Everything splashes in this poetic portrait sketch: the rain on the roof, the dog in the puddle, the grandchildren in the kiddie pool and the protagonist in the river Vltava. A middle-aged woman has lovingly converted a freighter into a house boat. The film captures her daily life in impressionistic, analogue aesthetics, from morning coffee in her bathrobe to the last cigarette on deck at dusk. She seems to have fulfilled a wish – a life by and in the river.

Sigmund Freud’s dream symbolism relates birth to water that one – or so he says – either dives into or rises out of. While an adolescent boy gets mysterious phone calls and shyly follows his clique to a shits and giggles party, his mother floods the ever-sparser home with separation anxiety and absurd scenes, mocked by the pompously wall paper pattern with all its curlicues.

In the global North, the DC-3 is regarded as a vintage plane and tourist attraction. In Colombia, however, it is still used as an airliner and serves as the only link to the outside world for remote villages in the Amazon region. The history of the former “Raisin Bomber” reflects economic and hegemonic conditions. Now the DC-3 raises its voice in an entranced cinematic journey through time and space to talk of dangers, sensual experiences – and a mystic passenger.

In Belgium and France, the documentary series “Strip-Tease” is real cult viewing. The creators of the TV production have now used more than twenty-year-old material to make a crime documentary in dirty black and white. The Brussels CID are investigating a murder case: A casual prostitute was killed in her flat. The discovery of a few French fries enables them to track down the perpetrator. True Crime.

The dead woman’s name was Kalima Sissou. Very quickly, the investigation focuses on her former boyfriend Alain, and so, in authentic, raw images, we watch Inspector Lemoine and his colleagues at work: at the crime scene, interrogating witnesses and, naturally, cross-examining the main suspect. Despite the serious character of the events, Jean Libon and Yves Hinant’s offbeat mixture of dark thriller and absurd reality comedy does not lack (black) humour. Shot in a simple cinéma-vérité style, the film does not embellish on what it shows. The creative and conceptual model is, of course, the series “Strip-Tease”, co-developed by Libon in 1985 and widely known for the unconventional, blunt and politically incorrect manner in which it tackled even delicate subjects. “For a Fistful of Fries” continues in this vein and takes us very close to the often incredibly profane action.

Mady and Merouane are two eleven-year-olds who grow up as best friends in the north-east of Paris. They live right next door to each other and that’s more important to them than anything else. And anyway, they feel so at home in their neighbourhood that they can’t think of a more perfect place to practice adulthood. When some other boys turn up, their friendship is briefly put to the test …

The flowing movement of a mountain landscape shrouded in orange fog is disturbed. The regular wafting stops, the landscape structures crumble. The atmospheric sound becomes a shrill screech. “For Tashi” describes the physical and emotional turmoil of a woman after the loss of her unborn child, seeking resonance with the viewers, hoping for comfort.

At the beginning Michelle Bastien-Archer shows and comments on photos of her wedding. The African-American and her childhood friend Jermaine were married in the unhospitable visitors’ hall of Sing Sing in 2007. He had been sentenced to 22 years to life for voluntary manslaughter in 1998. Ever since, she has been fighting tirelessly to prove his innocence. Now new documents have turned up that reinforce doubts about the trial’s decisive witness statement. Michelle becomes more confident. She presses even more determinedly ahead with her efforts to get Jermaine released. The camera is with her as if live, for almost a decade.

It feels like a thriller whose script was written by life and the U.S. American justice system. Daily life under exceptional circumstances, scenes from an unusual marriage. Timed phone calls from prison, countless visits to the lawyer, appearances at solidarity events for wrongly convicted African Americans. Michelle works as a house painter for the City of New York, raising her two children alone. We learn in passing that their biological father was the victim of a brutal crime. The portrait of a confident woman who shares her fears and hopes with us emerges.

The herb dispute, in this case about ’Akkoub (gundelia) and Za’atar (wild thyme) is one of the more bizarre aspects of the Middle East conflict. These plants are much sought-after ingredients of Palestinian cuisine and have been collected for generations; for reasons of nature conservation, however, this is forbidden in the West Bank. Israeli park rangers thus find themselves in hot pursuit of their collectors for a fistful of greens. Jumana Manna humorously presents the poaching as civil disobedience.

The Berlin-based Palestinian artist combines documentary and scripted material with pop references. Once, when archival footage illustrates the hype surrounding the illegal herbs, we hear Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Morricone’s harmonica melody from “For a Few Dollars More”. The ban also has an economic side, since Israeli companies are selling Za’atar as a spice mix. Drone and panoramic shots suggest the absurd manhunt for elderly people picking for their own needs. One of them says: “I’ll also be caught in 2050 with my children and grandchildren.” Manna wrote the court hearings based on real cases with lawyer Rabea Eghbarieh. Not mentioned in the film is the political success the attorney of the Adalah NGO contributed to in 2019: According to the new directive of the Ministry of the Environment five kilogrammes of the plants may be picked.

