Few artist portraits give us the privilege of getting as close to the painter as if we had free access to his studio. Over a period of three years, Pepe Danquart got to accompany the painter Daniel Richter, watching him paint, negotiate with his gallerist, talk to his publisher and joke with fellow artist Jonathan Meese. Danquart interviews collectors, attends auctions and even visits record shops.

From all this the complex image of an artist emerges who appreciates the abstract as much as the figurative and who seems to be searching constantly for the meaning of his work. Daniel Richter’s paintings fetch top prices on the art market – an aspect that neither Pepe Danquart nor the painter leave out, but that is, fortunately, not the focus here. Openings, auctions and gala dinners structure the narrative, but its heart is Richter’s studio, where we see him as a craftsman, a restless doer, who reflects surprisingly frankly and self-deprecatingly on his work, which to him is always also a political act. He talks about the process of creation, the effect, meaning and significance of his paintings, makes clear statements and, notwithstanding a certain amount of craving for recognition, ultimately doesn’t take himself more seriously than necessary.

Argentine director Agustina Pérez Rial’s debut feature-length film about the ninth edition of the International Film Festival in her native city of Mar del Plata from 1968 seems to find an uncommonly balanced solution to the primal dilemma of documentary storytelling. In an impressively brilliant montage of archive material, a story is constructed which, according to the director herself, is not necessarily true, but realistic.

Historical black and white photos of captivating beauty, film footage from various sources and documents from the now open archives of the surveillance authorities of the time are counteracted by a supposed witness report – de facto a female voice from offscreen. Pérez Rial is in subtle and intelligent control of her cinematic tools, pulling out all the stops: documentary and fiction, historical and contemporary, aesthetic, trivia and anecdotes. On the one hand, the meticulously researched facts unearth a forgotten microfacet of the Cold War, complete with militarisation, persecution and paranoia. On the other hand, they show a film festival as a node of ideologies and describe it as a highly politicised place. This opens unexpected spaces of reflection for the role assigned to such a cultural event – historical or current.

Somewhere on an ocean the crew of a fish trawler go about their work day and night. Every step must be perfect, every movement automatically leads to the next. Heavy chains have to be secured, nets reeled in, fish swiftly gutted and packed with ice into large boxes. A cigarette is always dangling from the lips and hopefully there’s always something left in the jar of chocolate cream. The camera moves in the same rolling beat as the ship in the waves.

A cinematic journey to the lowest point on earth, in the course of which the universal story of creation, responsibility and doom unfolds. The film was shot at the shores of the Dead Sea, where God once destroyed Sodom and Gomorra to punish the sins of humanity. The waters of the lake have been receding for decades. What’s left are salty crusts, deserted spas and dangerous sinkholes. The ambiguous but never obtrusive montage interweaves the biblical tale of Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt, with the disconcerting question of why we, as allegedly rational beings, react to the current crises by going into a state of shock instead of taking action.

On the island of Palawan in the Philippine archipelago, more and more rainforest is falling victim to the saws. The clearances have long been illegal but are protected and even initiated by President Duterte’s corrupt regime. Local resistance is forming. A group of courageous men around a determined human rights lawyer decide to react. They sneak into the forests to take away the logging teams’ chainsaws, cars and boats. This exciting film, constructed like a thriller, follows them on their dangerous missions, which they call “meta-legal”. But the price is high: Some of the activists pay for their resistance with their lives.

“Won’t make it today, hope you don’t mind.” A casual call, the husband will be late again, not to be expected before eight. He is an officer in the National People’s Army, still young, but with a lot of postings under his belt, always accompanied by his wife. She has resigned herself to her fate, while he flourishes enviably in his profession. Róża Berger-Fiedler spends most of the time by his side, following him in brisk cuts from appointment to appointment. Talking is required and demanded constantly: to representatives of the Soviet armed forces, young recruits, subordinates. Words come easy to him, but not everything runs smoothly.

Small and cu… No, not cute. This knee-high creature seems shy and in need of love instead. Until it comes snarling round the corner, chasing you on its short legs through the empty suburb. An uncomfortable lurking feeling spreads. With sparse drawing, mean sound bites and not-so-friendly characters, Malte Stein lays out the surgical instruments for a head game.

When the time “when St. Joseph came” is mentioned in this film, it doesn’t refer to a religious phenomenon, but to the most popular product of TML Holy Crafts Incorporated. In the factory on the Philippines, the country with the third-largest Catholic population in the world, the employees manufacture statues of saints under exploitative conditions. Joseph Mangat portrays this place with a focus on the workers, including some from the LGBTQI community.

