A country that could be anywhere, not precisely localized and yet everywhere. It’s a beautiful summer’s day when the life of siblings Kyona and Adriel changes forever. Their village is raided, destroyed and set on fire. The whole family is forced to flee and experiences many real and surreal situations on their tracks across a whole continent to finally arrive, perhaps, at a more peaceful place.

At the start of the film, Kyona leafs through a sketchbook, takes stock of her life and talks about the end of her childhood. It is only later that the siblings even realize that they are refugees, that like many others they are making their way to the border for a variety of reasons: natural disasters, the consequences of climate change, war, persecution. The two children come across dangerous and helpful people, are separated and find each other again. This feature-length animation, realized in oil on glass, relies on the rapid interplay between fantasy and reality, taking us, on the one hand, into a fictitious, non-real world. But on the other hand, the places, names, situations remind us of familiar things. They show fleeing, exile, setting out as a universal experience.

A contemporary answer to the avant-garde experiments of the 20th century. Once, artists like Oskar Fischinger drew graphic elements on the optical soundtrack of film strips to produce unexpected tones. Max Hattler turns the whole image into an optical soundtrack that directly translates into audio. Abstract movement becomes noise. What you hear is what you see.

Raphaël and Rémi are twins and very close. They spend their time in the skate park and their holidays by the lake. There’s always something to do: boating, catching frogs, bathing in the rain. This could go on forever. But we slowly realise that these holidays are also a farewell, because Raphaël will soon transfer to a school for children with disabilities.

A virtual tour of a computer-generated desert landscape and a story of failure: In 1998, the “Oasis”, Palestine’s first casino, opened. The peace-making idea associated with this development project lost out against political reality. Game over – the oasis becomes a multifaceted fata morgana of interviews with employees, operators and guests.

A background study of a dying amusement culture, filmed in slovenly dressing rooms in front of badly polished make-up mirrors. – Director Yoichiro Okutani follows the Odoriko, the Japanese strippers, through their daily routine between dressing and undressing, between pragmatic approaches to life and eroticism made fit for the stage. Okutani’s cut begins naked: A nude woman descends a staircase, filmed not to advantage but with the brutal ordinariness of routine. One production year and five minutes lie between this – Okutani’s – director’s cut and Mary Stephen’s editor’s cut “Nude at Heart”. But how much more?

A camera roams incessantly through an apartment and a life without any particular hallmarks. Sound and animated interventions portray family bliss and unhappiness, quarrels and separation, age and death. Radio news open the window a little to what is going on in the world outside. The constantly changing interiors tell of people who were at home here without ever showing them.

The ghost of a former lover lives under Olivia’s bed. Barbara invents fantastic stories to cope with Mauricio’s rejection. Mauricio sinks into the ground with remorse. Ramón develops a deep affection for a talking houseplant that bears Olivia’s features.
This film approaches its thematic core in circles as we are invited to ponder the complexity of human relationships from different perspectives. The twists of glances and emotions of the characters entangled in this round dance are not only reflected in the episodic, cleverly intertwined dramaturgy, but also in the visual design. “Olivia & the Clouds” explores a rich garden of artistic techniques. Figures and places we first encounter as drawings go through transformations and reappear as cardboard collages, watercolours or oil paintings. A multilayered narrative of attraction and revulsion unfolds, revealing new facets of form and content with every change of style. Music light as clouds, brilliant sound design, vibrant colours and not least the occasional digressions towards experimental film enchant us and carry us deep into this surreal story that couldn’t be closer to life.

A life dedicated to decay. Johannes Weigelt (1890–1948) was a palaeontologist, a dilettante photographer, a Nazi, all of it fervent. This essay is dedicated to the pioneer of taphonomy – sober and at the same time exciting in form. Three image fields are filled with changing content: black and white documents of fields of animal carcasses, a snapshot with Göring, text panels, artful photomontages. They all charge one another, containing a vibrantly shimmering biography fossilised in images.

The little robot lives alone in a house on the hill in the forest. One night, kaboom, a star falls from the sky. The little robot likes the star and decides to keep it. But he realizes that something is now missing from the sky and the star on earth fades more and more. It must be put back! But that’s easier said than done.

The peace of the superpowers is based on “mutual assured destruction”. States can annihilate each other completely with their arsenals. On 13 January 2018, 1.4 million people on Hawaii got a taste of this: A false missile alert text message brought their lives to a standstill that lasted 38 minutes, panic broke out and the nuclear threat suddenly became real.

A tired sun creeps across the horizon for the last time. A cold wind is already blowing over the lake. The migrant birds depart for warmer climes and leave the Nordic natural paradise. Heavy snow showers cover the land with a white coat. The animals condemned to stay – fragile creatures of delicate porcelain – cling to branches, looking for shelter. None of them will escape the frosty grip of the spreading winter. They are observed by a tiny girl, also made of wafer-thin, translucent white ceramics, who is the only one left in the freezing landscape in the end.
Anu-Laura Tuttelberg’s symbolic story is touchingly beautiful and at the same time full of inspiring irritations, because she makes her art run up against the reality of nature. She did not animate her puppets in a warm studio but exposed them to the elements, on location in northern Estonia and an island in the Norwegian Sea. In her film, cruel forces, disturbing fragility and the renewing force of the cold meet – ambivalently and elegantly.

