Silence reigns in the Berlin flat, but the film, whose complex montage encompasses the disintegration of Syria and life in exile, leaves no doubt that things are different in director Diana El Jeiroudi’s mind. Archival footage, loose portraits of confidants and an intimate perspective that explores her own position and her way of coping with trauma add up to a multi-layered document.

“Evil has a very loud and terrifying sound,” El Jeiroudi already noted as a child. Growing up in a country marked by surveillance and military parades has left its mark. In “Republic of Silence”, she looks for a way to come to terms with it, condensing old material, some of which shot in Syria, with a written monologue and stories of persons who also chose exile in the course of the civil war. The result is a complex filmic space that reveals the political and social disintegration of a nation. El Jeiroudi increasingly concentrates on showing a present outside Syria, life in emigration. Passing her husband's  nocturnal teeth grinding, birthday parties and disruptions in the international film festival scene, a life between tension and new beginnings becomes apparent.

Black and white, white and black. At first everything seems well-ordered in this bicoloured world. The black cat lives in the white field, the white bird in the black one. Each in their place. But when the two venture into each other’s space, nothing stays the same and their world unravels. A fast-paced silhouette animation.

Coupledom has its own dynamics. Her professional obligations do not tick by the clock, his cooking and love are extraordinary, but, alas, precisely timed. This all too familiar incompatibility is condensed into murky, acrid roast fumes and ends civilized, but bloody. Špela Čadež gradually slows down the pace, creating a space for the absurd goings-on to penetrate deeper and deeper. Black humour, “well done”.

A nostalgic trip into a past when buying a car constituted a lifetime’s work – especially for those Europeans who had a maximum of two handful of brands at their disposal. This cheerfully edited collection of auto biographies from socialist production evokes seemingly carefree times when the motorized vehicle was allowed to be simply a status symbol: free from ideological turf wars revolving around the climate crisis and mobility diets.

From Russia via Bulgaria and the Czech Republic to Germany and Norway, love stories between humans and Trabi, Moskvitch and Volga are captured on film. We meet protagonists who are fond of their beloved piece of tin, then or now, or have even amassed a considerable collection. There’s a couple who met and fell in love at a retro car exhibition and still drive the same model today. We meet a sexton who passes on his official car after 32 years of use. We make the acquaintance of a pin-up who always poses in front of vintage cars from the East. They all have a soft spot for these rickety rust buckets, because even though the products of the socialist car industry were usually slow, chunky, tedious to drive and to repair, they were all regarded as showpieces of a successful life. And there was one in almost every family: coveted, long longed-for, assiduously polished.

The archived testimonies of “Breaking the Silence”, an association of military veterans, are to be turned into a compilation of “service incidents” in the Israeli-occupied territories. But Avi Mograbi confesses: “My films tend to get complicated, even when my intention is to make a very simple film.” His reaction to a complex doom is artistically and intellectually commensurate: complex. Once again he uses a built-in commentary function in which he himself, white-bearded, explains the tricky situation to his audience: not as a special “Israel-Palestine” case, but as the bitter standard application of the globally familiar aporetic model of “military occupation”.

The NGO “Breaking the Silence” – BtS for short – consists of veteran Israeli soldiers who, by collecting personal accounts of their memories, want to raise awareness of everyday military life and the treatment of the population in the Occupied Territories. Director Silvina Landsmann’s film allows us a look behind the scenes of a contested group with a controversial approach in the midst of a conflict that’s been smouldering for more than 70 years.

What makes a good soldier? The ability to execute orders without scruples, or the consideration of higher moral goals when dealing with the enemy? For many members of BtS, the latter was only possible after active military service. In their work, they engage with operations and acts that in retrospect seem wrong to them. They address the Israeli population and foreign media with videos, lectures and city tours. The streets of Hebron are the site of frequent clashes between BtS, Israeli settlers and the army. On the political level, too, the organisation is harshly criticized. They are accused of fabricating stories, damaging Israel’s reputation and playing into the hands of anti-Semites. Landsmann observes with a cinematic, sober eye how the group struggles internally and externally to find its voice.

A Nazi propaganda film that survived only in fragments and never got to “test” its effect. It took intensive research to identify the scattered remains, correct the title in circulation, “Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt” (The Führer Gives a City to the Jews), and clarify who was able to see the roughly 90-minute attempted defraud at all before it disappeared. The intended international audience was no longer within reach in 1944/1945. But would they have been convinced by the retirement home for “resettled” Jews staged here? Kurt Gerron, film and theatre celebrity, interned in the Ghetto and conscripted as co-director, was deported to Auschwitz and gassed as late as 1944.

No sooner had optical sound been invented than it was used in other than the intended way. Geometric patterns, intertwined lines, facial profiles and letters instead of voice recordings and music – Moholy-Nagy imaginatively designs the optical soundtrack of the film. The photocell of the film projector then translates his “handwriting in sound” into electronic buzzes and beeps, along and beside the musical scale.

Silesia: a contested region marked by migrations. Animosities between the peoples have a long tradition here, not only since the Second World War. But the National Socialist tyranny left clear lesions behind. The director’s grandfather comes from this region, was the organist in a church in Krasiejów – a place which was once also called Krascheow and, for a while, Schönhorst.

The filmmaker Juliane Henrich – or more precisely, her alter ego, the writer Nannina Matz – sets out in search of her family history. What she finds are bizarre ways of representing the history of humanity – and the history of earth. She comes across all kinds of traces of dinosaurs. Some may only be made of plastic, but others are not: A certain species of this genus, whose fossils were found in Silesia, was christened “Silesaurus opolensis” by the Polish palaeontologist Jerzy Dzik. That’s why there is a Dinosaur Park in Krasiejów. And a local museum, of course. But also many people with different individual memories. They do not necessarily lead to ground-breaking discoveries regarding the looked-for family past, but they broaden the view: of the complex history of this region and the way it is thought together, represented and codified.