The train ride is deadly boring. The landscape rushes past as a buzzing surrealist kaleidoscope of colours and Ariel and Paul pass the time by drawing their worst nightmares for each other. For Paul it is his mother swimming towards him on the open sea to drag him underwater, for Ariel it is the confrontation with a psychotic woman in the bathtub. What starts out as a game turns uncanny when fellow traveller Gilda joins them – and begins to tell them that the eeriest thing ever happened to her. She hypnotised her demented husband in his sleep. The one who answered her had been none other than God. An indignant God, a disgruntled God and finally a downright angry God, for she had absolutely refused to stop asking her sleeping husband: “Why do we exist?”
With an incredibly precise sense for the moment when the profane suddenly develops the potential for horror, Jocelyn Charles takes us on a magnificent psycho-trip. The director leaves it to the audience to determine whether to watch the 2D animation as spot-on genre entertainment or whether to take in the undertones: the hubris of humans who constantly play God and want to solve every mystery, for example. A hubris that does not remain without consequences.

How are art and social reality connected? How can art respond to the horrors that happen in this world every day? At what point does art become political, at what point corrupted by the market? Leon Golub (1922–2004) works on huge canvases in his New York studio, uses press photos as models, distils gestures from them, applies paint, removes it, scrapes free what was hidden. The process has a violent side – like the martial motifs of his works. They show shootings, tortures or grotesque figures that enjoy their inhuman acts. These are motifs usually unearthed by investigative journalism in times of war. Now they are hung in an exhibition room supposedly free from the banal – and shock the viewer.

The film follows Vilma on her last weekend in her hometown of Tornio, a small place in Lapland. She celebrates her graduation, has a great time with her family and friends in the lightheartedness of summer and says goodbye to her old life. Very soon she will be far away. Her new home is the big city of Helsinki, a ten-hour drive from Tornio.

In this animation-documentary hybrid, four older women reflect on their memories of the old times when they were young and relations between the sexes were completely different. Their many voices merge into one: Grandmother Vera speaks. She tells her story in precise detail, gives insight into the turbulence of her youth and shares memories of her intimate life. She speaks as a representative of Slovenian women in the first half of the 20th century and illustrates their status in the gender and social hierarchies of that era.

Osario and Benedito, two brothers, lead a quiet and isolated life. Gravity doesn’t seem to exist in their cosmos. Objects float around – no up, no down, no points of orientation. The two have never known anything else than this floating in space. We float along and are irritated: is all this lightness just an illusion?

A visual artist all her life, Luchita Hurtado only reluctantly experienced her breakthrough at the age of 97. “Green Turns Brown” is a minimalist eulogy to the publicity-shy painter. Shot on Super 8 film stock during the last months of her life, this film, which revels in autumn colours, paints the portrait of a woman in tune with nature who sees death not as the end but as the crossing of a border. “Life goes on.”

The river Oder: A historical and cultural landscape churned again and again by the tide of events of the past century. A tale told in concentric circles about a region which was and still is the scene of the beginning, end and open middle of voluntary and involuntary migrations. Virulent issues of daily life and politics that, asked with confident casualness, provide a robust account of the present.

Movements and stories in the border region between Poland and Germany – Andreas Voigt’s new film takes up the themes of his 1992 work “Borderland – A Journey”. The charged term “homeland” stirs up (trouble in) the minds and hearts of the people: What it once was and what has become of it! Sure, that’s not the top priority in their daily agenda. But how people appropriate this term and how that in turn structures their attitudes also determines how they figure out the taste of life in the here and now of Europe. The search for closeness is confronted with the insistence on distance. Communication about belonging becomes flimsy because the body language says something different than the spoken word. As a film that’s not about administering a politically correct separation diet, “Borderland” provokes experiences and enables encounters.

A short yes and a long but. A man in a plaid shirt says a friendly hello and rhapsodizes about travelling to southern countries. But when he returns, he finds those southern foreigners have been swept, yes, into Switzerland. That’s not good. Not good at all! Every sentence fires up the next. The longer his hate-rant lasts, the redder and madder the otherwise friendly plaid man grows.

The motorway roars in the background, darkness lies over the service area. One truck driver smokes; another turns on the light in his sleeper cab. A summer Sunday is dawning, everything is standing still. Precisely designed detail shots induce in us a state of waiting. This is what life on the road can also look like. Cooking, dozing, staring into space. Hair is shorn short, words are exchanged. Polish pop songs resound from one of the cabs.

Life seems to have been tuned out. And yet it is happening. One of the men roams the forest, calls home. Suddenly a family is present in the images: The man remembers a swimming trip when the children were small. A strangely beautiful sight. He holds his mobile up in the air so the person on the other end of the line can hear the woodpecker.

