Chile is the only country in the world in which water management has been almost completely privatised. Three women stand for the profound damages suffered by the population as a result: a general water shortage, above-ground poisoning by industry and underground contamination via landfills. All parallel and interrelated facets of the same problem.

Unexpectedly, Marion Guillard captures the perfect shot: A flock of birds pirouette in the evening sky, the camera follows their graceful movements as if hypnotized, symbiotically. The road to this moment was long. Guillard shares her journey to the USA with us, which is not only marked by feelings of alienation from her family – the postcard motifs spread before her eyes also leave her cold. In a voiceover, she talks about her relationship to herself and her body, about an ideal of femininity she does not conform to, and disturbing encounters with men.
“We Had Fun Yesterday” follows Guillard’s stream of thought, both autobiographical exploration and reflection about the way we look at others: animals – wild or caged; nature - unspoiled or shaped by humans. The result is a surprising weave in which mental and digital images arise and crumble.

Narimane Mari dedicates a touching portrait that tells of parting to her now deceased lover, the artist Michel Haas. She captures first and foremost the small, everyday moments – street scenes, working at the studio, watching films together, reading to each other in bed. The absence of a traditional narration, long shots and intense conversations invite us to think about our own relationship with temporality.

A recurring potpourri of poems, prose and music by Nâzım Hikmet, Stéphane Mallarmé through to Sun Ra gives the film its very own leisurely rhythm. The scenes at the studio are carried by this mood, too. As with Jackson Pollock, the art is created mostly on the floor. But Michel Haas works with ink, large-format paper sheets and hot water instead of canvas and thinned paint. Humming happily, he hits the soaked paper with his bare hands until edges, creases and folds form. The abstract outlines and flat shapes are recognisable as figures only when viewed from a distance: Often, they are intertwined couples. A contemplative tribute to love.

The letters Halina receives from Farouk in the late 1970s are as haunting as they are hopeful. They have a long journey between them: from Iraq to Poland. But at some point the contact breaks off, and the reasons remain a secret. Their son Adam manages to build a bridge. And the latter’s son, Ignacy, tells the story from his perspective. It’s a delicate visual treatment behind which complicated fates are hidden.

Ten years after the bloody suppression of the workers’ uprisings, the dead are commemorated in front of the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980. The memorial service conceived by Andrzej Wajda could only be documented after sustained pressure. The resulting montage, which links images of the event with emotional reports by contemporary witnesses, was never supposed to be.

A hungry and solitary weasel roams the dry landscape, intent on hunting the last remaining birds in a tree. The birds try to keep the tree in balance while the weasel doggedly climbs its trunk. The tree sways, the stomach growls, the weasel persists until it’s too late. A classic anti-hero cartoon – not just for children.

“17 June 1990, East Berlin. The GDR will exist for another three months. No more time to commemorate all those who stood up in ’53, showed civil courage and were vanquished. This film is dedicated to them.” This is what we hear from offscreen as the film opens, to images of a rally for the victims of 17 June.

Right after the collapse of the GDR regime, director Andrea Ritterbusch searched the western archives for sources for a reappraisal of the East German uprising of 17 June 1953. She discovered a wealth of valuable original footage which she combined with newly shot interviews with contemporary witnesses of the revolt. In her documentary film she reconstructs the weeks before and after the countrywide unrest, sheds light on propaganda and, with the help of her interview partners, interprets the progress, cause and political contextualisation of the strikes and demonstrations over time. The SED regime was on the brink of collapse during those days and may well have been toppled without the intervention of the Soviet army. This review of an event that was already 37 years in the past when this film was made is true to reality and at the same time testifies to the excitement and reorientation of the East German population in the years of political change.

“Everyone says fat people eat too much. But it’s not that simple”, Christiane Hein states at the beginning of her film which follows seven-year-old Robert Becher from Erfurt in his struggle against excess pounds. The stages include a dieting sanatorium complete with “juice day”, humiliating physical education lessons at school and a visit to relatives in the country where Robert experiences a life without teasing and self-punishment. This is where the boy lets go – not easy when thoughts of weight fence one’s life in. Again and again, director Hein inserts scales as a symbolic image reminiscent of a guillotine-like torture instrument. A compassionate portrait.

A handful of quarrymen in the Reinhardtsdorf open cast mine near Bad Schandau dig out the coveted Elbe natural stone. Gabriele Denecke’s approach to the men, who are of different ages, is almost trance-like, the movement to and from the stones marks the transition to another world. We hear about the merciless working conditions of the past, about alcohol, people worn out before their time. Today, digging out the massive rocks in the midst of nature also constitutes a degree of freedom. Open cast miners share a special mindset. And: Once you’ve worn out your first pair of wooden shoes, you’ll stay – probably forever.

