After 62 years of marriage Aïcha Soualem is on her own again. Mabrouk, whom she has left, is nevertheless supplied by her daily with food and sugar cubes. Director Lina Soualem is interested in the relationship between her grandparents, who, as the last remaining Algerians in Thiers, France, look back on an eventful past. An empathic investigation all the way back to their native village of Laaouamer which leaves room for ambiguous emotions.

“Soualem” is the password which not only enables Lina Soualem to unlock the tiny, snow-covered village full of cousins in Algeria, which her grandparents left a long time ago. In a sense, “Soualem” is also the title of this gentle investigation of a granddaughter. And Laaouamer, that little place in Algeria, is only the final destination of a long journey which may be narrated via geographical coordinates but interweaves them closely with biographical and emotional ones. Aïcha and Mabrouk rarely talk about themselves. Instead, self-affixed wall badges speak: “The world’s best mom lives here” or “Welcome to the world’s best grandma’s”. To learn more about the couple, whose lives were shaped by French colonialism, Lina Soualem uses private photos and videos. Her investigation is full of love: persistent, but never prying.

Director Yvann Yagchi, the son of Palestinian migrants, and his Jewish best friend spend a carefree childhood far away from politics on the neutral ground of Switzerland. As adults, both long for religious and ethnic affiliation. Yvann wants to visit Palestine at last and break generations of silence about the fate of his family. His friend moves to a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Thus begins the story of a failed reunion.
With frankness and patience, Yvann’s film, addressed directly at his former closest confidant, documents his own emotional development: Initial optimism and diplomatic reserve soon give way to an underlying unease. When a Palestinian refugee challenges him to give up the platitudes about striving for truth and formulate his opinion clearly, we realise that there can be only one standpoint for Yvann. There is a rift between the friends, vividly illustrated by animated doodles. Reflections on a lost friendship turn into a search for identity, made immeasurably harder by the ongoing destruction of Palestinian existence.

A Nazi propaganda film that survived only in fragments and never got to “test” its effect. It took intensive research to identify the scattered remains, correct the title in circulation, “Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt” (The Führer Gives a City to the Jews), and clarify who was able to see the roughly 90-minute attempted defraud at all before it disappeared. The intended international audience was no longer within reach in 1944/1945. But would they have been convinced by the retirement home for “resettled” Jews staged here? Kurt Gerron, film and theatre celebrity, interned in the Ghetto and conscripted as co-director, was deported to Auschwitz and gassed as late as 1944.

How are we shaped by our DNA? The 360° film tells the story of fictional scientist Roderick Norman, who tries to extract dreams from an unidentified skeleton that are inscribed in the blueprint of this ruin of a body. This black and white collage of text, 3D images and traditional film footage questions our conventional understanding of gender and identity.

The filmmaker’s grandmother moved into this house in 1971. When Rolande Ségalini died, everything remained as it was during her lifetime. But what to do with all the accumulated things? As her granddaughter Céline begins to film this material legacy, she realises that her grandmother has remained an enigma to her to this day. Room by room, she inventories, classes, counts, sorts the possessions retrieved from wardrobes, drawers, cabinets and boxes and arranges the objects into new still lives. It is an attempt to understand the deceased woman better and find out more about her. Step by step, the heiress discovers various connections to France’s colonial history.
The film unfurls the facets of a discreet relationship with one’s origin – searching, questioning, interpreting, at the same time investigating the construction and external perception of identity, the practice of passing. The things of a life, displayed like the findings of an archaeological dig, are laid out ready to be analysed. They express a desire: to be recognised as a white Frenchwoman.

Authentic and symbolic descendants of the Canadian Indigenous community lead us to a place where past and present intertwine. Two Indigenous men reveal their disturbing physical experiences with systemic racism. Their reports break taboos. And they implore us to carry the knowledge, grief and anger into the world like raging buffalos! Join up!

Our heroine’s previous film was invited to multiple festivals and awarded a number of prizes. Maybe the success went to her head a little. She was so busy working that she spent four years without a single day off. Now she sits in her parents’ garage and works on her graduation film. Its heroine is the animation film student Julita who is working on her graduation film. An affectionate film-in-film puppet animation with a surprising end.