In the first scene, a plaster bust is uncovered layer by layer. This image could also serve to describe the approach of “Divine Factory”: From the shop to the workshop, from the entrepreneur to the simple worker, from the production to the uses made of the religious articles, this film reveals the social and economic facets of this institution. The Filipino director not only observes precisely how people work and trade there, he also involves the participants in frank conversations about love, wages and living conditions. The employees’ profit-oriented payment model reveals how economical and religious ideas interlock. The success of the company in the city of Antipolo near Manila, desirable for all, thus appears as nothing short of a divine blessing.

Driven by the barking of the voracious rented apartment, an aged ballet dancer makes his way through a permanently rain-drenched wasteland to his monotonous job. The protagonist makes graceful movements to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and seems briefly fulfilled. But the audience? Pearls before cows! Priit Tender’s caustic, surreal stop motion animation is a free association inspired by a poem by Andres Ehin about a grueling, gluttonous daily routine that’s gone to the dogs.

A summer day in the meadow. Two girls have fun playing ball, until the ball is thrown too hard. The ensuing anger and quarrel make them puff up until they fly up to the clouds like balloons. Once up there, they have no idea how to get back down again. Then they discover that their kitten is stuck in a tree. Who can rescue it?

The LGBTQIA2S+ community in Russia is facing an increasingly hostile social climate, is tabooed and criminalised. The AR experience opens a digital safe space for the local drag scene where they can perform without fear of violence. At the same time, this artistic occupation of heteronormatively dominated places is a political intervention.

In a remote village, whose name roughly means “a cold place”, this film looks for warmth in encounters. The Ukrainian village of Stuzhytsya is situated in the Carpathian Mountains in the border triangle between Poland and Slovakia. The three elderly female protagonists – a farmer, a post office clerk and a biologist – are firmly rooted in a place where hardly any young people are left in 2019, the year of Zelensky’s election victory. Over time, the film crew also becomes, at least temporarily, a valued part of the village community.

Between horoscope readings at the post office, farm work with pitchforks and church blessings of cars in need of repair, Maksym Melnyk, also a native of Zakarpatska Oblast, establishes a growing intimacy with the three women. His documentary style arises from the interaction: In the beginning, he asks off camera questions like a reporter, but as he gets closer to the people, he enters the frame himself. Very few documentary filmmakers today see themselves as a “fly on the wall”. But gifting a pig to a protagonist in front of the camera or letting her cut the camerman’s hair? That’s rather unusual. Taking the single farmer Hanna, who treats Melnyk and his cinematographer Florian Baumgarten – whom she calls “the German” – like sons, as an example, the film portrays a rural lifestyle full of privation that seems to be in decline in the mountain region near the EU border.

The core of this most personal of the Thorndikes’ projects are Annelie’s diary entries: Her story is to be the starting point for a kind of all-German ‘Heimatfilm’ that praises the utopian power of the GDR and sharply condemns Federal German wrongs, but finds transcendent beauty on both sides of the wall. Over the course of production, however, the visionary dimension of the project was progressively trimmed down, though it’s still tangible everywhere in the compromised final version: The intensity of its pathos is both oppressive and enchanting; some historical simplifications and ideological twists and bends may be hair-raising, but they still achieve the desired effect.

A young woman asks a hyena to take her place at a dinner and dance given in her honour. The plan requires skill and some violence, too. The posh company is portrayed in bold calligraphic brush-strokes, the vibrant animation is supplied by the heroine’s temperament. This mischievous farce confronts a class frozen in tradition and etiquette with a scavenging animal that gleefully celebrates anarchy.

For thirty years, Sofía Brockenshire’s father travelled the world as an official of the Canadian Immigration Service, his family always by his side. Diaries and other contemporary documents show the numerous relocations, the destinations in South Korea, India, in South and Central American countries. The result is a detailed mosaic of memories and audiovisual snippets that tries to take not only the civil servant’s perspective, but also that of his wife and children.

When asked where they originally came from, the Brockenshire kids answer cleverly: from the suitcases. Because they travel with them year after year, always prepared to have to leave a place they just moved to. The life of the family is determined by the Canadian authorities, they seem to have practically no say in the matter. Neil Brockenshire’s views on his professional career are ambivalent: full of gratitude and certain to have helped people, but also thoughtful and occasionally resentful. In her film, Sofía Brockenshire re-assembles what was scattered across the globe over the decades: photos, thoughts, desires. “The Dependents” is a personal portrait and something of a reflection about the existence as a professional expat in a world that has no borders for some and nothing but obstacles for others.