Coal briquets hit the waggon with a thundering sound, are loaded, unloaded and finally end up in the houses of Prenzlauer Berg. Renate Uhle is the owner of a coal shop run by her family since 1922. Together with her men – Klaus, Kalle, Manne, Erwin, Pummel, Felix and Würstchen – she sees to it that no one in the neighbourhood freezes. Work is hard, the afterwork beer obligatory, and Renate’s tongue quick and sensitive. Helke Misselwitz follows the workers on their chugging diesel-driven ants through the streets and the watershed year of 1989, sweats with them as they climb up endless stairs and listens to them through the cigarette smoke.

In 2020, the biggest protests against the government to date formed in Belarus. The protesters were met with violence and restrictions, many of them were given draconian prison sentences. A dangerous climate that sought to nip political activism in the bud took hold. For “Who, If Not Us? The Fight for Democracy in Belarus,” Juliane Tutein filmed and researched for three years in a country that had not seen a change of elites with its supposed independence in 1991. She discovered mainly women at the forefront of the courageous protesters. This portrait is dedicated to three of them: Nina Baginskaya, in her mid-seventies and active in the fight for an open Belarus since the 1980s, Tatsyana “Tanya” Hatsura-Yavorskaya, founder of the human rights film festival “Watch Docs”, and Darya Rublevskaya, the youngest at 22, who works for the “Viasna” human rights centre founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski. Tutein develops a polyphonic collage in which Minsk’s intimidating architecture has the same haunting impact as Hatsura-Yavorskaya’s escape into a Ukraine attacked by Russia.

In 2019, the “Sustainabiliteens” from Vancouver mobilized more than 150,000 people to march against climate destruction. The film gives insights into the teenagers’ everyday life which is determined not only by school, friends and families, but also by the climate crisis and activism. Taking things into their own hands gives them strength: “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.”

The aeroplanes are stationary, nothing moves, nothing takes off at the US military airbase in Arizona – until a young woman in a white dress begins to jump on a trampoline outside the fence, framed by an idyllic sunset. She conveys her story from the silent offscreen – only through subtitles. Having come from Saudi Arabia, she is stuck in the US because her father stole her identity papers. So homesick that she is considering drastic measures to get back home, she almost enlists in the military. But the US Army is suspicious and would not station her, a risk factor, anywhere near the Middle East. But there is a Baghdad in Arizona, too …
Artist Samar Al Summary’s work is an investigation into systems of power. She does not only talk about herself, the prejudices and obstacles she faces as a Saudi woman, but also about the crash of two Iraqi air force pilots who were to be trained by the US Air Force but never made it home either. In her dramatically condensed film essay, she takes up the symbolic fight – both against gravity, which she can at least temporarily defy by using cinematic means, and against patriarchy. The latter, however, is not so easy to fight.

An Athenian filmmaker is struggling with insomnia and seeks help from a tarot reader. She says that when she does manage to sleep, her dreams are strange, she dreams of her childhood apartment, where everyone has turned to stone. Yet such surreal thoughts hardly sound outlandish given the current state of Greece: petrified monuments to past glories as far as the eye can see, even as any sort of movement in the present has slowed to a standstill. She sets out to understand this curious paradox, dipping into literature, fiction and documentary to do so, disparate elements given unity by playfulness, political sensibility and shimmering celluloid.
Conversations with locals on the streets of the Greek capital about the nature of statues; the 1944 manifesto by poet Yorgos Makris that proposed blowing up the Parthenon and the groupuscule that now seeks to complete his work; the story of the political prisoners forced to rebuild the same monument in miniature; a rogue Caryatid now discovering love. Such times are hard to make sense of, whether in Greece or beyond, and perhaps there is only one way to proceed, to move forward, to live: everything bit by bit. “When will we gather the world together piece by piece?”

The multicoloured, turbulent journey of a huge crate never seems to end. Whatever could it contain? An elephant, a lion, a bear? First it’s loaded onto a plane, then a ship. Then it goes up the mountains in a train, and over hill and dale on a bus. The crate keeps getting smaller and smaller and everyone has their own idea of what may be hidden inside. But mum’s the word!

Adam is 15, bullied by his schoolmates and ignored by the girl of his dreams. His grandmother, who has teased him all his life with nasty remarks about his appearance, uses her dying breath to bring home to him once more his supposed physical shortcomings. Even the prospect of the upcoming summer holidays hardly raises Adam’s spirits, because his father has organised several unpleasant holiday jobs for him to build his character. On top of everything else, the teasing and negative comments manifest in Adam in strange deformations of his body which provoke additional stress and ridicule.

Adam is different. He stays outside while the people around him go about their usual – their “normal” – activities. He watches his sister being cheated on by her boyfriend, must bear a neighbour’s fanatical lawn care accuracy and discovers that a resident of his street throws bags of dog faeces up into the branches of the alley trees. The more the daily madness around him becomes evident, the more Adam emerges as an empathetic and mature young adult. Contrary to all claims he, whom the others regard as a strange eccentric, is in control of his life.