Is that a belly or a cell that is in visible turmoil? In any case, in Angel Wu’s film the capitalist hamster wheel is a living organism – though it is not quite clear whether we live in it or it in us. When a young factory worker makes a wooden fetish, prays to it, and then eats it, he is physically and visibly consumed with ambition and work mania. Without further ado, the people around the fire turn into a column of factory workers with a number-crunching management, the free-roaming zebra is put into a cage that is quickly shipped off as a container. But Wu does not just stage this development as a simple series of recognisable capitalism markers but also retains the cryptic, haptic quality of her magnificent mixed media reflection on the content level.
Is the fetish an anvil that symbolises human malleability? Does the worker long for something else? Are the delicately drawn insights into the interior of the machine visions of hell or simply an Anthropocene in its final stage? Based on the physical formula “work equals force times distance,” Wu not only combines 2D animation, photography, collage, and drawing – as well as Taiwanese music featuring some unsavoury retching. Rather, she condenses reflections on working life in (Asian) societies and our imprisonment within it.

Michelle, 86 years old, is an equally obstinate and touching widow and filmmaker Amélie Cabocel’s grandmother. Michelle lives alone in a big house in a lonely area of Lorraine and is probably completely unaware that with every fibre of her existence she bears witness to a vanishing age. But when Amélie tries to persuade her to take part in a photographic and exhibition project, she resolutely makes it her own.

Michelle spends her leisurely days reading the obituaries in the local weekly regularly and with great concentration, making long phone calls to the few surviving “cousins” and leafing patiently through the carefully guarded photo albums in which her memories are preserved. Beyond her private life, these albums and folders are also an eloquent fund of an everyday culture about to disappear. When Michelle’s granddaughter wants to produce a film and an exhibition based on this material, the old lady catches the bug and, with her headstrong personality, adds fuel to an already challenging enterprise. “Forgotten Lands” is the moving portrait of a grandmother from the familiar perspective of her granddaughter, but also an intelligent reflection on the unique ability of photography to record echoes of a life lived.

Is it not unlimited freedom, the most radical form of self-realisation, to exist in every conceivable setting as a flying mythical creature, a sad mouse or a furry figure with an extended naked spine as a tail? In her film, Monika Masłoń moves through different spaces as an avatar, exploring the subject of touching and being touched on VR platforms. Anything our phantasy can imagine can be created from pixels here. The limits of existence can be extended infinitely by a click. But what about human – or avatarian – closeness? Can an emotional signal like shaking hands be simulated in this VR world, despite the complete absence of physical bodies? When I see my avatar being touched, can my body memory suggest that I feel this tactile event even though there is no other physical body?
Masłoń examines these questions with a delicate sense of humour and in exchanges with other avatars. But then we enter a VR space that feels more intimate: She has taken us on a personal date. How does the impossibility of physical touch in a long-distance relationship differ from that in VR? Can a VR date create more physical presence and still the longing for the beloved person better than other forms of communication?

In the 1960s, the Soviet cinematographer Leonid Burlaka worked on films that went around the world for the Odesskaya kinostudiya in his native city of Odesa in the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Today he is eighty years old and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; his memory is visibly fading. Filmmaker Igor Ivanko follows the traces left by his grandfather and discovers an archive of immense value in the garage.

Dozens of rolls of photo film, albeit almost decayed, are found between gardening and other tools. The grandson scans the material and shows it to his grandparents. Burlaka’s face brightens when he recognises familiar faces, but he can’t remember much. Ivanko realises that he has a treasure of historical dimensions in his hands. Leonid Burlaka began his career when many Soviet creative artists were struggling with censorship. When state repression eased in the mid-1960s, he had long established himself in his profession. The political change, however, was reflected in his works. Ivanko’s attempt to record his grandfather’s memories before they disappear forever comes too late. But he succeeds at making a film that looks back on fifty years of cinema and life in the USSR: a stirring portrait of the times and the family between emotion and information.

In the midst of the Moroccan desert, characterised by rocks, scrubs and immeasurable expanse, two men are looking for celestial bodies. Pacing out this weathered ground is a downright gargantuan task. Both have great hopes tied to the meteorite fragments: While one of them is looking for knowledge, the other longs for a better life. Adnane Baraka’s impressive directing debut traces existential questions in powerful images.

The barren landscapes of south-eastern Morocco are known for frequent meteorite impacts. Mohamed, a nomad who lives with his family in a tent in the desert, decides to start searching. Like the other men who scour the terrain with him he hopes to find a valuable rock from space that would mean his escape from poverty. On the other side of the country, scientist Abderrahmane analyses meteorites for enclaves of long-dead celestial bodies. To reach the origin of our life, we have to look at the stars.

A couple of filmmakers – she produces, he directs – are trying hard to assemble the autobiography of the woman, Caroline. A long time ago the man, Frank, won an Oscar for the adaptation of his own life on film. Now he just wants to help Caroline a little, but of course have a say in things, too. Caroline isn’t exactly enthusiastic.

Franzy is an extraterrestrial cook who lives alone and also feels a little lonely. She loves to season her dishes with a special pink ingredient that makes everything taste extra delicious. But when the spice tin is empty, Franzy must go in search of new supplies. She reaches a planet full of hungry creatures delighted with her culinary skills.

Karola Hattop juxtaposes the many media images of confident working women and the men who support them with a naïve reporter who finds out that in practice equal rights are often quite a different matter. Somewhat pushy, he seeks out women at the hairdresser’s and in the maternity wear department, joins functionaries in their cars, crashes wedding parties and sneaks into museum tours for children. A revelatory curiosity full of the casually captured mundane drabness that was often revealed more clearly in student films than in comparable DEFA productions.