In the early 1980s, Poland is in a state of emergency. The country’s democracy movement, represented by the free Solidarność trade union, is to be suppressed. To this end, President Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law on 13 December 1981. In collusion with the Soviet Union a threatening scenario is staged to justify the “stan wojenny”. As a result, Western nations like Great Britain and the USA impose economic sanctions on the Eastern Bloc state. This produces a complex field of tension in which the Polish population are confronted with existential shortages on the one hand but continue their struggle underground on the other – despite curfews, telephone surveillance and a media system controlled by the military.
In his found footage film, Tomasz Wolski brings the explosive, the everyday and the iconic together to provide an insight into a situation that is as absurd as it is dangerous. The extremely dynamic (and musical) montage illustrates the rapid and convoluted succession of events while at the same time intervening through comments, quite often with a notable sense of humour, for example, when Wolski helps a British news correspondent not always on top of events to a bit of retroactive glory: “Most fundamental is the … Hang on, sorry, sorry, could you … Photography and filming will be widely controlled …”

Renata Lučić, both director and protagonist, returns to her hometown to visit her father in a small village in the Croatian part of Slavonia, near the Bosnian border. She has always hated the rural area on the banks of the river Sava, “those endless meadows and gardens,” as she reveals right in the opening sequence. Even as a child she knew that she would leave. Like her older brother, like her mother. And like 124,667 other women who “went West” after the war, usually to Germany or Austria, to work – and never to return.
She now hangs out in the almost abandoned and womanless village with her estranged father Tomislav and his best friend Joso. The men follow their routines, working in the forest or eating river fish they caught themselves. Emotional closeness and intimacy gradually form in at first seemingly trivial conversations and despite initial misunderstandings and distinctly different world views. The film project, which started as the story of an emigration, gradually turns into a sensitive study of loneliness, human relationships, friendship and love; about the beauty of the little things that leads to larger insights – not just for Renata.

“Y” sensually draws the progress of a same-sex relationship from playful beginning to turbulent end. Charcoal strokes become the language in which the filmmaker tells us of the process of growing closer to and away from each other, of intimacy and estrangement. A shared chapter of life is sketched, corrected and discarded.

But the line also explores the female body. The tip of the charcoal wanders through curves, hills and valleys, circling soft flanks like a finger and gently stroking breasts and hips. In the darkness of the cinema, the eye is free to glide along the emerging and disappearing shapes. We become part of an erotic triangle and are given an intimate insight into the protean psychological and physical aspects of this partnership.

Yaren’s mother died four years ago. This summer she is excited to go to a special camp: a bereavement camp. All the children here have lost someone close to them. In five beautiful and intense days, Yaren and the other kids deal with what unites them all: their pain. A film about loss, healing and friendship.

Sphere, cuboid and potato figure hang out in the playground of grey everyday life. After a literal short trip of the spherical fellow into the gaudy, psychedelic cosmos where colours and forms blur, the only thing to do is to bring along the friends. The three of them pool all their skills in a rubber ball and jump into the new timeless world.

Shots of ordinary life from seven months in Tallinn, where nothing is ordinary in 1988. In the course of perestroika, the people’s national awareness grows stronger and the return to Estonian identity is celebrated by the masses. Soviet occupation must end. Observations from a country in upheaval, commented on with tender irony.

Yasin El Harrouk is Yonii is actor, rapper, singer, Swabian, Moroccan. This portrait presents him as a lively shifter between life and creative cultures, between the roles he plays in the studio and in front of the camera, and the expectations that family and community have of him. Yonii has two languages and even more worlds – and enjoys this wealth. But on the sofa in his mother’s Stuttgart living room, it becomes clear that this range of different worlds also means a constant balancing act.

Powerful poetry in image, word and sound – Max Ferguson’s work is a rough diamond that testifies to an emotional, unpolished force and whose light is refracted in many colours. Mixing elements from photography, painting and collage with short video sequences, Ferguson finds strong verbal and visual images to mark the tipping point between physical desire and emotional violation.
Rough aesthetics and a gloomy atmosphere reminiscent of early underground films are combined with extreme delicacy and a constantly alert, almost animalistic curiosity. They manifest a very contemporary female self-image. The balancing act between pain and self-respect takes place in a sound cosmos of electronic thunder and nervous buzzing. While the brawny truck cannot leave its lane, the deer follows its instinct and finds a (new) way, even if it must learn from the wolf.

August 2022, a 360° view of a Ukraine that has been fighting the Russian invasion for six months. In the midst of warfare, a shared solidarity emerges which also releases resistive-creative forces: museums hide collections, a street artist finds his calling, opera companies and rave communities raise their volume when the bomb alerts threaten to drown them out …