In September 1992, four tower blocks in the town of Mantes-la-Jolie, not far from Paris, were demolished. They were part of the Val Fourré district, which was celebrated as a flagship social housing project in the 1960s, as archive footage reminds us at the beginning of the film. But filmmaker Dominique Cabrera, who grew up in a similar housing project herself, is not concerned with urban planning or architectural failures. Instead, she is interested in the residents’ memories: remembrances of the poor and the wealthy living together, of insidious but persistent decline, but above all of the beautiful things that make up a life, the variety, the emotions, the personal happiness.

Jessica Sarah Rinland visits zoological gardens across Argentina to craft a portrait not of a single institution, but rather its underlying concept: an observational, yet still ever-probing exploration of zoo itself. The different types of image and their textures she collects to this end—the silky 16mm that comprises the bulk of the film, the crisp surveillance footage, the grainy black-and-white cameras that capture creatures roving “undisturbed”, the yellowing photographs that pin down Indigenous people and animals alike – perfectly correspond to the varying perspectives she gathers on her subject: a place of imprisonment and colonial legacy, but now also one of everyday routine, conservation and even tenderness.
For all the ambivalence of its central theme, this is, like all of Rinland’s work, a film of extraordinary tactility: Human hands that clean, catalogue and caress, leathery trunks and furry fingers that reach between iron bars in search of comfort, plumage glistening in the sun. Jean Piaget coined the term collective monologue to refer to the developmental phase in which the child believes nature is created for them alone and can be controlled as such. It is so strangely moving to see control give way to care.

How brutal is it when your own language casts you out of your home because it has been turned into the language of crimes against other people? In her autobiographical animation, Irina Rubina analyses why Russian can no longer be the language of security for her and why German – historically riddled with guilt and therefore insecure – does not offer a new home yet. The stark factuality of the director as narrator is enormously unsettling because it describes the irreversibility of this emotional state precisely.
On the visual level, dark spots eat into idealised images of home, until the planes become deadlocked in abstraction. The pictures were created on a so-called pinscreen. Reliefs can be “painted” and animated by the pins’ shadows on this screen on which around 200,000 pins are arranged in lines. The alternation of light and shadow and their immediate proximity lend drastic expression to the inner turmoil and ambivalence.

Summer, dust, a burning sun. It is stock car race season, a loud, aggressive show that leaves only smashed carcasses of cars in the end. After each lap, the dents are worked over with heavy hammer blows before the damaged racing cars are sent back on the smoky track. The audience are standing at the edge of the sand pit and can’t get enough of the pile-ups.
From off screen, the director gives a matter-of-fact account of the violent relationship in which she got caught up at the age of 18 and from which she only managed to free herself two years later. She analyses precisely what happened to her back then, using the dented, destroyed vehicles as a powerful metaphor for her injured body. The interplay of images and words is spot-on – like precisely placed knife stabs.

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.

This pointed montage of contrasts recalls the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorised by US President Harry S. Truman, and the devastating consequences: images of Harry in a warm embrace with a girl, images of wounded children in Japan. In September 1945, the island state in the Far East surrendered and the Second World War was officially over.

After the Wehrmacht invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Jewish population was disenfranchised and killed, as this etude, staged at the Terezín Memorial, recalls. The fact that there was successful Jewish resistance even in extermination camps like Sobibór did not fit in with the traditional image of the passive victims that is melodramatically re-enforced by this film.

In early 2020, the lockdown has brought the world to a halt. Homes become space stations, hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Nobody goes out, only the thoughts go wandering. Students of seven international universities exchange personal impressions of and reflections on this forced isolation online and get to know each other through this joint project.

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?

A fire breaks out in the cornfield where Dolores plays a game of hide and seek. As she flees, the little girl tumbles into a deep hole in the ground. When she regains consciousness, it turns out that she is not alone in the darkness. Two spooky old women are trying their best to keep Dolores in the cave. A small clay armadillo sees through the creepy old women’s plan and helps Dolores escape. She makes it back to the top but must still find the path out of the cornfield.
It is not only the outstanding stop motion animation, the expressive puppets and the fantastic sets that give the audience some pleasant thrills here. In perfect harmony with the background music, this film puts us in a trance – almost as if we were sharing a magic potion with Dolores and the two ghostly creatures and dancing around a fire until the borders between reality and dream, between this world and the hereafter begin to blur. While out in the cornfield the rain sets in.

