It is a stroke of luck when a film manages to simply observe the flow of life and almost casually show us the miracles found in life’s corners. Ann Carolin Renninger approaches people and things with great serenity and a palpable joy of searching for and finding images.

Rovin lives on a remote farm on the Baltic Sea and explores his surroundings with insatiable curiosity. He is interested in the universe, planets, unknown creatures – and in tardigrades, those tiny multicellular organisms that look like dust bags on legs and are real survival artists. Quite unlike humans, as Rovin points out, because the latter are sure to die out one day. He sees this as a logical fact, not a threat. And when you open yourself up to the grainy, earthy images and the calm narrative, you eventually stop wondering, too, why that should be a problem. After all, as long as the wind blows through the trees and scatters the tardigrades, everything is in good order. In addition to the captivatingly alert boy, Renninger meets Marie, who knows everything about rocks, and Christopher, who decorates a place with these rocks. They are all on a quest and every day find a piece of what one cannot hold onto: the present.

The calls of the swifts fill the air. A sound that is the epitome of summer. The sun shines down on a chunky building. Surrounded by this shimmering and seemingly carefree atmosphere, children practice German vocabulary, explore empty rooms, and draw with chalk on the ground in front of the house. But not playground designs like hopscotch. Again and again, they write on the curb: “Putin, stop killing people.”

A former Wehrmacht barracks, later used by the U.S. army, this bright yellow complex now serves as accommodation for refugees from Ukraine. The directing duo’s poetic film captures an instant in the lives of these youngsters: a short and yet decisive moment between two worlds, one of them already left behind, not quite arrived yet in the other and a vague future in sight.

In 2020, the biggest protests against the government to date formed in Belarus. The protesters were met with violence and restrictions, many of them were given draconian prison sentences. A dangerous climate that sought to nip political activism in the bud took hold. For “Who, If Not Us? The Fight for Democracy in Belarus,” Juliane Tutein filmed and researched for three years in a country that had not seen a change of elites with its supposed independence in 1991. She discovered mainly women at the forefront of the courageous protesters. This portrait is dedicated to three of them: Nina Baginskaya, in her mid-seventies and active in the fight for an open Belarus since the 1980s, Tatsyana “Tanya” Hatsura-Yavorskaya, founder of the human rights film festival “Watch Docs”, and Darya Rublevskaya, the youngest at 22, who works for the “Viasna” human rights centre founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski. Tutein develops a polyphonic collage in which Minsk’s intimidating architecture has the same haunting impact as Hatsura-Yavorskaya’s escape into a Ukraine attacked by Russia.

Does farmer Ly have dealings with the Chinese, who have recently been tampering with the infrastructure of the village of Sitabaomba, not far from the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo, director Nantenaina Lova asks as bluntly as mischievously. Ly denies it. However, it becomes increasingly clear in the course of “Where Zebus Speak French” that the various development measures, often introduced by foreign initiatives and fuelled by corrupted politicians, also affect him.

Focussing on Sitabaomba, Lova shows over several years how the village population attempt to defend their farmland. Their fight is reminiscent of David against Goliath but doesn’t lead to despondence. Because in Madagascar, a very unique form of artistic, especially linguistic expression has always been cultivated which, at its best, allows people to maintain an inner independence. The commentary is therefore spoken in the style of “Kabary.” This polite, rhetorically sophisticated and sometimes mocking form of speech elegantly circumvents criticism, thus stating it all the more clearly. An artist also visits the village repeatedly and makes stones speak with the children, confirming an attitude Nantenaina Lova describes as follows: “Laughing at injustice rather than crying, resisting rather than pitying.”

The small town of Marinka lies in the Ukrainian Donetsk Oblast. Almost 10,000 people lived there, even though the town was under constant attack by pro-Russian separatists since 2014. When the war escalated in the spring of 2022, however, Marinka came under heavy artillery fire and practically all residents had to leave the town by September. The local police helped get them out. One of the policemen is Vasyl, the protagonist of this film. In a white van, soon christened the “white angel” by the population, he and his colleagues pull civilians out of the line of fire, recover the wounded and the dead. Vasyl’s helmet camera records the dramatic events of their missions: evacuating scared people from their cellars, first aid for the seriously injured, the hasty gathering of personal belongings, the painful and permanent partings.

Six months after the end of Marinka, the Leipzig-based investigative journalist Arndt Ginzel and his crew return to eastern Ukraine. They find the survivors, rescued persons and rescuers, and let them comment the action cam images. They speak of losses, of pain and grief, but also of hopes and dreams. “White Angel – The End of Marinka” is more than a film about war. It is a document of humanity and the longing for peace.