Avi Mograbi met his grandfather in a dream. The setting: Damascus, 1920. Would the two have spoken Arabic or Hebrew at this impossible encounter? It’s amazing that they were able to communicate at all! For Mograbi barely speaks Arabic, and his grandfather only learned Ivrit later. Another impossible conversation begins in his friend Ali Al-Azhari’s flat: between Avi, the Jew, and Ali, the Palestinian. Their lively, affectionate exchange about ancestors, vocabularies and dreams is supposed to prepare for a film that ends up not being made. But since the footage has already been shot, why not use it to tackle a new Israeli-Palestine reality?

“There was a body that didn’t want to be human. It didn’t know it belonged to someone. To me.” María Cristina Pérez González opens her film with these poetic and cryptic words, diving deep into the visually powerful, hand-painted animation. Associative rather than narrative, the sad voice pulls us into a maelstrom of remembered fragments that all revolve around the protagonist’s body: A voluminous shape that sometimes eats itself with loathing, stretches until it fills the frame or cowers like a pea – in the blackness of the fluid, generous brushstrokes, but above all in its own fleshy self.
There is the estranged sister who once called the feet of this body ugly. The good friend who disappeared without a farewell. The father who once said that all unhappy women grow fat. And most of all there is this nameless figure that lives in her belly and feeds her depression with a cute grin. As so often in life, the only path to contentment is reconciliation. With the sister, of course, but above all with her own body which does not fit into narrow social norms – but is the only one she has. And with which she can dance, jump, and even laugh quite splendidly once she understands that it is not a monster to be fought.

Young people roaming through thickets, bathing under birches in clear lake water, dewdrops glistening in the sunlight, animals scurrying, flying and crawling through the undergrowth. What at first looks like a modern fairy tale film soon lands rather rudely in today’s reality. Finland, the most densely forested European country with its boreal vegetation acts, together with Sweden, as the green lungs of the continent. There is a scientific consensus that preserving forests is one of the most effective measures to counteract climate change and halt the massive extinction of species. Despite this immensely important task, around ninety percent of Finland’s forests are currently threatened by deforestation, partly for the paper industry.
Her love of trees and her equally great anger at their destruction suddenly puts 22-year-old Ida at the forefront of a new environmental movement. Together with many like-minded people she takes on the giants of the Finnish forest industry. At the same time, she realises that her family, too, share the deeply rooted conviction that the forest is “cropland” meant to ensure Finland’s prosperity. One thing is certain: The committed young activists must fight a tough battle against economic interests, the political system and the prejudices of generations.

When director Mickaël Bandela was six months old, his biological mother Gisèle, who lived in France, handed him over to his foster mother Marie-Thérèse, who cared for him for almost twenty years. Though he stayed in touch with Gisèle, visits were always irregular. Now Mickaël is 35 and about to found his own family. It could be the perfect moment to include Gisèle into his life as a grandmother. But she decides to return to her old Congolese home.

Mickaël tries to understand – the woman who gave birth to him, the woman he grew up with and himself. His autobiographical film turns into a fragmented search for the traces of memories of his own becoming. Some sequences show moments of extreme disorientation. A loss of balance while revolving around oneself, as one might assume? No, that’s precisely what does not happen to Mickaël Bandela. His work, which counteracts the lack of archive material with visual ingenuity and an idiosyncratic rhythm, is full of empathy. Not only does he shine a light on growing up unprivileged in the French province, he also allows us to understand the actions of both his “mamans” and reveals backgrounds. In addition, he achieves an elaborate analysis of (un)interchangeability: that of every individual, even the often sacrosanct-seeming figure of the mother.

Quartzsite, Arizona. A town in the middle of the desert which regularly turns into a huge camping ground where up to a million people from the northern US states escape winter. It’s less chilly here, and people of every kind are welcome to rent a plot of dry land for 180 dollars. Ryan Maxey joins them for three seasons in a row, approaching the motley community with an intimate and at the same time soberly observant eye.

Meth junkies, gun lovers, constitution keepers, a trans woman dressed in pink and breeding cuddly pets and white men wearing “Black Guns Matter” t-shirts. People trade everything and help each other. Sometimes it can get rough. But the US-American flag, the ever-present guns and collective prayer are part of life, just like the democratic choice between pancakes and hamburgers. Maxey’s documentary foray takes him through all these lives and lifestyles which he seems to register sometimes with affectionate tenderness, sometimes shaking his head. Despite his critical semi-distance, he is clearly a part of the community he portrays. His film, a collaborative work in some ways, combines shots of this place from different perspectives and different times. Ambivalences persist, which is why all judgement must be preliminary.