In 2002, the filmmaker moved into an apartment on the 15th floor of a Kyiv high-rise. She was twelve at the time. Today, from the safe distance of another country, she talks to people who remember the flat and the time spent together. Coming-of-Age, the love of cinema, a sense of community and the erotic charge of individual moments combine to create an image of missing home and intimacy. With every memory, we zoom a little out of the still image on screen: three windows facing southwest, a balcony facing southeast, a rooftop protected from view, a high-rise panorama. The warm and personal gaze at the sky and houses of Kyiv is mirrored in the cold attentiveness of international war reporting.

Will Bishop-Stephens has been working on kinetic sculptures he calls “Thrum” since 2020. Version IX links a bicycle wheel to a guitar. Butterfly wings, snail shells, poppy seed capsules and feathers grow and shrink on the spokes, the guitar strings produce a vibrating drone. The animation and sound machine takes us to a state of floating.

This hand-drawn animated documentary provides subtle insights into the patriarchal structures of South Korean society and discusses the roles assigned to women there. Challenged as a restaurant owner and single parent, the director’s mother was helped by the characteristics of her animal zodiac sign: fierce as a tiger, she earned respect. But to her daughter she insisted that she tell nobody about her father’s absence. That is only whispered about.

A young taxidermist is fascinated by crows, paying considerate attention to their dead bodies. Her work on the birds is simultaneously a careful study of anatomical connections and a kind of service toward the resurrection of this mythical creature from the realm between life and death. Through detailed, pulsating black-and-white images and a sparingly intense soundtrack, a charged atmosphere unfolds between craftsmanship, imagination and poetry.

Two siblings, a boy and a girl, play together. They say goodbye to their father who has to go to war. To comfort his sister, the big brother gives her “tò he” every day, a traditional toy made of sticky rice powder. Until one day their father returns. A colourful and imaginative animated story from Vietnam.

What happens when we digitize our consciousness? We explore a virtual refuge of three-dimensional pixels. Gradually the outlines of a city unfold before our eyes. A choir of memories of its (digital) population is heard, tracing the past. The subjective knowledge of history fades away in a jumble of voices and pixels.

Trees and other plants during the period of American colonial rule in the Philippines, photographed from the perspective of those in power. The images not only document the rich flora, they categorize and classify the resources of the colony. The forest becomes inventory. From potted plants to sawmills, from logging to reforestation: In her essay Shireen Seno takes us to the essence of photography itself – and to its relationship with colonialism. Because both are trying to pick something.

How come the moon is able to pour such equally familiar and mysterious light on the earth it shines on? And why have the countless lunar addicts among international filmmakers been so willingly seduced by this magic power that they set important scenes of their works in the somnambulistic mood between a deeply decadent blood moon and the fresh innocence of the new moon? “To the Moon” is an entrancing ode to one of cinema’s central motifs.

Director Tadhg O’Sullivan, too, surrendered like a hypnotized man to the strange light of the moon and its cinematic supercharge. Using 130 sequences from international film history and enchanting 16mm footage shot exclusively for this project he weaves an immersive meta-narrative in which precisely placed film dialogues, literary “moon passages” and an ingeniously eclectic soundtrack also do their part. Is this where you find your own moon films, with which you were hopelessly struck at a time? Did Tadhg O’Sullivan give due space to “Black Moon” (no), “Suspiria” (no) or “Carnival of Souls” (yes)? Many may ask this. But profound consolation awaits the disappointed ones: Every missing film is outweighed by three others that are so amazing that the loss is easily got over with.

Inspired by the course of the Danube, the European river par excellence, this film drifts from the source to the delta, from the forest of origins to the sea of arrival, both black by name. The water keeps flowing, seasons pass, borders move past and languages change. The images and sounds are the results of a poetic and meditative work which abandons itself to the river’s speed and rhythm. Via encounters and reports, dialects and philosophies, people and landscapes, the grand narrative of a fragmented, torn Europe emerges. But it’s here precisely, along the Danube, that this continent is also marked by the wealth of intertwined cultures.