A young man apparently gets lost between his parental home in Lower Saxony, Berlin darkrooms and a flat share in Madrid. The clinical chill of the psychiatry reports is juxtaposed with a heart-wrenching diary text that resists being categorised too quickly. The images, too, speak a different language than the diagnosis: “Disoriented and not responding to his environment,” the initial anamnesis reads. But we see the film sequences trace and re-cast photographic evidence of getting lost, re-connect the narrator persona striving for self-empowerment with his environment. The protocol of a story of illness and treatment expands into an auto-socio-biographical document of self-location by artistic work – on life as lived.

A man’s voice from offscreen. He lists individual words, has problems of articulation. At first these are abstract terms, the screen stays black. Sky, street, village and house, however, are accompanied by suitable images. They take us into the speaker’s life. It is his house. These are his automatic shutters. We look into the kitchen where his wife is preparing something. He exercises in a specially equipped room. Later he sits in front of the microphone again, obviously recording his voice to preserve it. Another dimension opens between the recorded words and sentences and beyond the images. There is an inevitability in the room – and a great love. The robot vacuum makes its rounds. Who will put the words stored on the computer into a meaningful context later?

When parents can no longer fulfil their duty of care, the children’s world often falls apart. Nothing stays as it was. Suddenly it is no longer mum or dad who are in charge but the youth welfare system. Daniel Abma followed a youth housing group in a rural area over several years, showing professional educators who want to give five boys between the ages of seven and fourteen what they need most urgently, day by day: security, orientation, a home.
The documentary focus is not on the children but on those who take the parents’ place. They sometimes remind us of Don Quixote tilting at the windmills, for there is a diffusion of responsibility between school, youth welfare services, and absent mothers and fathers. Words fail when adults do not keep appointments, when those in charge capitulate in the face of racist bullying and propose some “time out” – for the bullied boy – in a psychiatric facility. It would be easy to denounce these mechanisms, but that is not the point Daniel Abma wants to make. His observation, both emphatic and reserved, looks questioningly into the gaps in the system – with those who are in danger of falling through and those who try to fill them with affection. He makes us suspect that the answer is not to close all the system’s gaps. It is people who are there for other people and take responsibility.

We all know photos with painted-over or cut-out faces. The repeatedly inserted hand that works on family pictures with pens and other utensils seems like a refrain. The attempts at eradication are audible. They are a dissonance transferred to the body. Scratch, distort, remove. Usually a woman’s head.
Even if the narrator speaks in the third person, even if the hand may not be his hand, these could be his own experiences. The fragmentary descriptions revolve around a mother who beats and tortures her children. It is a childhood in permanent fear. How do you deal with the memories and scars in adulthood? Can the experience be put into words at all? Why do you feel strangely alienated from your siblings who suffered the same? David Kind’s essayistic approach to the trauma of violence is questioning. The doors of the title are opened with extreme caution.

What does it mean to live a nomadic life in Germany today? How do people see you when to keep moving is more important to you than possessions and social status? What are the prejudices faced by people who work outside the 40-hours-per-week regular job model and want to be fulfilled? To get some answers to these questions, Anna Friedrich walks part of the way with four women who prefer travelling to settling.
The journeywoman Magdalena loves the intensity of permanent new beginnings, but travelling also keeps her from working in her dream job as a qualified farmer. As an activist, Johanna lives in her refurbished van, which she has parked at various spots for years, and frequently takes part in political protests like forest occupations. Elwera, a former tightrope artist, and her granddaughter Ghislaine belong to the Yenish community who move from market to market, continuing a generations-old tradition. Director Anna Friedrich uses the conversations to shed light on her own longing for being on the road, but also for a critical reflection of the settled world in the eyes of these women. The potentials of a nomadic existence thus emerge – and how they are in danger of wasting away between settlement permits and garden fences. Stepping to the other side of the fence opens possibilities.

Apulia, 1959: Women in white dresses dance ecstatically in a small chapel. They jump around, roll on the ground, some even climb the altar. They are said to have been bitten by a spider. Their dancing mania requires a ritual exorcism with music. Pictures like these inspired Italian anthropologists to travel to southern Italy. Equipped with tape recorders, film and photo cameras, they tracked down the phenomenon of tarantism.
This essayistic documentary follows the wealth of multi-media archive material produced on this research trip. It brings out the voices of the affected women, who turn out to be experts of their own performances. A special relationship developed between the scientist Annabella Rossi and the “tarantata” Michela Margiotta, with their correspondence at the centre of the film. Even today, these images of female frenzy are disturbing, revealing the loss of control of husbands, families, science and the church. In today’s Apulia, the film discovers living forms of tarantism, tamed as folklore, a tourist attraction. There are new poisons that have infested the system. They, too, must be danced out.

Light is a fascinating phenomenon. Without light, there would be no cinema, no film – and no life. So light is at the origin of everything, and yet it remains invisible to the eye until it hits matter. This moment is – quite literally – the starting point of Thomas Riedelsheimer’s latest work, for the springtime spectacle of rainbow shreds in the cinematographer and documentary filmmaker’s flat became the starting point of a search for the origin of the images we form of this world. For this quest he dived deep into two spheres that seem to follow different laws but always strive to fathom the magical: physics and art.
An intellectual and poetic ping pong game evolves between researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Erlangen and the “Extreme Light Group” of the University of Glasgow as well as internationally renowned artists such as Ruth Jarman, Joe Gerhardt, Julie Brook, Johannes Brunner and Raimund Ritz. In its course, the various perspectives on light lead to new insights on all sides that would hardly have been achieved without this methodical cross-over: about laser power and colour pigments, about black holes and floating sculptures. In brief moments, the uninitiated may even get some idea of the laws of quantum physics, generally considered impossible to visualise.

The camera glides through a nocturnal, inanimate Berlin, documenting disembodied dance floors where the spotlights illuminate emptiness. Tales of longing and desire on the soundtrack. A brief visual reminiscence of lockdowns and retreats into bourgeois privacy, threatening a sex-positive culture that demands the consensual, open encounter of bodies. But people, curiosity and lust reconquer cinema. Exploring softness together, finding out where the bodies lead, allowing skin cells and nerve endings to get to know each other – and asking at every step where the boundaries are. This is the agenda of three couples and a group of sex-positive persons who meet here. “Truth or dare” is played, an age-old excuse to override taboos.
What Maja Classen explores with them, without trying to pin it down, is the question of how consensus makes a new sexuality possible. Even the protection from sexually transmitted diseases is part of the game, personal responsibility in the darkrooms, the images of femininity, masculinity and love dragged in from one’s socialisation that need to be defamiliarised again. Nothing we see transgresses boundaries. Nothing that happens happens without consensus. And yet none of it is taken for granted. “The joy of being there – and exactly there.”