In autumn 1989, many Leipzig citizens lost patience with the GDR. Within weeks, they brought down a forty-year-old state apparatus resistant to change by rallies. Now their patience is tested again: In 2008, the German Bundestag promised the “City of Heroes” of the Peaceful Revolution a monument. Planning has been going on and on … Leipzig bears the waiting with equanimity; after all, it was not idle in the meantime. Right after reunification, the citizenry took charge of its culture of remembrance with such vigour that the monuments are piling up today. Looking up to the crown of the palm tree of the Nikolai Column, one had better take care not to step on a commemorative plaque, fall into a commemorative fountain or bump into a commemorative bell.
Classicist? Figurative? Abstract? What is the formal language a city chooses to tell itself its own history while it is practically still happening? Locals and newcomers roam the current Leipzig collection of monuments, a man ties his shoelaces on the big toe of the bronze sculpture “Step of the Century”. Do people think about what monuments give them to think about? The subtly framed and laconically presented impressions of the city are intermingled not only with the trademarks and emblems of lived urbanity, but also with the voices of local cultural delegates. They are thinking: about the pros and cons of accelerated remembrance.

Lazy and yet insistent, summer knocks on the doors of a Berlin trailer park. Right next to the busy Ostkreuz intersection, this settlement stands in the way of the hectic hustle and bustle of the capital. A green oasis. This summer, among the plants and trees in full bloom and fruit, wild shrubs and lovingly improvised dwellings, Aalo, Jone, Royce, Noah, Kï, Neo, Marlek and Steffen must begin to say goodbye to their cozy home. Liberated from the heteronormative conventions of society, the Mollies collective has for years lived a queer-feminist counter lifestyle here.
Dane Komljen manages with great calm to make this hard-won free space tangible, to capture it as a momentum pointing beyond its own duration – even though the eviction has been long in coming. Building cranes rise to the sky behind the green walls, sounds of demolition come closer, the rattling of trains, the sirens of ambulances mingle with the busy humming of the many insects. What lies in store for the inhabitants is left open. But autumn is bound to come and when the leaves fall, the site will fall victim to the city’s development plans. Another space of possibility for alternative lifestyles disappears.

Nazario, founder of the Spanish underground comics movement and pioneer of the gay graphic novel, looks back on his eventful life, his flamboyant and explicit works. 16mm films, photos, illustrations and paintings document the spirit of departure of a counter culture, but also recount Nazario’s great love for Alejandro with whom he was together until the latter’s death. Profession and passion merge in this artist.

The top-secret military testing facility Dugway lies in the barren desert of Utah. This is where the U.S. Army are rehearsing the wars of tomorrow. They specialise in nuclear weapons, chemical and biological agents, including anthrax and special nerve toxins. Even the Hiroshima pilots practiced on this site. Meeting at this war site far from all combat zones are: a heavily traumatised soldier, a military chaplain, a survivor of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima and a father looking for his missing son. They are all proud of their American Way of Life and at the same time marked by the horrors of war. Because even in Utah, far from all actual fighting, it has indelibly inscribed itself – into the people’s souls and the collective memory of the U.S., for many decades the nation with the highest military budget.

This visually powerful film approaches its protagonists without prejudice, trying to learn how they navigate a social system that sees the use of violence as a right of freedom. What does it mean when guns and their attendant rituals are used to strengthen family cohesion, when shooting practice becomes a bonding exercise between fathers and sons? And when – unimpressed by the daily arms buildup – fear hovers over everything and seeps deeper into life every day?

These fucking doubts! And isn’t a 100-kilo massif of a man who recites tender poetry on stage a contradiction in terms anyway? He almost fell silent. But then he defeated the booming silence and made his own fears the subject of his slam poetry performances. One small step for mankind, one big leap for a shy giant.

Fast drawn lines fidget, in the middle a girl on a bustling street crossing, just now holding her mother’s hand … and suddenly alone! But what did Mama say: If we lose each other, stay exactly where you are. It’s just that the car drivers are not amused at all. Now everyone has to help, even the Prime Minister himself.

The NGO “Breaking the Silence” – BtS for short – consists of veteran Israeli soldiers who, by collecting personal accounts of their memories, want to raise awareness of everyday military life and the treatment of the population in the Occupied Territories. Director Silvina Landsmann’s film allows us a look behind the scenes of a contested group with a controversial approach in the midst of a conflict that’s been smouldering for more than 70 years.

What makes a good soldier? The ability to execute orders without scruples, or the consideration of higher moral goals when dealing with the enemy? For many members of BtS, the latter was only possible after active military service. In their work, they engage with operations and acts that in retrospect seem wrong to them. They address the Israeli population and foreign media with videos, lectures and city tours. The streets of Hebron are the site of frequent clashes between BtS, Israeli settlers and the army. On the political level, too, the organisation is harshly criticized. They are accused of fabricating stories, damaging Israel’s reputation and playing into the hands of anti-Semites. Landsmann observes with a cinematic, sober eye how the group struggles internally and externally to find its voice.