She left Serbia a long time ago and never looked back. But then Nataša Urban discovered her father’s hiking diary and began to connect his entries to the events of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The 1999 total eclipse of the sun is the central motif, employed by Urban as a metaphor for the way a dark past remains part of the present.

Kitted out with analogue film equipment, the director travels back to find the stories of her family, intimate friends and acquaintances. She listens to memories of inconceivably cruel acts; she watches the wind blow through leaves of grass. Her father, a lean, grey-haired man, hikes through the forest, striding again through the places he once visited. Dreamlike scenes meet sober descriptions of almost unbearable atrocities. Urban skilfully combines 16 mm and Super 8 film with archive material to explore the blurred boundaries between the individual and the collective, the private and public spheres, the personal and the political, resulting in an enchantingly beautiful work of art, a poetic reflection on growing up during the war.

The riots that were to spread across the whole of France in 2005 began in Clichy-sous-Bois outside the gates of Paris: young men on the barricades, burning suburbs. The division of society became painfully tangible. What has happened since then? This complex, finely woven documentary look at the Banlieue shows how consciously young people today deal with discrimination. The age of machismo seems over – at the school theatre workshop or while playing soccer. Women rule the world …

András and his daughter Zsófia enjoy a relaxed Sunday in their stately city mansion, just before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. But soon the silence in the house is disturbed by an escaped pig, closely followed by an unexpected visit: András’ brother, his large family and lots of luggage barge in through the front door. Running children and garrulous relatives bring noise and bedlam to all floors. Art objects are handled without permission, furniture is moved, objects fall to the ground. The visitors have brought chaos. Zsófia’s father and the maid try in vain to restore calm and order. Though András and his brother get closer to each other, the old house is not up to the changed circumstances. A leaking water pipe heralds a finale that at least makes them all stand still together.

The archived testimonies of “Breaking the Silence”, an association of military veterans, are to be turned into a compilation of “service incidents” in the Israeli-occupied territories. But Avi Mograbi confesses: “My films tend to get complicated, even when my intention is to make a very simple film.” His reaction to a complex doom is artistically and intellectually commensurate: complex. Once again he uses a built-in commentary function in which he himself, white-bearded, explains the tricky situation to his audience: not as a special “Israel-Palestine” case, but as the bitter standard application of the globally familiar aporetic model of “military occupation”.

To enter the land behind the mirrors like Alice … A girl looks behind the mirror of her childhood for the first time, looking out cautiously, but also curiously, for the first harbingers of growing up. She steals away, detaching herself from her parents and siblings. Beside the small, protected family home, there now is a new, vast emotional space to explore.

A stuttering boy transforms an Iranian kitchen into a fantastic cosmos. The father’s body becomes a refrigerator, the mother's belly a washing machine whose spin cycle gives birth to a screaming baby. Even birds on tiles and detergents have a surprising life of their own. This exuberant animation, dotted with real-life elements – fried eggs, broken plates, chess pieces – develops a subtle wit, ironizing ingrained family patterns.

Nazario, founder of the Spanish underground comics movement and pioneer of the gay graphic novel, looks back on his eventful life, his flamboyant and explicit works. 16mm films, photos, illustrations and paintings document the spirit of departure of a counter culture, but also recount Nazario’s great love for Alejandro with whom he was together until the latter’s death. Profession and passion merge in this artist.

The top-secret military testing facility Dugway lies in the barren desert of Utah. This is where the U.S. Army are rehearsing the wars of tomorrow. They specialise in nuclear weapons, chemical and biological agents, including anthrax and special nerve toxins. Even the Hiroshima pilots practiced on this site. Meeting at this war site far from all combat zones are: a heavily traumatised soldier, a military chaplain, a survivor of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima and a father looking for his missing son. They are all proud of their American Way of Life and at the same time marked by the horrors of war. Because even in Utah, far from all actual fighting, it has indelibly inscribed itself – into the people’s souls and the collective memory of the U.S., for many decades the nation with the highest military budget.

This visually powerful film approaches its protagonists without prejudice, trying to learn how they navigate a social system that sees the use of violence as a right of freedom. What does it mean when guns and their attendant rituals are used to strengthen family cohesion, when shooting practice becomes a bonding exercise between fathers and sons? And when – unimpressed by the daily arms buildup – fear hovers over everything and seeps deeper into life every day?

These fucking doubts! And isn’t a 100-kilo massif of a man who recites tender poetry on stage a contradiction in terms anyway? He almost fell silent. But then he defeated the booming silence and made his own fears the subject of his slam poetry performances. One small step for mankind, one big leap for a shy giant.

