sister in stunned disbelief. But gradually she understands that Monika has found a new dream in the “Zollhaus”. This enables her to offer an intimate insight into the chronicle of a family. The film confronts us with the universal question when it is the right time to live one’s dreams and how quickly this time may pass.

In Siculiana, a small Sicilian town full of flaking facades, religiosity is lived out as a matter of course. And of course the figure of Jesus Christ worshipped here is black, and always has been. However, some people cannot get used to their dark-skinned neighbours in the refugee camp. The camera accompanies locals and stranded people along their paths, which often lead to the church, but not necessarily together, and draws a kind of map of the city in black-on-black contrasts.

It’s become quiet in Siculiana, a local says. He’s not referring to the loud demonstrations against the Villa Sikania, now converted into a refugee reception camp. And certainly not to the colourful flurry of activity that grips the city every year as the faithful prepare for the feast of the Finding of the Cross. That’s when they hang up the “Benvenuti” sign. But who exactly is welcomed here? The pomp and circumstance of the festivities are at the centre of this filmic portrait of a community in which the alleged common ground is disintegrating into voice and skin tones: between the black people from abroad and the black man on the cross who – according to an elderly lady – was forced to “darken” himself in order to incorporate human sins. Between an aging city stylised to the point of becoming scenery and God’s newly arrived children who promise a future and who could bring new life into the alleys.

AIVA is an artist, animated by algorithms. But above all she is the soberingly limited male tech vision of what more diversity in the arts could look like. In her paintings AIVA prefers the vertical, to some acclaim. A naive and cliché-ridden “art documentary” lets us participate in her work. Precisely observed, with sparse gestures and trenchant wit, Veneta Androva reflects a current status quo in her computer-animated future fiction.

Partly rhetorical, partly ironic and partly profound, the film deals with the Germans’ strange, three-hundred-year-old relationship to their stereotypical ideas of America’s native population. This includes the question of how the audience themselves feel about this ominous object of fascination. The backdrop and starting point of a floating journey through the history of various stereotypes are the ruins of the former U.S. embassy in East Berlin, where an exhibition on the subject took place in 1986.

Classical music is great, says ten-year-old Arshan. He lives with his family on a ranch in California, helps to feed the cows and does household chores. But he uses every spare minute to train his voice. Arshan’s big dream is to become an opera singer. When performers for an opera production are sought in town, he anxiously goes to the casting.

This detailed and sober look at the issue of nuclear power begins where Germany is currently standing: with shutting it off. It’s precisely because the film is anything but alarmist that the alarming aspect of the situation becomes clear. The nuclear nightmare is not over; a safe final nuclear waste repository is not in sight. And yet, boosted by the coal phase-out, many people seem to see “clean” nuclear energy as an option again. The terror of climate change trumps the terror of the nuclear worst case scenario. A zero sum game.

Carsten Rau succeeds masterfully in calmly probing the heated controversy. He talks to people who live with and off nuclear power. Engineer, scientist or innkeeper, he very deliberately frames them all with the same mixture of seriousness and nonchalance. The story is told without dramatisation, but with stunningly “beautiful” images that make the fascination with this technology quite comprehensible. When hip French nuclear engineers finally try to join the front line of climate protesters, we realise how false the talk of an “unavoidable option” is and always has been. The portrait of a society emerges that walked into a blind alley with open eyes and is slowly coming to realise that with every step it takes it is moving further away from the exit.

Painting, virtual sculptures, technophile hybrids of reality and illusion – Aaron Jablonski has been creating mobile face filters for social media channels since 2018. Sometimes they form a confusing swarm of echoes around a head, sometimes they come as spiky digital punk. His immaterial masks, hovering between fashion and art, conceal as much as they reveal about their wearers.

Quiet, dark shots of nocturnal fog, of a mine, a dump truck or a wreck, of huge earth craters and new surface contours created by excavation. Raw material extraction, economisation and exploitation of nature are the themes of this visual study. It’s accompanied by an unobtrusive, but threatening and assertive sound that underlines the mystic quality of the images. Post-industrial landscapes become post-apocalyptic.

Elise is a timid woman. She’s even afraid of trees. When one day a paper plane sails through her window, she’s so agitated that she hardly sleeps a wink that night. The next morning Emil, a boy in a baseball cap, knocks on her door. He’s looking for his plane and also needs to go to the loo. Suddenly Elise’s life changes in a wonderful way.

Complete darkness. Our concentration turns to the spherical sounds around us. Basses wander through our body, triggering images, emotions. The sensory overload which usually has us so firmly in its grip is turned off. Sound – improvised and modulated interactively – takes the lead. Stories emerge. And all this exclusively in our own heads.

In the mid-19th century, a massive fireplace was the centrepiece of every stately home in England. Children are agile enough to keep the flow of air going in the narrow and dark flues. Their young skin is scraped raw by the sooty stone walls. Their fear of falling is as strong as their fear of the master’s punishment. Black-brown-red cross hatching and unusual camera perspectives bring to life the report of a chimney sweep of the time.

In a dilapidated village in south-eastern Turkey, a Syrian Orthodox nun endures alone with her animals. However strong the hostility of her predominantly Muslim neighbourhood may be: she won’t be driven out, for she has sworn to protect the church and not to leave the sacred place. This quietly filmed observation of everyday life focuses on an isolated woman who carries the pain of a whole community inside her.

The population of the village was tortured and driven away in the 1990s. The nun Dayrayto came here only afterwards. Today she rarely receives visits from passing believers. She usually spends her days doing maintenance work on the church and taking care of the animals. Right now she is worried about her old dog. Has he been poisoned? What to make of the provocations and threats she talks about? Dayrayto is always vigilant, even when she’s resting. From her elevated dwelling she looks far across the landscape, registering every vehicle, however distant. But she is in no way distracted by the presence of the film crew. The unobtrusive camera follows the nun – not at every turn, but as a constant, protective companion as she endures on her “bastion”. Loneliness, worries and fear shape this sparse life. They made her suspicious, but also fearless.

Most accidents happen at home. Thus a likeable, jazz-loving drawn figure is unprepared for an appeal to his own political responsibility. A random Brecht reading spurs her to do something – at the very least so as not to end up on the wrong track or wrong side of things. Pointed, tidy, and full of humour and affection for human dithering, Anne Isensee questions the illusion of a permanent contradiction in reality.

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.