Electromobility is a great promise of the future. The Democratic Republic of the Congo with its vast cobalt and lithium deposits supplies two of the essential building blocks for the necessary batteries. “Machini” focuses on the lives of those who bear the brunt of the exploitation of such dirty raw materials for our “clean” energy.

Sanjivani, a young woman from a rural area in the state of Maharashtra in central India, is a loving and tender mother. After her husband’s suicide, she lives with her brother-in-law who makes her work in the fields. She is now solely responsible for her two kids, faced with a mountain of debt left by her husband and the structures of a patriarchal society that incapacitates and renders invisible widows like her. It is only when she joins a group of women who suffered similar fates that she slowly gains some self-confidence. She is not alone with her despair and grief – the suicide rate among peasants who took their lives in the face of crop failures and dumping prices on the globalised market is harrowing: 400,000 in the last twenty years.
Kinshuk Surjan not only observes people and circumstances with compassion; he also stands for a cinema that makes a difference. The women’s group he follows here only came together as a result of his film project. In impressive images and with great empathy for the protagonists he portrays, he not only succeeds in producing a careful representation of highly complex contexts, but also a truly documentary intervention into unacceptable conditions – with the aim of improving them.

We are travelling back in time to the early 19th century on the south coast of England. This is where Mary Anning lives, a 12-year-old girl who is inquisitive, persistent and fascinated by fossils. She spends every free minute at the beach to look for the fossilised remains of long extinct animal species in the strata of her hometown’s coastal cliffs. Her father, too, is an enthusiast and earns a little extra for his family by selling fossils. When he disappears after the collapse of a cliff, Mary’s life is shaken. All that her father leaves behind is a mysterious drawing whose meaning Mary only gradually makes out. She is determined to uncover the secret together with unexpected allies. An entertaining and warm-hearted biopic about one of the first female palaeontologists.

A brilliant and highly poetic collection of tiny moving image moments which offers aesthetic delights through cleverly chosen camera angles, framing, lighting, montage and the materials used. This archive of trifles remains silent. The eyes begin to hear, the sound is generated in the mind. Simply enchanting.

Flocks of starlings are circling above the retirement home. These impressive natural spectacles are called murmurations because from a distance they sound like collective murmuring. Not everyone hears or sees them, but the old man notices. Sometimes the starlings send a single twittering messenger to his window. Often, the birds are more present to him than his fellow humans, more present than the old demented fellow resident who regularly waters a still life of flowers, more present than his neighbours in the amateur choir. And then it happens: The old man finds a first feather in his hair, then a second, then several. Soon he grows a beak so that instead of singing he can only caw.
The last phase of life we witness here is lovingly animated: The puppet animation was created with gauze bandages, a beautiful approach to the vulnerability that comes with aging. The farewell to life shown here is devoid of pathos, not even that over-produced grief we know from many narratives of dying. Even the retirement home is a completely mundane place, neutrally portrayed. Instead, we follow this feathered farewell as a quiet but growing alienation from the world, a no-longer-belonging. And one day we will all grow the wings that go with it.

Once again ten-year-old Romy must say goodbye to her school class to travel through Europe with her family. She pitches in at home because circus life makes children grow up quickly. This film lets us share in her everyday life and the passion for the grand performance. It talks about her longing for the familiar, but also the freedom of being on the road.

Hunger and hardship ruled the Piemontese mountain village of Ughettera at the beginning of the 20th century. The meek peasants complained neither about the parasitic priests nor the tough seasonal winter work in neighbouring France – not even when the Italian state called them to arms and sent them first to Libya, then into the World War. Only when the Fascists arrive did the Ughetto family trade its home for new deprivations and new hopes across the border.

With this imaginatively directed puppet animation, Alain Ughetto has created a warm-hearted memorial to his Italian grandparents Cesira and Luigi. With subtle humour, tenderness and empathy he tells of generations who lived in poverty, but also of happiness and love, fortunes and misfortunes. “You don’t come from a country, you come from your childhood”, Cesira teaches him. The director finds himself in this family chronicle, recognises his predilection for working with his hands. Soon the film becomes a reflection on telling stories with what these hands shaped. They are frequently present in the frame – piling charcoal into a mountain, making forests from broccoli or simply getting handed a cup of damn strong espresso by Cesira.

