Sardinia, 1940. The harmless term “horsing around” takes on a very serious and ultimately tragic meaning for 14-year-old Michele and his 11-year-old friend Ventura. When they learn that the peasants have sold their best horses for serious money to the state and thus to the military for the approaching war, the two boys take a decision that is as naïve as it is intuitive: They free the herd in a daring nighttime operation. Their happiness is short-lived. Betrayed by a villager, they are caught on the way home and Ventura is shot dead. A senseless death? Or a sign of special bravery, as the ambiguous Sardinian film title suggests?
Director Giovanni Columbu, a Sardinian himself, has dedicated his late animation debut to his grandmother who once told him the story. He took the liberty of adapting it with brushstrokes on paper, his style drawing primarily on the charms of historical painting schools, animation techniques and cinema genres. Columbu’s associative visual language, marked by shades of black, white, and grey, is animated by impulsive hatchings, countless dots, and generous elisions. The soundtrack, too, sets rather sparse nuances – subtle illustrations that draw on Sardinian cultural traditions while opening a space for universal metaphors.

For the first time in six years, Barbara Morgenstern, pioneer of German-style electronic intimate pop, works on a new album. Her laptop sits on a shoebox, in the privacy of her home she finds first lines and harmonies: “I like to be alone,” one song begins. One by one, musicians join her. Intuitive ideas take shape. A window has opened. Arrangements, rehearsals, recordings follow. Step by step, the music enters public space, images are produced, videos, narratives. Questions arise: New beginning or back to the roots? New Biedermeier or tough political comment? The bigger the band, the riskier the booking. The more crisis-ridden the environment, the more comforting the music-making.
Sabine Herpich shows the creation of a pop album as a working process. Her view is as unpretentious as her protagonist, her quiet observation not interested in story and glamour, but in closeness and comprehension. We understand why someone works as an artist, even if it is never explained. Barbara Morgenstern shares what moves her: “Labour of love / for the rest of the earth / I’m more than certain / that this still has worth.”

Identity is a myth. Berthold Barluschke, an ambitious cog in the GDR foreign trade system, has changed names and roles multiple times. Thomas Heise follows him as he moves house. He once went from Mittenwalde to New York, now he is leaving his family in Paris. A polyglot secret agent with a petty bourgeois background. Barluschke worked for the GDR secret service and the West German Federal Intelligence Service, always anxious to get the most out of it for himself. “What should really be talked about?” the filmmaker asks. The impossible endeavour of getting to the professional impostor using the means of documentary film results in one of the freest, most fragmented works in Heise’s oeuvre. Awarded the Silver Dove at DOK Leipzig but rarely screened since.

Tree sitting is an important part of climate activism. The “occupation” of Dannenröder Forst in 2019 was meant to prevent its clearance for a highway. The people holding out in the airy heights of their tree houses were dependent on support and supplies from the ground. This help came from locals who would never have dreamed of being part of a resistance movement before. David Klammer’s film shows how brand-new alliances are formed in the face of environmental and climate destruction while realising how powerless words are. These alliances could last – even if the trees, like those in the “Danni”, fall victim to the chainsaws in the end.

The world stands still. Gaudily painted cruise ships lie in the oil port of Augusta on the south-east coast of Sicily. Their lustre fades a little more every day. On the scorched, tinged 16mm film stock they seem as unfit for the future as the refineries visible behind them. When, if not in the early summer of 2021, would the time have ever been riper for reflection and reassessment?! Old, exploitative economic systems that keep people away from Europe and let only raw materials enter are in lockdown. Their future is unimaginable. But is there a way back? To the gentle sound of the waves, the birds and the insects, the smoke of the industrial plants wafts back into the chimneys. But the images have been damaged.

Grandma has become a little doddery. And since the death of her husband, called E.O., ever bigger gaps have opened in her memory, and her disorientation has increased. Director Astrid Menzel makes a decision: to take a ten-day canoe trip on northern German waters with her brother and the 86-year-old lady. An adventure whose outcome is uncertain and which the three travellers have to face anew at every stage.

Looking at the sky, watching the changing cloud formations, being all there. Things that Astrid Menzel’s grandmother finds easier as her dementia progresses. Horses and beds are recognisable up there, and sometimes there are thoughts of the late E.O. A chain of disintegration has been set in motion: The beloved house has become confusing, a home for grandma is being searched, the relatives feel nagging guilt. The granddaughter Astrid feels the need for action. Gently and with endless patience, she involves the elderly lady in the preparations and organisation of a canoe trip that would be a challenge for any beginner: Travelling on the river day in and day out, a different sleeping place almost every night. Old and young are trying to find strategies of interaction. Rummikub matches and writing a travel diary anchor them, but emotional breakdowns, too, are part of the endeavour.

