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.

Nikola is a son, husband and grandson who teams up with his wife Corina to make a film about this. At its centre is his mother Dida who, due to a learning disability, has always been dependent on Nikola’s grandmother and lives with her in a small two-room flat. So far, so good. But Granny is getting old and Dida longs for independence. So it’s up to Nikola, who suddenly finds himself in charge. A charming look at a family in transition.

It’s a constant back and forth, as the couple live in Switzerland while mother Dida and Granny Dobrila live in Belgrade. No sooner have Corina and Nikola stepped out of the bus in one place when they find themselves on the return journey. Or is it the outward journey? Grandmother and daughter are a functional-dysfunctional team – one of them the brain, the other the executing body. The fact that Dida is much more than a shadow of her carer becomes apparent when Dobrila increasingly withdraws into an observer’s position. How can the grandson take over his grandmother’s duties without trading his own independence for that of his mother? The two directors succeed in making a touching film about the inescapable changes in their family without slipping into heaviness, working with lots of humour and a camera that seems to be present under any circumstances.

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.

Most accidents happen at home. That is where a jazz-loving drawn figure is unexpectedly re-confronted with a text by Bertolt Brecht that brings an appeal to their own political responsibility. Something at least must be done to avoid ending up on the wrong side. A trenchant, tidy contemplation that shows some understanding for human indecision.

On 4 September 1970, a group of Vietnam veterans set out on a long march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Their goal: to convince the local population along the way of the injustice that has been going on in Vietnam for years. They did this not just with speeches by the wayside, but with shocking, unannounced and publicly performed re-enactments. Complete with uniforms and plastic machine guns, supported by extras, they thus draw attention to their own war crimes in Indochina. Both camera and tape recorder stay close to all this, capturing the reactions of passers-by and city residents. Solidarity on the one hand, vicious insults on the other. A deep divide runs through the “home front”.

Small and cu… no, not cute. This knee-high creature seems somewhat affectionate and shy instead. Until it comes snarling around the corner, sprinting after you on short legs through the empty suburb. An uneasy lurking, a lurking unease starts to spread. With hand-drawn austerity, mean sounds and not-so-friendly characters, Malte Stein prepares the surgical instruments for some terrific mental cinema – for the protagonist and for all who watch him.

Small and cu… No, not cute. This knee-high creature seems shy and in need of love instead. Until it comes snarling round the corner, chasing you on its short legs through the empty suburb. An uncomfortable lurking feeling spreads. With sparse drawing, mean sound bites and not-so-friendly characters, Malte Stein lays out the surgical instruments for a head game.

Trucks crawl along the road, decorated with garlands of flowers, loaded with the mortal remains of people who were murdered at the Srebrenica massacre. The bereaved receive the coffins to bury the only recently exhumed and identified dead in the sprawling cemetery of the city which also doubles as a memorial. This is the overwhelming opening of a film that goes on to concentrate on three of the few survivors of this mass murder which claimed the lives of thousands, mainly men and boys, within a few days in that small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 1995.

Srećko returned and now lives in the woods on a hill above the town. Mirza escaped by wandering through the mountains for days and now resides again with his wife in their old house. Mejra has lost her husband and sons and, aged 85 now, still supports herself only from her field. Their quietly observed everyday activities alternate with poignant archive material which shows the inconceivable events in minute detail. Shaky and blurry videos contrast with clear images of fieldwork and an enchantingly innocent nature. The past still weighs heavily, but the tenacity of the human spirit in bearing up under the most horrific circumstances emerges.

When the time “when St. Joseph came” is mentioned in this film, it doesn’t refer to a religious phenomenon, but to the most popular product of TML Holy Crafts Incorporated. In the factory on the Philippines, the country with the third-largest Catholic population in the world, the employees manufacture statues of saints under exploitative conditions. Joseph Mangat portrays this place with a focus on the workers, including some from the LGBTQI community.

In the first scene, a plaster bust is uncovered layer by layer. This image could also serve to describe the approach of “Divine Factory”: From the shop to the workshop, from the entrepreneur to the simple worker, from the production to the uses made of the religious articles, this film reveals the social and economic facets of this institution. The Filipino director not only observes precisely how people work and trade there, he also involves the participants in frank conversations about love, wages and living conditions. The employees’ profit-oriented payment model reveals how economical and religious ideas interlock. The success of the company in the city of Antipolo near Manila, desirable for all, thus appears as nothing short of a divine blessing.

Driven by the barking of the voracious rented apartment, an aged ballet dancer makes his way through a permanently rain-drenched wasteland to his monotonous job. The protagonist makes graceful movements to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and seems briefly fulfilled. But the audience? Pearls before cows! Priit Tender’s caustic, surreal stop motion animation is a free association inspired by a poem by Andres Ehin about a grueling, gluttonous daily routine that’s gone to the dogs.

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.

Sarajevo–Rimini. This route once took ten-year-old Mirela to safety from the Bosnian War in 1992, when she was evacuated to Italy by a United Nations convoy along with a group of other orphans. Their stay was to be temporary, but no one came to pick her up. So Mirela began a new life on the Adriatic coast. As an adult, she returns to her homeland in search of a mother whom she last saw as a four-year-old, a journey accompanied by many questions: Why was she among the few who were sent to exile? Would it have been better to have stayed in Sarajevo, free of guilt? Mirela finds no clear answers. But from the traces she gathers and the threads that cross in her life, “Dom” weaves a sensitive meditation about identity and belonging.

A summer day in the meadow. Two girls have fun playing ball, until the ball is thrown too hard. The ensuing anger and quarrel make them puff up until they fly up to the clouds like balloons. Once up there, they have no idea how to get back down again. Then they discover that their kitten is stuck in a tree. Who can rescue it?

Everyday life in casual street scenes in the Leningrad spring in the 1960s. A taxi driver suddenly remembers his transport missions on the so-called “road of life” during the German Wehrmacht’s 900-day blockade in World War Two. Iconographic images from the time of the Siege of Leningrad offer insights into how the people lived then.

Everything goes downhill. For whom? Marian Cholerek leaves that to the audience. After all, there was no way he could tell his story about a joint action of alleged oppositional forces in 1979 unequivocally. His years of work on animated series for children and his penchant for erotically charged humour, however, are unmistakeable. A cheerfully subversive children’s film for adults.

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.