Chile is the only country in the world in which water management has been almost completely privatised. Three women stand for the profound damages suffered by the population as a result: a general water shortage, above-ground poisoning by industry and underground contamination via landfills. All parallel and interrelated facets of the same problem.

The letters Halina receives from Farouk in the late 1970s are as haunting as they are hopeful. They have a long journey between them: from Iraq to Poland. But at some point the contact breaks off, and the reasons remain a secret. Their son Adam manages to build a bridge. And the latter’s son, Ignacy, tells the story from his perspective. It’s a delicate visual treatment behind which complicated fates are hidden.

In 2019, the “Sustainabiliteens” from Vancouver mobilized more than 150,000 people to march against climate destruction. The film gives insights into the teenagers’ everyday life which is determined not only by school, friends and families, but also by the climate crisis and activism. Taking things into their own hands gives them strength: “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.”

An inventive examination of the legacy of the 1990s: In his experimental short film, Ben Young portrays the figure of the then U.S. president – whom he is said to have met once in person in Louisville, Kentucky – as a foil for the questionable political developments, the beginnings of a globalised world and a society marked by collective amnesia. The director’s intelligent, witty and very personal reckoning with Bill Clinton.

A jumble of emerging history is contrasted with the present efforts to optimise profit through ventures and ominous business ideas. In the midst of this labyrinth is a duo of artists who only want to make films. Their misfortune: the German film funding system allows only those who work in an artistic-documentary style to realise science fiction films. Cause enough to find true science fiction material on real German soil instead of looking for a fiction.

Rothenstein, south of Jena. A mountain, hollowed out and built on. Labyrinthine corridors cast in concrete spread over a distance of more than five kilometres. The film precisely constructs – stone by stone, image by image – a story which, composed as a mirror of German history, touches on archaeological finds from twelve thousand years ago and at the same time projects into the uncertainties of the future. Bizarre energy fields, myths and tales of dragons, plans of U.S. preppers fleeing from the end of the world meet facticities of National-Socialist exploitation and forced labour, stories of flight from the 1930s, and the military history of the GDR.

“Zaho Zay!”, it’s me. This is the daily salute of the prisoners in a crowded Madagascan prison whose guard looks for her lost father in each new prisoner. Her projections and fantasies let the mystical, murderous father figure roam the island in simultaneously dreamlike and nightmarish sequences, accompanied by a poetic voiceover. A hybrid narrative, speculating about the mysterious paths and profound traumas of its landscapes and all who walk in them.

A pair of dice, a quiet murderer and his victims, traces of history and magic realism. Rituals and riddles, revenge, remorse and imprisonment are unravelled and re-interlaced between the brutal reality of a detention centre, the fantasies of the fictionalised narrator and the vast natural spaces of an island – slowly and poetically. Crises, colonial violence and its continuities are suggested and condensed. The montage of documentary material and staged sequences references western and film noir and develops an intense visual and narrative pull. An almost lyrical text and the precisely framed images bear witness to an impossible quest that’s actually a haunting, referring to individual and collective traumas and the strange forces with which such shocks inscribe themselves into narratives and places.

Set theory, one of the cornerstones of mathematics, serves as a metaphor for “social structures as spatial arrangement”, as the first sequence of the film reveals. The visual playfulness first becomes an exploration of two- and three-dimensionality and then turns out to be a well-founded reflection of social power relations. The search for a supposedly correct “order of things” triggers the compulsive element in many viewers. Who’s (not) afraid of being different?