After ten years in Germany, where he acquired “the beautiful language of the former arch enemy”, the filmmaker returns to Haifa and takes stock of the time spent between the rivers Rhine and Neisse, but also looks at his home from a changed perspective. The result is a complex montage of images from those years: conversations, landscapes and objects, sought and found in Germany, Poland and Israel.

“The Rhine Flows to the Mediterranean Sea” attempts the Sisyphean task of a localization between philo- and anti-Semites, the anxious and the indifferent, those who remember and those who suppress. Not an image or sentence that doesn’t trigger a multitude of associations. The devil is in the detail: This film opens our eyes to this. What are the traumas that perpetuate the Holocaust, which the filmmaker, son of a Polish survivor, was unable to forget, “never, not for a single day” in all those years in Germany? What mechanisms of suppression are at work among the relatives of the perpetrators, of the victims? How is the perception, the mind, the memory of the individual shaped by belonging to a nation, a religion or political group? Offer Avnon gives fragmentary answers and each raises new questions. The search for the “uncanny” he began with his film is far from over.

A distant idyll featuring well-behaved children at play: a prettily illustrated and well-labelled world. An unsuspecting rabbit scampers there which may be cute but can also be tortured and slaughtered. And when a goblin who can turn insects into flashing diamonds springs from the dead body, one would have to be a stupid child indeed not to smell a business opportunity. Good children! Bad children!

Nobody likes to play tennis with Tyrano so he endlessly hits the ball against the wall – until one day he meets Brachi. Playing a match, however, doesn’t quite work out as Brachi keeps falling over. Tyrano tries everything to make Brachi stay and finds out in the end that all the other dinos have their problems, too. But hey, whatever!

Sixteen-year-old Cian is expected to work at his family’s sheep farm after school. Life there is as rough as the Irish west coast landscape. No time to lie in or play football. Instead, rams must be taken by the horns. In this sensitive coming-of-age study, the camera watches the lanky boy from up close as he learns the challenging craft of shepherding, under his grandfather’s patient and critical eyes.

“I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” Even though Sky and Johanna definitely did not have this quote by Mark Twain in mind, it’s written in the stars of the two young women’s journey through South Africa. A chance acquaintance turns into a relationship that shimmers in all the colours of love. Between Marmite toasts, joints, selfies and music they explore each other inside out. But what happens when the journey ends?

In this deeply personal piece, filmmaker Johanna Seggelke chooses a very different approach to its predecessor, “Bibi Must Go” from 2020. She questions herself, her feelings and memories and almost casually unfolds an enchanting coming-of-age story about a love that emerges and fades in the seemingly endless summer. With a light hand, the film maintains the delicate balance between shimmering beauty and incidentality and manages to make the complicated dialectics of intimacy and strangeness palpable. The outstanding montage interweaves feathery holiday videos with an extraordinary score and the director’s sometimes wonderfully quirky, sometimes wise reflections. A delightfully direct film which preserves the rough edges of the moment and at the same time tries to outwit the undeceivability of one’s own emotions – at least for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

The rough, unkempt facades in Prenzlauer Berg – as if the skin had been peeled off the houses, says photographer Tina Bara. Having grown up in a prefabricated building, the young woman was drawn to East Berlin. She quickly got in conflict with the state, just like the artists Cornelia Schleime and Gabriele Stötzer, whom director Pamela Meyer-Arndt questions in her film about memories, traumas and creative genesis.

Stötzer, Schleime, Bara – none of them had it easy in the GDR. One of them ended up in prison for a petition, the other was harried by refused exit permits, all of them suffered psychologically to the point of pain. Spying, abuse and oppression are reflected in the women’s works. Tina Bara’s dark self-portraits, taken in a sparse Berlin apartment, Cornelia Schleime’s paintings denounced as “garbage art”, Gabriele Stötzer’s photo series of women in cut-up dresses and runny make up – testimonies of desperation, but also evidence of the urge for unconditional self-expression. Meyer-Arndt visits the artists, rediscovers places from the past with them and observes the creation of new works. The narratives shock and touch, and at the same time inspire awe for the vehemently chosen paths in life which more than once skirted very close to the abyss.

