Five young people from Ukraine talk about their lives after the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all of them fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the war, however, shattered their life plans. Representing “Generation Maidan”, they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. Theatre director Roza Sarkisian produces a Hamlet adaptation with them in which they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas on stage again.

For them Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is not just a historical text, but a current and existential dilemma that has no clear answer. The film follows the rehearsals where different biographies, self-images and political positions clash: A soldier meets his first LGBT person, the feminist quarrels with the fact that the war has undone hard-won emancipatory achievements. Frictions and differences are exposed, compromises are strenuously negotiated. Eventually the film’s focus widens and leaves the stage to introduce the five as individuals with their own inner struggles. The result is a many-layered, dense portrait of a torn and yet powerful Ukrainian generation who, due to the Russian invasion, find themselves at war again, only a few months after their production premiered.

The yellow banana beckons from the fruit basket; it’s peeled in no time and about to disappear in the mouth. But stop! Before you can at last take the first bite, you have to share. The banana becomes smaller and smaller. The elephant, too, wants a piece of the sweet fruit. A piece for you, a piece for me … A little film about the joys of sharing.

The term hysteresis soberly describes a processual behaviour where the previous history affects the result as much as new changes. Robert Seidel enters analogue drawings, performance footage of the queer dancer Tsuki and pluck sounds and drones by Oval into a feedback system that reorganises time and movement in a multicoloured and sensual organic tableau.

Hammer and compass in Mozambique. We see a GDR flag waved at a rally in Maputo, carried by “Madgermanes”, contract workers who once toiled in eastern Germany. Some of them founded families there, like Eulidio. His daughter Sarah grows up with her mother in Berlin. The relationship with her “second home” is slow in growing, partly thanks to Luana, Sarah’s baby, whose father Eduardo is also from Mozambique.

Eulidio still remembers the Lubmin nuclear power plant. Today he fries chips in Springs, South Africa. Meanwhile, Sarah only knew her father from a photo for the longest time: rather cool-looking, wearing a cap. She met him for the first time when she was eleven and felt how comfortable she was surrounded by people whose skin is as dark as hers. As an adult woman she decides to spend some time in Mozambique – and meets Eduardo. On the flight back she’s pregnant. This documentary observation by Brenda Akele Jorde deals with Sarah’s attempt to weave together and spin out threads that were torn by the fall of communism. And it shows the challenges this brings: While Sarah is confronted with racism in Germany, in Africa she’s regarded as a German. While once her father Eulidio was expelled after the fall of the Berlin Wall, now it’s Eduardo who sees his daughter only sporadically.