Mariella lives in Berlin with her family of seven. Her father was trained in kung fu martial arts at the Chinese Shaolin monastery. Today he runs the Berlin-Schöneberg kung fu school and prepares her and her sisters for the next tournament. This has been part of Mariella’s life for many years. But the nervousness before each competition never really gets better.

“See you next year!” a Portuguese fire warden says as he dismantles his control equipment at the end of the season. Humans and nature in southern Europe may be used to forest fires, but that does not change the facts: The ever more massive conflagrations are caused by climate change. We have long been living in the age of fire.

In the Portuguese interior, a forest fire has just devastated a large area. Wounded nature is silent, not a single bird is heard, only the wind that makes the charred tree trunks rustle. But the vegetation recovers astonishingly fast. Where all life seemed to be gone, greenery soon sprouts from the ruined trees. The residents of the affected region are engaged in the reconstruction with great respect for their natural environment. Because plants, too, are sentient creatures. In quiet, almost melancholic, but also hopeful images, the film pays tribute to the strength of the trees and illustrates how essential it would be for humanity to learn to live in harmony with nature again.

Barcelona, 1991. Juanjo has to repeat the last school year. His new teacher seats him in the last row next to Miquel, who is not exactly happy about this. The two have to write an essay together on the same afternoon. A disagreeable task that is gradually forgotten as they discover that they share a great passion: music!

Juanjo comes from sheltered circumstances, his family pamper him. Miquel is the son of a single mother who could hardly manage to take care of his two siblings without his support. Heavy Metal becomes the refuge and central node of their friendship. Screeching guitars and screamed vocals – with a few remarkable exceptions – are the soundtrack of this exciting but warm-hearted and gentle story that allows a glimpse into the souls of two teenage boys. The film’s visual design is consistently pared down – to the point of leaving out whole sections of the background and character portrayal. The directors’ poignant use of distinctive striking visual elements takes us ingeniously into the world of the two friends. A wonderful journey into a time of changes, insights and growth.

A series of tuba thefts that occurred ten years ago at Californian schools is the starting point of a multilayered and entertaining reflection about sounds and music, how they are represented in images and described in words. The artist Alison O’Daniel tells the story from the perspective of Deaf people; her film resembles a musical composition that varies its material in several movements.

In one sequence we hear the swelling drone of a passenger plane flying at low altitude over a residential area and gradually drowning out the sounds of the wind before we first see its shadow glide over the houses and at last the source of the noise. The subtitles, an integral part of this film, not only describe the sounds in amazing precision but also quantify their acoustic pressure in decibels.

Alternating between passages with and without sound motivates us to be more differentiated, focused, targeted in our perception. The film revolves around the motifs of hearing, sounds, noise pollution more than around the narrative of the mysteriously vanished tubas, more even than around the impressive protagonist Nyeisha “Nyke” Prince who plays a Deaf drummer in “The Tuba Thieves.” The tuba thefts are first and foremost a metaphor: What does the lack of a specific sound do to our perception?

Authentic and symbolic descendants of the Canadian Indigenous community lead us to a place where past and present intertwine. Two Indigenous men reveal their disturbing physical experiences with systemic racism. Their reports break taboos. And they implore us to carry the knowledge, grief and anger into the world like raging buffalos! Join up!

In 2002, the filmmaker moved into an apartment on the 15th floor of a Kyiv high-rise. She was twelve at the time. Today, from the safe distance of another country, she talks to people who remember the flat and the time spent together. Coming-of-Age, the love of cinema, a sense of community and the erotic charge of individual moments combine to create an image of missing home and intimacy. With every memory, we zoom a little out of the still image on screen: three windows facing southwest, a balcony facing southeast, a rooftop protected from view, a high-rise panorama. The warm and personal gaze at the sky and houses of Kyiv is mirrored in the cold attentiveness of international war reporting.

Following in the footsteps of the Hamburg film director Hans Schomburgk who travelled through the German colony of Togo from Lomé to the north with his companion and actress Meg Gehrts in 1913, Jürgen Ellinghaus screens the footage shot then at its locations in modern-day Togo. Schomburgk’s affirmative images show slave labour, humiliation and the arrogance of the colonial power. The material is contrasted by Gehrts’ romanticising diary entries and other colonial reports which often testify to a horrifying coldness.

The screenings of this material, which has never been shown in Togo before, prompt the audiences to reflect on tradition, stereotypes, the “white gaze.” In the villages, the colonial images conjure up memories of handed down stories. In the metropolis of Lomé, young film enthusiasts deplore that these images were kept from them until today and discuss in which contexts they should be screened. But “Togoland Projections” not only shows how much these painful documents and texts are needed in contemporary Togo, because they are part of the country’s history. The film also demonstrates that they are needed in Germany so we can take responsibility for our suppressed history and face our own racism – past and present.

A shimmering shoal of herrings are swimming through the wide ocean when they are suddenly broken up by seagulls. Separated from the shoal, a small herring ends up all alone in a tidal pool. Looking for a way out, he encounters many other marine creatures. Some scare him. But there’s no time for this now: Only by joining forces can they defend themselves against the hungry seagulls.