Mount Sinai Hospital in New York is one of the largest and oldest hospitals in the United States. Mati, an aspiring hospital chaplain, works here. She is about to complete her one-year residency in the department of “Spiritual Care,” a branch of palliative medicine. Patients struggling with insecurity, trauma and grief get emotional and spiritual support here. The film follows Mati and her colleagues through 2020 and 2021, the years with the highest number of deaths in the history of the USA. Mati herself must struggle daily to find her balance. Because, as her supervisor puts it, if one’s own bandwidth is used up, there is simply no room left for the tougher things. It is therefore an important part of the work of a counsellor to get support and guidance for oneself.

Luke Lorentzen observes this cosmos with great sensitivity and, despite being so close, with pleasant restraint. The calm camera often keeps its distance, especially in moments of doubt or when observing conflicts in the team. A film unafraid of intimacy that spans a thought-provoking arc: between questions of faith, loss and professional sustainability.

“Who are you to change anything!?” Yisrael Meir Lau, once Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, rages against non-orthodox movements in Judaism. His nephew, queer activist Amichai Lau-Lavie, has an answer that packs a punch: born in 1961 on Israel’s Independence Day, 38 generations of rabbis in his family tree, son of a Holocaust survivor, drag queen, today also an ordained rabbi and spiritual leader of an interdenominational Jewish congregation in New York. Amichai wants to be a “virus inside the system” to break patriarchal traditions and make Judaism more humane, more open. His drag alter ego urges: “Redemption will only come through transgression!”
Director Sandi DuBowski followed his protagonist over more than twenty years. The long production period enabled him to document different phases in Amichai’s life, to show him celebrating, crying, doubting and triumphant. Supporters and critics comment on every decision and life change. The result is a complex portrait that sensitively introduces not only Amichai but also his family and congregation. An inspiring story that gives us hope.

Tattooed skin, harbour music, the horror of a shipwreck, the fog bells of a lighthouse, the changing of the tides. This film about the glorious and deadly ocean, which pulls you down into the depths of the sea, is the result of an interoceanic workshop that uses the creative mechanisms of the cadavre exquis technique. An intuitive tale arises from a collective act of creation.

Our everyday digital life is unthinkable without smartphones. Across the world, more than five billion such devices are in circulation. Each one of those is even touched more than 2,600 times per day. This AR experience takes us through the hidden history of this technology and thus into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. What natural and human resources does the tech industry require for its innovations?

Ricky is a boy from the Ashéninka tribe who lives with his family deep in the Peruvian Amazon Forest. But even here, the children’s favourite pastime is watching videos on their mobile phones. One day, Ricky is faced with the task of overcoming his fears and going hunting for a huge catfish that can only be caught by hook. This is where his journey to adulthood begins.

The tumultuous 1960s in China as a collage of archival images, clay figures and interviews. Lei Lei lets his father and his grandfather talk, about bicycles and bank clerks, about life in the countryside, re-education and class enemies. Their memories generate a multicoloured surreal world that is an enchanting fantasy of the time before and during the Cultural Revolution.

In his second feature-length film, artist and animation filmmaker Lei Lei once more takes up experiences of family members and uncovers a piece of national history via private stories. For more than six years, he collected family photos, postcards, propaganda images and old films. On this backdrop he forms and moves his characters made of gum-like pastel modelling clay, whose colourful, almost childlike appearance supports the impression that this is where a grandson imagines the anecdotal memoirs of his ancestors. But this imaginative animation is anything but naïve: It takes the time to accommodate the detours and pauses in the narrative and takes us – by means of a restrained soundscape, too – deep into a universe where one can lose oneself.

A harrowing scenario of bullying based on a short story by Charles Bukowski, whose language is translated authentically into a rough comic book style. A children’s gang teach the neighbour’s boy a lesson. It’s their duty, the self-styled righteous ones tell themselves. What starts out like a game in a framework of dominance and banal irrationality escalates into murderous group dynamics.