In 1885, two boys came across a large collection of Chumash Indian religious artefacts in a cave in California’s San Martin Mountains. Later named Bowers Cave, it is now located on a landfill site. Lee Lynch and Lee Anne Schmitt’s graceful, protean short braids together a panoply of different texts and images to unearth the different layers to this all-too American story and allow its wider implications to resonate: photos of museum exhibits given their Chumashan names in voice-over, historical quotes that move across views of contemporary industrial activity, Indigenous figures rendered as bright plastic toys, the mouth of the cave and the markings carved into its walls.

“Why should I move? I was born here.” While a senseless war is waged in Vietnam and million-dollar rockets are shot to the moon, there is not enough decent housing in New York – and worse, the poor are being forcibly evicted from their homes, says an angry protagonist of this activist film which introduces the New York squatter movement. Latin Americans in particular are forced to leave the lucrative Manhattan housing market, but the protesters do not accept this without putting up a fight. “Break & Enter” is a spontaneous and encouraging film document about self-organised communities based on solidarity.

At American high schools, the threat of school shootings has become omnipresent. In addition to regular drills of how to act in case of assault, security forces and metal detectors are now part of everyday life in the schools. In the name of security, a whole industry is busy developing bulletproof hoodies and blackboards, arming teachers and installing ever more surveillance devices. Is this prevention? Or a self-fulfilling prophecy?

While cheerleaders rehearse, basketball teams play and homecoming queens are crowned, adults in the background prepare for the emergency: What to do if a school is attacked – from inside or outside? Behaviour and meditation training to prevent violence in the first place are one thing. More money, however, is spent on armament. The so-called security industry has long entered the school market. Todd Chandler’s restrained observation takes a look at the arms and service industries and the media, at social psychologists as well as teachers. He cleverly focuses not on individual schools and incidents but rather on how a whole system responds to a threat.

Eating dirt and burping with relish – an earthworm refuses to be satisfied with this embarrassing evolutionary outcome for his species and sets out to learn better things. But imitating many-legged and winged insects does not result in distinguished behaviour but rather leads to mortal danger. Ethan Barrett demonstrates magnificently that clay is the pinnacle of the evolutionary pyramid of animation, especially when it is set to such a light and poignant score.

A genius of independent cinema looks back on his hitherto unrecognized work. From now on he will leave this unprofitable art well alone, be part of the big business, sell himself and be bought. A brilliant future seems within reach. A torrent of buzzwords from the beginner’s guide to self-marketing. Burning ambition. Caustic sarcasm. Biting irony.

A film about a child with a passion: The little girl loves everything that flies high. She lets herself being pushed on the swing until she is almost out of the frame, and she loves her new balloon. But then she gets caught in the clutches of a bird dealer who locks her up in his flat on the top floor of a high-rise. The only way out is through the window.

“It is places like Laikipia that make some Kenyans begin to ask: Are we really independent?” For centuries, this region in the central Kenyan highlands has been a grazing area for the Samburus’ animals. With colonialisation, white people began to settle there, built ranches and farmed cattle. After Kenya’s independence in 1963, they stayed on. So far, relations between them and the locals have been alright, albeit distant. Climate change, however, increases the potential for conflict in the country and intensifies the competition for resources.
Laikipia has been suffering from the effects of global warming for several decades. Long periods of drought destroy the grassland the Samburu and their herds depend on. The white cattle farmers’ ranches and not least the privately managed and strictly guarded nature reserves cut through their traditional migration routes and block off the paths with electric fences. When elections are near, the disputes threaten to escalate. Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murimi followed Kenyans of all parties over a period of five years and give them a chance to tell their stories in this film.

The winter’s night draws its last breaths in the milky amber glow of the street lights. Snowflakes trickle down, the camera slowly circles a small guardroom in a driveway. Night after night, this lonely island is occupied by: Nobody. As a security guard in the cold, he guarantees the safety of the warm homes and their owners. He passes the time with a recalcitrant oil radiator, a calendar girl on a green meadow and his meandering thoughts. His security logs serve as a seismograph of reflections on life and nightly rounds of the square. Nobody is wrapped in a shell of coolness grown over a long time, which makes it hard for him to react to a rare smile the way he would like to in his heart.
Nadia Hallgren and Jamie-James Medina condense an autobiographical short story by artist and musician Willis Earl Beal aka “Nobody”. The actor Michael K. Williams, who died in 2021, lent his voice to this inner monologue and gives it a sleepy, melodious sound. In this very cinematic, melancholy piece in a state of limbo, casual observations open a philosophical cosmos. But every time the journey of the mind crashes on the tarmac of the carpark in front of the block of flats.