“Whoever has discovered a truth must also bear witness to it and make it known,” says the critical Potsdam high school graduate and pastor’s son Alexander Schulz at the start of the film and adds: “You must also endure the personal disadvantages.” Between March 1989 and March 1990, Kurt Tetzlaff follows the intelligent boy through a time of upheaval. At their graduation, Alexander and his class perform the play “Dictatorship of Conscience” by Mikhail Shatrov. He takes part in the demonstrations in autumn 1989 and refuses to serve in the army. Sequences from the GDR news demonstrate how far removed from the citizens the state leadership had become.

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.

Once again Kurt Tetzlaff portrays Alexander, who in 1990 works as a nurse and is active in the “Action Reconciliation”. The sense of departure of the autumn of 1989 slowly gives way to disappointments about the outcome of the People’s Chamber elections in 1990, the currency reform and the Unification Treaty. The political and social changes took place at a rapid pace that many found hard to follow. The sense of community that carried people through 1989 is fading. “Now it’s every man for himself”, Alexander states. He has no use for capitalism: “I feel just as lied to and cheated as before.” Resignation spreads.

A piece of land awaits Déni Oumar Pitsaev in the Pankisi Gorge, a Chechen enclave in the Georgian part of the Caucasus. His mother bought it for him, hoping to bring her son, who was socialised in Western Europe, back to his Chechen roots. When he arrives, he realises that the gift comes with strings attached: Relatives and friends from the neighbourhood constantly ask when the 40-year-old Déni with his receding hair intends to start a family. When he counters with his own vision – building a treehouse for adults ten metres from the ground, a childhood dream – he triggers complex debates about the relationship between the individual and society and what historical conditions it is subject to: The region is deeply scarred by the effects of the Chechen War, the wounds extending even to his estranged relationship with his father. In all this, Pitsaev’s manner of confrontation is always extremely delicate, never turning into an attack. With expert curiosity, he approaches a world that is both completely alien and home to him.

Director Thomas Heise’s brother worked for Mitropa at the Berlin-Lichtenberg railway station for a while. Heise knew that all doors would be open for him there, that he could shoot his graduation film as a master student of the Academy of Arts there. In addition, the 40th anniversary of the GDR on 7 October 1989 was coming up, a holiday on which riots were to be expected. Thomas Heise wanted to bring these two things together: the employees at work between the counter and the kitchen, on the backdrop of the events of October 1989. A sound collage contrasts the statements of the employees in an end-of-time mood with the jubilant reporting of the festivities – a filmic image of the beginnings of the dissolution of the state.

Marta Pajek (digitally) created a complex, atmospheric universe – with minimalist means and yet rich in detail. References to contemporary history meet visions of an intuited, dystopian future. We are made aware of (our own) transience in subtle, but almost brutal ways. Ageing bodies, ageing ideas. In the end, the grande dame of Polish cinema, actor Anna Polony, sings: “… when will we ever learn?”

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.

In the blink of an eye – as the film is titled – 66 years pass by, seven centuries of stone crumble and a savings bank replaces a church. In six and two half chapters, Jorge Moneo Quintana succeeds in a feat of archival work, montage and sound design. The organic merging of images that show the site’s transformation submerge the audience into a pleasantly sober reflection on the beauty and sadness of decay.

February 2022, the beginning of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine. When the fighting comes closer, director Alina Maksimenko flees from the district capital of Irpin north-west of Kyiv to her parents’ home in the countryside, where she gets stranded with her cat and her camera. It would be better to move even farther away, beyond the border, to be really safe, the daughter urges. Nonetheless, they decide to stay – hoping for the situation to get calmer on the one hand, trusting in the remoteness of their village refuge on the other.
The three of them hold out in an increasingly empty village. Fear spreads, tiredness. The parents refuse to change anything about their usual routines. It is an unbearable limbo that is inherently self-destructive. They try to hold on to their everyday life as best they can. Father Tolya takes care of the animals in the neighbourhood; dozens of abandoned cats gather at the front door every day. Meanwhile, mother Tetyana gives piano lessons over the phone, unless the mains is down again. And Alina, the daughter, makes a film. She is not interested in the fighting. Rather, her documentary of those first weeks of war is a minutely detailed portrait of waiting. The eye is on a microcosm where survival is in question, which makes it universal.

Animals have no “LGBTQIA*”, they simply are and do, practicing gender, sexuality and family constellations according to desire and necessity. There is still a lot to discover here, as Marcel Barelli reports. He went stalking, observing and listening closely. Briskly animated and wittily narrated, he tells of fantastic zoological caprices and miraculous relationships.

Standing in the water in fishing gear, catching fish and taking in the rugged winter landscape. What at first sounds like a dream for outdoor fans is part of the working routine of prison inmates in the East Slovakian town of Perín-Chym. Their job is to breed carp, which are primarily consumed at Christmas dinners. Marek Moučka anonymizes the prisoners by erasing their eyes in his artful black and white film. He talks to them about freedom and missed holidays.

To put it bluntly, one could say that most of de Antonio’s films are courtroom dramas. In this sense, “In the King of Prussia” is typical – and at the same time unusual, starting with the title. King of Prussia is a small town in Pennsylvania which became the scene of an action by radical Christian pacifists in September 1980. They broke into a factory where, unbeknownst to the public, parts of the nuclear missile Mark 12A were produced, and held a happening inspired by the Sermon on the Mount and Fluxus. The film is a re-enactment, but not of the action, rather of the trial against the so-called Plowshares Eight. In de Antonio’s first video production, shot in the trial breaks, the defendants played themselves. The role of the judge was played by New Hollywood star Martin Sheen.

We find ourselves in the middle of a gay sauna. In search of physical contact outside ideas of bourgeois romantic love, we are part of a group sex scene. We look at the protagonists, just as they look at us. The space becomes a stage, both real and surreal, that provokes reflections: about sex positive spaces, our own lust and our own sense of morality.

The hot button issue of pre-war Kyiv: the power of developers. Oleksiy Radynski explores the opposition of an architect who designed one of the most significant buildings in Kyiv and the capitalistic cynicism that ruins the city’s uniqueness. Florian Yuryev’s philosophy of a galaxy’s mortality, of a “beautiful zero” we all are going to return to, contrasts with the ridiculous and dangerous stubbornness of a businessman inspired by Donald Trump.

We meet an artificial intelligence designed to ease our transition into the digital. Life in the analogue world is no longer possible, not even necessary. The VR experience guides us through a speculative scenario that illuminates the relationship between humans, machines and nature in posthumanism. Texts, images and sounds were created by means of AI and algorithms.

Stunning panoramic shots of natural landscapes are cut through by swathes of traffic. People appear like little dots in the depths and at the periphery. Only gradually do we realise that they are fleeing. Great dramas grow out of this micro world, the colossal landscape becomes increasingly merciless and begins to resemble an infinite space of fear.