Fast drawn lines fidget, in the middle a girl on a bustling street crossing, just now holding her mother’s hand … and suddenly alone! But what did Mama say: If we lose each other, stay exactly where you are. It’s just that the car drivers are not amused at all. Now everyone has to help, even the Prime Minister himself.

The NGO “Breaking the Silence” – BtS for short – consists of veteran Israeli soldiers who, by collecting personal accounts of their memories, want to raise awareness of everyday military life and the treatment of the population in the Occupied Territories. Director Silvina Landsmann’s film allows us a look behind the scenes of a contested group with a controversial approach in the midst of a conflict that’s been smouldering for more than 70 years.

What makes a good soldier? The ability to execute orders without scruples, or the consideration of higher moral goals when dealing with the enemy? For many members of BtS, the latter was only possible after active military service. In their work, they engage with operations and acts that in retrospect seem wrong to them. They address the Israeli population and foreign media with videos, lectures and city tours. The streets of Hebron are the site of frequent clashes between BtS, Israeli settlers and the army. On the political level, too, the organisation is harshly criticized. They are accused of fabricating stories, damaging Israel’s reputation and playing into the hands of anti-Semites. Landsmann observes with a cinematic, sober eye how the group struggles internally and externally to find its voice.

Barely a kilometre off the Belgian coast, 35,000 tons of chemical munitions are buried at the bottom of the sea. The scraps of yesterday’s wars are secreting toxic gases today and the film explores the effects this will have – from fishing boats to delicatessen counters. An ominous droning lies over the impressive images of already dubious production processes. The shrimp end up in fish cakes. The seagulls lament the calamity. The people are at a loss.

Chivas DeVinck works his way up from the soil to the stars to find out what constitutes Nevada outside of Las Vegas. Milieus, places and people are intertwined in a collage. The magnetic core of the whole is the subterranean water from which everything seems to grow and for which everyone strives. What looks like an arid desert landscape or a sleepy little town from afar, turns out on closer inspection to be an atmospheric representation of the rural U.S.

Just before the COVID pandemic brought the whole world to a standstill, DeVinck captures the curious, the mundane and the harrowing in White Pine County in eastern Nevada. There are well-nigh endless community meetings about dog-keeping issues, and farmers who talk to their Peruvian shepherds in appalling Spanglish. There are droning radio shows nobody may listen to anyway, and special church services for sex workers. But people are also preoccupied with explosive political issues: the distribution of water supplies in the arid region, the thirty-year dispute over the construction of a water pipeline to Las Vegas, the continuing discrimination against the indigenous people. Resonating in all this is the myth of the US concept of freedom, manifesting itself in gun possession, the idea of every man for himself and an unwavering faith in the healing powers of capitalism.

In the Swedish town of Gullspång, Kari and May meet a woman who looks exactly like their sister Lita who died more than 30 years ago. No coincidence: Olaug was born on the same day as Lita in the rural north of Norway; a DNA test confirms that the two were born as twin sisters. The happy reunion with Kari, May and the rest of the family, though, soon shows the first cracks. At the age of 80, Olaug’s identity is shattered. Why did her parents give her away? Will she fit in with her new, deeply religious kin? She does not believe in divine revelations. Instead, she is haunted by Lita’s alleged suicide – and indeed her investigative research raises questions about the circumstances of that death.

At least at one point in the film, director Maria Fredriksson is audibly dumbfounded behind the camera. What starts as a feel-good film becomes a character study of identity, then a kind of true-crime and finally a mystery story. The direction takes it up a notch, sometimes to dramatic, sometimes to quite funny effect: The perfectly lighted country houses with portrait photos on the walls and the ironically suggestive use of music are reminiscent of “Twin Peaks.” Sometimes life writes the crazier plot twists.

Emanations of a nightmare. Drawings of fragile girls’ bodies from which the silhouettes of massive men emerge devouring each other. Obsessive images from the inner perspective of a nude dancer during her performance. Shreds of acoustic memories of sexual abuse. And always recurring: the rapist in a hat, the forever unerasable unreal reality.

Two siblings are sitting peacefully at a table and drawing. There is a swimming hedgehog in the sister’s picture. The brother wonders whether this would work in real life. He goes into the garden, grabs a hedgehog and throws him into the pool to test this. Not funny at all, thinks the hedgehog. But before he scurries back to his pile of leaves, he comes up with a wet surprise …