Every day the shoes from the shoe rack have new adventures. Today, the rubber boots Buddel and Torf tell the other shoes about their experience on a rainy day with a huge dark puddle in the playground, and what trick the unicorn rubber boots Chunk and Tuva used to take away their fear of getting thoroughly dirty … Episode three of the popular KiKA series.

19-year-old Maydegol fled from Afghanistan to Iran with her family. Here she tries to make her big dream come true: She wants to be a professional Muay Thai boxer. The sport not only gives her strength for her gruelling daily life, but is also meant to help her get out of this inhospitable exile at last and work towards social change in Afghanistan. In order to be able to afford the training, Maydegol works every spare minute without her parents’ knowledge, including on fruit and vegetable plantations. She reflects on her apparently hopeless situation with friends from her boxing club: stuck in a foreign country, without documents and without prospects. The young women do not give up, though; they state clearly what they think, what they demand and what they expect from life.
Maydegol’s expectations are as special as she is. The likeable, captivating protagonist not only impresses with her persistence, but also with her authentic personality, which shines through in this documentary – even in the dark moments.

In 1945, the Red Army are advancing on German territory, the Second World War is drawing to an end. Families are still trying to escape to America, but many plans fail. Five-year-old Sophie also loses her father and mother during the flight. They are killed by Nazi officer Scharf and a Soviet soldier named Vasily, with Hitler Youth Beckmann as a witness. The gruesome event takes place in an extremely strange hotel which henceforth will bind the four survivors to its premises in bizarre ways, no matter which rooms of the truly scary building they find themselves in. Up in the lounge, where the new customers arrive one by one, down in the kitchen, where the now grown-up Sophie prepares food, or even in an alcove near the elevator shaft, where Beckmann hides with the rats. The involuntary permanent guests age but never tire of courting Sophie.
Heinrich Sabl has built an excitingly disturbing dollhouse decorated with quotes from reality for the German-Soviet history of guilt and coping. In his first feature-length animated film, on which the director worked for more than twenty years, he sends extraordinary characters on an equally extraordinary visual and acoustic time journey through the war-damaged suites of the 20th century.

There was an eery silence after a fire had destroyed the Moria camp completely in September 2020. Not just locally, but in public discourse. The world did not seem particularly concerned with the inhumane conditions in other camps on Europe’s external borders or the countless pushbacks in the Mediterranean. Nor did the arrest of six adolescents who were accused of arson resonate in any audible way – though even a second glance at the circumstances of the investigation and the criminal proceedings revealed the actions of the Greek judiciary to be questionable. Not to mention the underlying refugee policy of the European Union.
Jennifer Mallmann dares to take this second glance with her film. At its centre is her correspondence with Hassan, one of the convicted youths, who tells her of his everyday life, his desires and fears from prison. Calm, precisely framed images document “normality” on the fringes of Fortress Europe. They show how strategical isolation and the ensuing structural exclusion work. If you want to know how our community of nations imagines its future you only need to look at the newly-built futuristic high-security camps, where new arrivals are treated like people who have committed serious crimes.

The child and the otter live in a small cottage in the woods. Their water source has dried up a while ago. In their distress they set out together to the snow-covered mountains to bring back a supply from the icy summits … With her first animated film, illustrator Malin Neumann delivers a poetic tale in warm colours about the vital importance of water.