Quiet, dark shots of nocturnal fog, of a mine, a dump truck or a wreck, of huge earth craters and new surface contours created by excavation. Raw material extraction, economisation and exploitation of nature are the themes of this visual study. It’s accompanied by an unobtrusive, but threatening and assertive sound that underlines the mystic quality of the images. Post-industrial landscapes become post-apocalyptic.

How can we visualise the past without perceiving it too much as a historical fact? This film uses a clever combination of archival material and oral history to bring memories of a transgenerative trauma and the associated pain to the surface. What seems to be the past becomes visible in countless points of contact with the present. It’s a simple, touching treatment of the incomprehensible consequences of a historical crime.

Elise is a timid woman. She’s even afraid of trees. When one day a paper plane sails through her window, she’s so agitated that she hardly sleeps a wink that night. The next morning Emil, a boy in a baseball cap, knocks on her door. He’s looking for his plane and also needs to go to the loo. Suddenly Elise’s life changes in a wonderful way.

Complete darkness. Our concentration turns to the spherical sounds around us. Basses wander through our body, triggering images, emotions. The sensory overload which usually has us so firmly in its grip is turned off. Sound – improvised and modulated interactively – takes the lead. Stories emerge. And all this exclusively in our own heads.

It’s spring and the little bird discovers the first leaves on his tree. Already the buds open and the bee comes buzzing. Curious, the little bird stumbles after it and almost overlooks the fox who is growling hungrily again. After the farting caterpillar last year, the bird can now be happy about a new companion.

In the mid-19th century, a massive fireplace was the centrepiece of every stately home in England. Children are agile enough to keep the flow of air going in the narrow and dark flues. Their young skin is scraped raw by the sooty stone walls. Their fear of falling is as strong as their fear of the master’s punishment. Black-brown-red cross hatching and unusual camera perspectives bring to life the report of a chimney sweep of the time.

Pointedly sober and factual, the speaker explains the necessary preparations for the last departure of an express steam train headed for Berlin from Leipzig Central Station on 30 September 1978. Numerous amateur filmmakers and photographers accompany the steam engine as it departs on its final mission. Unlike the speaker, they were probably quite moved.

In a dilapidated village in south-eastern Turkey, a Syrian Orthodox nun endures alone with her animals. However strong the hostility of her predominantly Muslim neighbourhood may be: she won’t be driven out, for she has sworn to protect the church and not to leave the sacred place. This quietly filmed observation of everyday life focuses on an isolated woman who carries the pain of a whole community inside her.

The population of the village was tortured and driven away in the 1990s. The nun Dayrayto came here only afterwards. Today she rarely receives visits from passing believers. She usually spends her days doing maintenance work on the church and taking care of the animals. Right now she is worried about her old dog. Has he been poisoned? What to make of the provocations and threats she talks about? Dayrayto is always vigilant, even when she’s resting. From her elevated dwelling she looks far across the landscape, registering every vehicle, however distant. But she is in no way distracted by the presence of the film crew. The unobtrusive camera follows the nun – not at every turn, but as a constant, protective companion as she endures on her “bastion”. Loneliness, worries and fear shape this sparse life. They made her suspicious, but also fearless.

Most accidents happen at home. Thus a likeable, jazz-loving drawn figure is unprepared for an appeal to his own political responsibility. A random Brecht reading spurs her to do something – at the very least so as not to end up on the wrong track or wrong side of things. Pointed, tidy, and full of humour and affection for human dithering, Anne Isensee questions the illusion of a permanent contradiction in reality.

In the summer of 2000 Ugandan and Rwandan troops fought a devastating battle in Kisangani. The International Court of Justice sentenced Uganda to pay one billion U.S. dollars to the civilian victims. After almost twenty years of waiting in vain, some of them set out for Kinshasa to enforce their legal claim. The physical and theatrical power of their mission both drives and radiates from this film.

Dieudo Hamadi has given the women and men he is about to follow down the Congo a visually confident and assured exposition. Gathered on an inky black stage, they look at us and sing: of blood spilled, of money forgotten. Then the march of the maimed sets itself in motion, on crutches, with prostheses, past the nearby pits of the dead and out into the country. Every metre covered is an act of rebellion. When the procession of beggars, who rightly won’t tolerate this designation, finally climbs the stairs of the National Parliament, iconic scenes of Soviet revolutionary cinema seem to shine through. But the crowd that is moving here is different. Its individual bodies push back with all their weight both against the casual shrug of the shoulders of political routine and the carelessly rounded calculations of loss and equivalent value of the arithmetic of war.

What did the Corona lockdown look like from a window in the residential towers of posh East London in the spring of 2020? The reflective two-week observation shows serious shifts in the everyday coordinate system of a privileged urban population at an immediate level. Meanwhile, the vacant apartments in the district, which were deliberately caused by speculation, represent a warning sign for the future of investor-friendly urban spaces.

Loneliness has many faces in Berlin. Young and old are afflicted by it, men, women, single and married people. It’s normal. Nonetheless there’s a stigma attached to this mixture of emotions that makes sufferers stay silent. Director Nicola Graef tries a different approach in her film: She lets the lonely inhabitants of the capital city speak, listens. The result is varied and quite often surprising.

Berlin is a city for extroverts, Tessa thinks. The young woman’s mind, however, is on the opposite site. The consequence is loneliness and that “is quite draining”, she says. 85-year-old Efraim, a photographer and flaneur, has found a confident way to deal with those nagging feelings: He’s “not the type for marriage” anyway. Artist Thomas, on the other hand, suffers from the end of a long-term love affair and wonders whether “the icing sugar is all kissed away by the age of 50”, but also says: “There is a market for everything, even for broken cars.” Poised and affectionate, we move through the expanses of the city in Graef’s film, where stories sprout like weeds between the cobblestones. From the corner pub to the artist’s studio, from the parks to the sports club and, time and again, into the silent flats – she encounters her witnesses to emptiness everywhere. Their reports are moving, but they never make us feel hopeless.

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.

A controversial filmic parable on the loss of homes and the destruction of nature in the name of industrial progress: Between 1979 and 1982, the village of Magdeborn, which was regarded as an obstacle to brown coal mining south of Leipzig, is demolished. The locals are resettled, mostly against their will, to Grünau, Schönefeld and Borna. Those portrayed in this cinematic requiem rarely mince words when they call themselves pawn sacrifices and bargaining chips for the economic needs of the state. Officially, Tetzlaff and his team were attested an unacceptable emotional closeness to the people.

What’s growing in that empty space there? On 17 December 2010, the Tunisian grocer Mohamed Bouazizi burns himself to death in public – the Arab Spring begins, the fire spreads through the Internet. A fast-forward trip through the interior architecture of a modern revolution, right into the dispersed character of the event: from the planet’s surfaces to digital de-spatialization.

58-year-old Erwin introduces himself as “old but horny”. He has declared the mobile home in his front garden his favourite refuge, where he has everything he needs: a computer, a bed, a coffee machine. Two webcams link Erwin to other men who satisfy his carnal desires. In this tiny space, Jan Soldat comes close to him, of course. He learns of love affairs, as great as extinguished, of a complicated family web and worries about the future.