Tunnel vision, dark circles under the eyes and breathlessness – a warm bath will help against the traces of an exhausting night out. If it wasn’t for the small rubber duck, who starts to interrogate you in your hallucinating fatigue. Your crumbled memories return one by one, spiked with accusations. The conversation slips away towards an overwrought, darkly poetic lament about the filth of the night you passed.
Maria Dakszewicz not only invents highly original and apt linguistic images in which “drops of sweat are floating like kebab grease” on the bathwater. Her watercolour-spotted drawings with their rough black lines also bring the taste, smell and seediness of the food stalls you frequented on the way home into the supposedly cleansing domestic hygiene idyll. A darkly humorous hangover where you have to share the bathtub with yourself.

Can school be exciting and even fun? The integrative pre-vocational August Sander school in Berlin-Friedrichshain at least seems the perfect place for this. The noise of the cars of the big city can be heard from the distance, birds are singing on the lush green grounds. Lessons here include horticulture, agriculture and animal care. And when you watch the students weed garden plots and feed rabbits, things look extremely enviable at first glance. But of course, even in this paradisiacal place there are conflicts, annoying teachers and the anxious question: What comes after graduation?
This documentary follows the school life of a group of pupils with different learning disorders and other impairments over one school year. At its focus are young people who are on the way from training to work, from childhood to adulthood, and struggle to find their place in the narrow regulatory system of school and in society.

This Marxist education offensive cast into actions and images is part of a bigger cycle of so-called educational films that, following Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the didactic experimental play, use lucid illustration to fill abstract terms with practical meaning. In fifteen learning unites, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky address the basic concepts of Karl Marx’s main political work, “Capital”, discussing a section that, according to their own statements, they do not consider self explanatory. “The intention is to make a person who is walking think about walking so that he falls down,” as the two filmmakers noted about their project. It remains to be seen whether such a fall also makes the penny drop among the audience.

This film about children in Eisenhüttenstadt, that showcase project of socialist urban development, was planned in 1981 and terminated “for reasons of state discipline” before it began. Ten years later, its protagonists are already in the West or no longer alive, Thomas Heise sweeps up the remains. Very little material, but memories. Neil Young’s ballads accompany car and train rides through the new non-places of the German East: “Gone, gone, the damage done.” From there, “Iron Age” delves into old and new conflicts – baffled parents, escapes from reality, the wish to think for oneself and not be thought. Odds and ends. A DEFA production, placed with Norddeutscher Rundfunk by Klaus Wildenhahn and awarded the Sponsoring Prize at DOK Leipzig.

Claire Simon’s filmic observation focuses on the institution of school. But instead of a systematic analysis of the objectives and workings of this place of education, her emphasis is on the daily interactions between children and teachers. How are disputes resolved? How do you teach consideration, forbearance, empathy? The film explores these questions calmly and with an unobtrusive camera, using as example the Anton Makarenko primary school in Ivry-sur-Seine, just outside the south-eastern outskirts of Paris.
Parents arrive with their children. The teacher shakes hands with a newcomer – a gesture of encouragement. In class, the instructors seldom raise their voices, authoritarian shouting is out of place here. The staff rely on dialogue instead, which in turn depends on trust and mutual respect. Claire Simon immerses herself in the life of this school and lets the captured moments between children and adults speak for themselves. A sensitive mosaic unfolds: moments of deeply felt learning and teaching bliss, boat trips on the Seine, turmoil in the schoolyard. All these details feed into the vibrant image of a pedagogical mission carried by small and big shoulders.

In her childhood, Maka attended her hated piano lessons in tears. When she asks her mother about it, she is told that this torment is extremely important for discipline. The conversation prompts an examination of whether current pedagogical routine in Georgia has strayed far from such a concept of education. A music school in which brutal emotional and verbal pressure is part of the curriculum; a ballet school where little girls must endure intense pain while stretching; a primary school class where even the most passionate recitation of a patriotic poem about the heroes of the motherland is cause for criticism. We plunge into a somewhat surreal, at times hilariously rigid world, reminiscent of a Palaeolithic dinosaur desperately trying to save itself in the present day.
“Steel is tempered by fire,” says the mother. Her words express the burden of responsibility for her beloved daughter and convey many warm, previously unspoken feelings. “But I am a human being first,” Maka replies. The loving daughter insists that the idea of humanity based on authoritarian power structures must be overcome, because it is still reproduced in the most private relationships, including those between parents and children.