“Extinction Rebellion” (XR), known for creative civil disobedience, blockades and performances, want to put pressure on politics to finally adopt effective measures against the climate crisis. The greater the attention, the greater the effect, that’s their hope. But will this equation work? And how can such a heterogenous movement take joint decisions? “Rebellion” follows the development of the first XR group in Great Britain from up close, showing both euphoric moments and heated debates. After all, the issue is whether change is possible without questioning power structures – in society, but also within their own ranks.

A white model of a home stands broken, shelled out, is re-animated with augmented reality. Through the recollections of two Syrians and a touch of animation, home becomes reconstructed. While this project is tied directly to the war in Syria, the model stands as a universal reminder of the horrors of war in general, as well as the power of memory.

The red house dissolves and transforms into all kinds of other things. The house re-assembles, but bigger and wider than before. Quicker than the eye can see, all kinds of brightly coloured shapes appear on the screen. What was a clown a second ago suddenly becomes a wild mix of fantastic images and figures. And right in the middle, the red house keeps turning up.

In spring 2017, authorities in China’s Xinjiang region, without any legal basis, began detaining thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in so-called re-education camps. This animated 360° film reconstructs the memories of three men who had to endure political indoctrination, torture and solitary confinement.

It is said of Krzysztof Kieślowski that he did not see himself as a political filmmaker. At least this early documentary casts doubt on this, for it depicts the cold stranglehold of bureaucracy. The setting is a municipal funeral home in Warsaw. Phone calls are made, documents checked and stamped. Business runs like clockwork, from the cradle to the grave.
Leipzig naturally maintained ties with older Polish documentarists like Jerzy Bossak, even after he relocated to Denmark. The fact that Kieślowski and other notable Polish film artists of his generation did not appear in the programmes before 1990 fits into the image of a life consumed by pettiness painted here. The real issue was probably animosities with the festival in Cracow.

In the “White Horse” café, waitress and guests apathetically go through their routines. Meanwhile, the reality surrounding them seems to destabilise more and more: between white noise and the sound of tuning forks, between daydreams of galloping knights and ever-growing mountains of drizzling packet sugar. Ivana Bošniak Volda and Thomas Johnson Volda pile up layers of these images and sounds, until they crack – and clear the way to breathe.

Abstract organic drawings, wandering flocks of clouds and the surging sea give the “Impromptu opus 70” piano piece a visual body which refuses to take on a fixed form or pause. “Remous” embraces the undulations of Jacques Hétu’s erratic composition, twists perspectives and makes individual notes shimmer as brief reflections of light on the surfaces of deep darkness.

The GDR formed an image of its citizens, hardy in everyday life and firm in principles, that it wished to see reflected in “their” art. Dresden-based artist Volker, called Via Lewandowsky, avoided the vanity of the GDR art scene and reflected something else back to his superior state: the indolence of the flesh, the gluttony of the systems that allegedly ordered the world. This Super 8 film from the late German Democratic subculture rubs against Heiner Müller’s stage text “Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome A Shakespeare Commentary”. The manuscript was (half) published in 1986 by the East Berlin Henschelverlag with the following proviso: “If the play is not accepted for production, this book must be returned immediately […].” Lewandowsky emigrated to West Berlin in 1989 before the fall of the Wall.

Silence reigns in the Berlin flat, but the film, whose complex montage encompasses the disintegration of Syria and life in exile, leaves no doubt that things are different in director Diana El Jeiroudi’s mind. Archival footage, loose portraits of confidants and an intimate perspective that explores her own position and her way of coping with trauma add up to a multi-layered document.

“Evil has a very loud and terrifying sound,” El Jeiroudi already noted as a child. Growing up in a country marked by surveillance and military parades has left its mark. In “Republic of Silence”, she looks for a way to come to terms with it, condensing old material, some of which shot in Syria, with a written monologue and stories of persons who also chose exile in the course of the civil war. The result is a complex filmic space that reveals the political and social disintegration of a nation. El Jeiroudi increasingly concentrates on showing a present outside Syria, life in emigration. Passing her husband's  nocturnal teeth grinding, birthday parties and disruptions in the international film festival scene, a life between tension and new beginnings becomes apparent.

Nothing meets everything in a digital moment of limbo. We find ourselves in the middle of a mirror sculpture at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. There seems to be nothing there, but we are repeatedly asked to see more. The limits of our imagination and orientation become the true narrative. We could escape it at any time. But what would we be missing then?