Anyone interned in the Nazi Jewish transit and collection camp Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands faced death: The trains left to Auschwitz from here, to Sobibór. In 1944, the camp commander ordered the prisoner and cameraman Rudolf Breslauer, who was murdered shortly afterwards, to film the camp, presumably as visual evidence of his own “work performance”. Harun Farocki, West German doyen of essayistic image criticism, used the surviving silent material to compose an equally silent sequence analysis commented only in title cards. It is surgery on the hidden narrative, not open heart surgery.

“I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” Even though Sky and Johanna definitely did not have this quote by Mark Twain in mind, it’s written in the stars of the two young women’s journey through South Africa. A chance acquaintance turns into a relationship that shimmers in all the colours of love. Between Marmite toasts, joints, selfies and music they explore each other inside out. But what happens when the journey ends?

In this deeply personal piece, filmmaker Johanna Seggelke chooses a very different approach to its predecessor, “Bibi Must Go” from 2020. She questions herself, her feelings and memories and almost casually unfolds an enchanting coming-of-age story about a love that emerges and fades in the seemingly endless summer. With a light hand, the film maintains the delicate balance between shimmering beauty and incidentality and manages to make the complicated dialectics of intimacy and strangeness palpable. The outstanding montage interweaves feathery holiday videos with an extraordinary score and the director’s sometimes wonderfully quirky, sometimes wise reflections. A delightfully direct film which preserves the rough edges of the moment and at the same time tries to outwit the undeceivability of one’s own emotions – at least for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

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.