The little green figure runs up the mountain to the other figures made of beads and small building blocks. All move to the same rhythm, right, left, up, down. One day the little green figure, too, is supposed to decorate itself with beads. But this throws everything out of sync. The gears come to a standstill.

Filip lives next to Tereza, he is a blocked writer, she is an ageing prostitute. They have little in common, except for the wall separating their apartments. One day Tereza asks him to write a letter to her fiancé. But that’s only the beginning … Špela Čadež makes the puppets dance, loosely based on Maxim Gorky: a pas de deux of neighbouring lonelinesses.

In November 2021, people tried to enter the EU via Belarus and Poland, but the route turned out to be a death trap. All access points to the border region were blocked in order not to create an escape corridor. Men, women and children were stuck in no man’s land – in the middle of winter, in the middle of the forest, for weeks. The film follows Polish activists on their mission. They learn that humanitarian aid, just like the refugees themselves, comes up against borders.

Tröglitz in 2015: The mayor organises a shelter for refugees. He and his family become homeless themselves, because many residents believe that strangers do not belong in their Middle German home. With an interview with the mayor on the soundtrack, the drawings and 3D animations make tangible how the immense hatred corrodes the fabric of the community and tears the people apart.

Siren-like singing and rhythmic light reflections segue into a lyrical text and sketched silhouettes of coastlines and waves. Delicate lines and soft shadings on superimposed transparent foils form many-layered networks of shapes and structures. What is offscreen creeps into the frame through reflections and blends in with the visual design of the film. Then and now meet and merge into a poetic narrative about a childhood in Stralsund, at a time when the city was still part of the GDR. A fenced-in, circumscribed childhood, framed by nocturnal floodlights, the bawling of drunk sailors and the crumbling plaster of facades and walls gone grey. The narrator manages to leave this oppressive fortress behind, but she can never escape completely. The memories that have settled like grey dust on her interior will stay with her forever.

In only ninety seconds Marcus Grysczok tells a touching personal story of loss and takes us to great emotional depths. Tune in: an electronically distorted outcry. The protagonist talks to himself and to someone who no longer lives in this world, but all the more in his heart. He looks for a way out of this state of powerlessness, assuming a stranger’s role, a free-roaming paper dog that runs between real shelves and across tables, races past people on black-and-white photographs and everyday objects, chases himself on a plate rim. The images convey a feeling of home – a home for memory and for life. Tune out? As soon as the dog stops, reality puts an end to this restless racket and brings the awareness of enduring loss. Poetic in language and design, the film formulates a moving but clear-eyed farewell to a brother.

His mother starts drinking when he is eight years old. Jan Koester projects photos from his childhood on his own body that tell of loneliness and helplessness in toxic relationships. These Rorschach-like superimposed images put physical abstractions in relation to their violent and alienated surroundings. Shifting between fluid and halting movements, telescoped pixels tugging at each other deconstruct predominant gender norms.

The biography of the female elephant Bibi, who is considered to display abnormal behaviour, is marked by misfortunes: Born in Zimbabwe in 1985. Lost her mother shortly after birth. Imported by the East Berlin zoo in 1989. Deported to the Halle zoo in 2008. On the basis of an empathic reappraisal of these traumatic events the film reflects on the significance of social issues and how to deal with exclusion today: a therapy by proxy on film that will hopefully have a long-distance healing effect on Bibi.

The river Oder: A historical and cultural landscape churned again and again by the tide of events of the past century. A tale told in concentric circles about a region which was and still is the scene of the beginning, end and open middle of voluntary and involuntary migrations. Virulent issues of daily life and politics that, asked with confident casualness, provide a robust account of the present.

Movements and stories in the border region between Poland and Germany – Andreas Voigt’s new film takes up the themes of his 1992 work “Borderland – A Journey”. The charged term “homeland” stirs up (trouble in) the minds and hearts of the people: What it once was and what has become of it! Sure, that’s not the top priority in their daily agenda. But how people appropriate this term and how that in turn structures their attitudes also determines how they figure out the taste of life in the here and now of Europe. The search for closeness is confronted with the insistence on distance. Communication about belonging becomes flimsy because the body language says something different than the spoken word. As a film that’s not about administering a politically correct separation diet, “Borderland” provokes experiences and enables encounters.