How do you grow up on a planet that is being destroyed by humanity? This film looks for answers to this urgent question and introduces us to Bo and Luca. The close friends are enthusiastic climate activists, connected by their commitment. We follow the two teenagers for four years on their contradictory and surprising path to adulthood.

A cinematic family constellation in which the audience is guided through a seemingly random conglomeration of private photos, video recordings, notes, thoughts, sounds and texts. Narrative strands crystallise, only to be discarded, taken up again and finally left standing in their ambiguity. A film about the big questions of life, love, family, relationships, death and good food. No more, and certainly no less.

Pippa and Victoria’s favourite pastime is skating. But there are new frustrating “NO SKATING” signs cropping up everywhere in the city. The two refuse to let this get them down and forge a plan to take back the city. They want to organise a street contest to find more allies – and to finally skate again!

Learning a foreign language is like creating another self. How can you speak it without losing your own sound, without dissolving completely in it – and still be heard and noticed? This film is a charming and intellectually fastidious attempt to navigate the complexities of language, identity and trauma.

To do this, the filmmaker resorts to her own biography. Because Russia invaded Ukraine when Daryna Mamaisur, who comes from Kyiv, was in Portugal for a Doc Nomads graduate course. Home and the search for it became the defining factors of this work, as well as the traumatic situation of only being able to “witness” the difficult situation from a distance. She, the Ukrainian in Portugal, learns Portuguese. She lets the new words for “war,” “explosion” and “attack” roll off her tongue. She compares them with the soft, intimate sound of her native language, with the sound of Kyiv. Friends send audio and visual recordings from Ukraine which, combined with animations, become a multilayered essay and finally a testimony – for the resilience of language and culture, no matter where they are spoken and lived, and not least for the power of the artistic documentary, which can make speech and sound possible.

An ingeniously sketched chamber play about the nerve-racking hour before dinner: mother peels vegetables while father is trying to convince their little daughter to take a bath. The protagonists are pretty caricatures of their respective natures, even more so of the roles imposed upon them. An ordinary family – bound together for little good and much evil.

“See you next year!” a Portuguese fire warden says as he dismantles his control equipment at the end of the season. Humans and nature in southern Europe may be used to forest fires, but that does not change the facts: The ever more massive conflagrations are caused by climate change. We have long been living in the age of fire.

In the Portuguese interior, a forest fire has just devastated a large area. Wounded nature is silent, not a single bird is heard, only the wind that makes the charred tree trunks rustle. But the vegetation recovers astonishingly fast. Where all life seemed to be gone, greenery soon sprouts from the ruined trees. The residents of the affected region are engaged in the reconstruction with great respect for their natural environment. Because plants, too, are sentient creatures. In quiet, almost melancholic, but also hopeful images, the film pays tribute to the strength of the trees and illustrates how essential it would be for humanity to learn to live in harmony with nature again.

For ten years, Belgian photographer and artist Léonard Pongo has been documenting the landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In his latest work, he enters into a sensual dialogue with them. The precise camera often focuses on light reflections that literally draw us into the moving images, while at the same time revealing the cinematographic apparatus behind them. In combination with the elaborate sound design and the restrained, beautiful music of “Bear Bones, Lay Low”, the solo project of the Belgium-based Venezuelan Ernesto González, the portrait of a landscape emerges which the captivating montage composition turns into a visual, auditive and meditative pleasure.
Nonetheless, “Tales from the Source” is not a traditional “nature film” but an aesthetic positioning inspired by Congolese traditions, art and philosophy which – as the artist himself emphasises – represents the Congolese landscape “as a source rather than a resource.” The result is best described as an experience rather than a representation.

Barely a kilometre off the Belgian coast, 35,000 tons of chemical munitions are buried at the bottom of the sea. The scraps of yesterday’s wars are secreting toxic gases today and the film explores the effects this will have – from fishing boats to delicatessen counters. An ominous droning lies over the impressive images of already dubious production processes. The shrimp end up in fish cakes. The seagulls lament the calamity. The people are at a loss.

One day, the young mother Christelle panics and runs. Her husband Laurent sets out to find her, baby in arms. He questions her father, sister, friends. Suddenly, Christelle’s disappearance exposes cracks that had remained hidden in a seemingly perfect world. A complex network of relationships turns out to be a fragile house of cards. Dominique Cabrera’s third feature film brings together a magnificent ensemble of actors, all of whom are allowed to express the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of their characters with wit and empathy, above all Marilyne Canto, who plays the leading role here and whom Cabrera cast in four of her five feature films.