Heynowski’s biographical research in the guise of an exposé film was part of a campaign coordinated by SED functionary Albert Norden to unmask the FRG as a fascist state. Documents and commentaries trace the career of Adenauer’s Chief of Staff of the Chancellery, Hans Globke, who had collaborated in the systematic marking and racist declassification of Jews as a Nazi administrative lawyer and Eichmann confidant. The facts had been on the table for some time, but acquired new propaganda value in view of the impending Eichmann trial. In 1961, “Operation J” was awarded a main prize at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week.

Testimony versus “prosthetic memory”: The director dubs the sound recordings of her grandmother, collected over a period of ten years, in which the old lady recaps her encounter with a tornado as a child, in front of a green screen. While the details of her memories change through repeated narration over time, the found footage from feature and disaster films, weather reports and landscape images suggests a mediatised participation in the events.

In the middle of a deserted city of concrete and fog, text fragments float over a sea of flowers. This is the story of a woman who refused to leave her home after a disaster. The game of tension and ignorance, suggestion and concreteness leaves room for projections: We are confronted with our own fears before the plot is resolved.

A formally sophisticated and thoughtful film about the “Below Forest Death March” memorial site: In the late spring of 1945, this wooded area near Wittstock became an improvised temporary camp for inmates of the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps. They eternalized themselves and their fate by carving on the trees. But what does “eternal” mean? The trees grow, change and renew their skin …

In rural Ethiopia the staff of a health centre are fighting maternal mortality. They tirelessly appeal to women to give birth in the clinic. But reservations are strong, and so are the practical obstacles. How are heavily pregnant women supposed to arrive in time when the ambulance comes hours later or not at all? Against medical advice, Hulu Ager decides to give birth at home, assisted by a traditional midwife.

With palpable familiarity, the film crew captures moments of intimate communion between Hulu Ager, the midwives and other women. On the margins of the central conflict, the many challenges they face in a patriarchal society emerge. The debates are most lively under the hood dryer at the hairdresser’s: She doesn’t enjoy sex because of her circumcision, the medical professional Welela reports. “Sometimes you have to prepare yourself for sex,” another customer advises. Sometimes it helps to get drunk. But the perky hairdresser is sure: Bad sex is grounds for divorce. The women share their desires and woes with each other, experience solidarity and gather courage for small and great acts of departure and resistance. Men are relegated to the role of extras, if at all.

Narrated by the incarnate ghost of a deceased real hair donor. In the post-war era, the export of real hair wigs contributed to Asia’s economic development, with Hong Kong as a major hub. In its heyday in the 1960s, “Asian real hair” was popular with wealthy U.S. women, but then the USA imposed an embargo on the product, now classified as “communist hair”. This is where the intricate and innovatively realised story begins: Starting with complex economical and sociopolitical contexts, it weaves a thread that runs through various historical and dreamlike staged levels.

Hong Kong was and is a space of in-between-ness – between East and West, between communism and capitalism. Perhaps that is why there are so many spooks in the city, one protagonist speculates. Just like the well-travelled ghost, an eternally wandering entity and contemporary witness of an imperial and colonialist past.

Theo Montoya draws on casting outtakes, melancholy observations of daily life and decadent party impressions from his friends to create a morbid and yet tender portrait of a young, queer generation in Colombia. In a country marked by violence and repression they can hardly imagine their future, but maintain a close, almost loving relationship with death.

This was meant to be a fiction film: a ghost story in which the dead no longer find cemetery space and consequently coexist with the living, including having sexual relationships – which the state rigorously forbids and persecutes. A clandestine nocturnal subculture emerges where erotic desires for which daylight means annihilation can be acted out. A week after Montoya found his leading actor for the project, the latter died of a heroin overdose. More deaths among his friends follow. They are the ghosts haunting the film that was ultimately made. It retains its dystopian character, but the dangers it portrays are quite real: For these young people, they are part of everyday life in Medellín, which is still deep in the shadow of Pablo Escobar and where the search for pleasure and human warmth takes one through labyrinthine abysses.

A lovingly designed mini-drama about a droll puppet with a button nose and jug ears in scary situations we all remember from our childhood. The horror on the one-metre board under which a bottomless abyss is yawning. The panic when the door of a public toilet won’t open. Every scene illustrates children’s fears, and we don’t laugh about a little man in distress but about ourselves.

Tszzzzidd – skin and adhesive tape separate slowly, almost lasciviously. From a sober physical point of view, forces between molecular bonds are being overcome. Yoriko Mizushiri composes brief, highly sensual variations on pain and pleasure based on this phenomenon. Restrained, calm and scalpel-sharp, she creates two-dimensional drawn animations in subdued colours, accompanied by cool electronic sounds that explode in one’s head only to scatter into the anxious but curious body.

A person sits at a plain table. Time makes its usual rounds – until there is a hiccup. Moments fall into each other, angles of vision diverge, normality slips. The table becomes an unmanageable combination of constantly changing perspectives. The troubled person is transformed into a distorted temporal body. The world atomises itself in basic shapes and colours.

Partly rhetorical, partly ironic and partly profound, the film deals with the Germans’ strange, three-hundred-year-old relationship to their stereotypical ideas of America’s native population. This includes the question of how the audience themselves feel about this ominous object of fascination. The backdrop and starting point of a floating journey through the history of various stereotypes are the ruins of the former U.S. embassy in East Berlin, where an exhibition on the subject took place in 1986.

Ten years after its premiere, Kamar Ahmad Simon’s film has lost nothing of its bitter topicality. In 2022, too, millions of people are fleeing floods after heavy rainfall in Bangladesh, hundreds of villages are flooded or completely cut-off. On 27 May 2009, cyclone Aila hit the Bangladeshi coast. The community portrayed in “Are You Listening!” has settled in a makeshift home on an old dyke and keeps stubbornly waiting for the new one to be built. With a fine sense for absurd situations, the filmmaker documents a daily life marked by the determination to return one day against all odds.

A few years after her marriage to Seongman, Areum decides to go to France to study and finally make the kind of films that are not possible in Korea. Seongman, however, has nothing to do in France and, as he doesn’t understand French, is sliding into depression. A joint project is to help against homesickness. They open the one-table restaurant “Oegil” to provide South Korean expats with culinary memories of home.

Of course, this means that Areum has no time left for filmmaking. When she gets pregnant, massive chaos is looming. After the birth she finally focuses on her studies and Seongman takes over as house husband – a role that overwhelms him so much that he goes on strike. In this challenging everyday life, she must assert herself as a woman, artist, mother and spouse. The feminist narrative determines the point of view from which Areum Parkkang, in this second part of her autobiographical film project, examines her own life, its comedy, tragedy and planning uncertainty. The tone is charming throughout, and the energy of her reflective self-observation is infectious. Areum lets us participate head-on in her back and forth as an independent filmmaker between festival pitchings, homesickness and the baby change unit.

A young Swiss woman searches for her Armenian roots. Various lovingly animated drawers of the simultaneously accumulating family archive open. This very personal examination of collective traumas of post-migrant communities finds images and words for racism and the difficulties of talking about feelings with male family members. Its leitmotif is a wardrobe roaming through night-blue landscapes which – despite the cracks – holds everything and everyone together.

Classical music is great, says ten-year-old Arshan. He lives with his family on a ranch in California, helps to feed the cows and does household chores. But he uses every spare minute to train his voice. Arshan’s big dream is to become an opera singer. When performers for an opera production are sought in town, he anxiously goes to the casting.