The sea on whose shore Weronika Szyma has set her film is a dense, pulsating blue. The beach and the family who are staying there, meanwhile, are limited to delicate black and white line drawings. Their minimalism makes the blue stand out all the more enchantingly: Sometimes represented as a horizontal strip that promises freedom but also fuels insecurity. Sometimes sloshing diagonally across the screen, swallowing up the image completely for a brief moment and marking a caesura. And there are quite a number of caesuras, because the seven film minutes span the story of several generations.

At one point the father disappears and the mother and her almost grown-up daughter are left to fend for themselves. They learn to comprehend the loss, support each other, turn gestures of distance into gestures of affection. Until the confidence grows to start all over again. The only thing that does not change here is the blue of the sea.

A marvellously wild stop motion animadoc trip to unknown worlds, in which 18-year-old astronaut Fatu sets himself a challenge that’s as nerve-racking to him as a lunar expedition. He wants to go shopping at the supermarket – for the first time as he sees himself: in full glam make-up. How will his family with their Kosovar roots react to these new coordinates? Will his self-perception and the others’ perception clash? Set course for star date LGBTQAI+.

Filip lives next to Tereza, he is a blocked writer, she is an ageing prostitute. They have little in common, except for the wall separating their apartments. One day Tereza asks him to write a letter to her fiancé. But that’s only the beginning … Špela Čadež makes the puppets dance, loosely based on Maxim Gorky: a pas de deux of neighbouring lonelinesses.

Toretsk in eastern Ukraine is marked by the decline of the coal industry: wasteland, rubble, scrap metal. In 2014, Russian separatists brought war into the region, destroying homes and families, including Nastya’s. The girl and her friends, all on the brink of adulthood, accept the decaying outskirts, gone to seed in the face of threat and depression, as normal. Taras Tomenko observes their small danced or sung escapes, their moments of obliviousness, sometimes their tears.

In November 2021, people tried to enter the EU via Belarus and Poland, but the route turned out to be a death trap. All access points to the border region were blocked in order not to create an escape corridor. Men, women and children were stuck in no man’s land – in the middle of winter, in the middle of the forest, for weeks. The film follows Polish activists on their mission. They learn that humanitarian aid, just like the refugees themselves, comes up against borders.

The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 also resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe. Many were affected, including eight-year-old Anatoly Rizov. In “Boy, Bloodbrother of Death,” Maja Weiss draws an emotionally shattering portrait of the unfulfilled childhood of a boy caught between the apocalyptic scenario his Ukrainian hometown became and – utterly ironic – the no less threatening state of emergency in Slovenia. During the summer holidays, Anatoly is supposed to recover there from the frightening conditions at home. But in the fight for independence from Yugoslavia, the place of refuge becomes a crisis area, too.

Chernobyl, 25 years later. Maja Weiss meets the boy, Anatoli, as a young man. What has happened in the meantime – between the nuclear disaster and the prospect of another tragedy? Where have all the international relief funds disappeared, and where did the millions intended for the reconstruction of the decaying sarcophagus of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant seep away? Where is my life taking me? What legacy will I leave to my son? These are just some of the questions that Ukrainian Anatoly Rizov, now grown up and twenty years after the first documentary portrait about his fate shaken by crises and wars, tries to answer.

Tröglitz in 2015: The mayor organises a shelter for refugees. He and his family become homeless themselves, because many residents believe that strangers do not belong in their Middle German home. With an interview with the mayor on the soundtrack, the drawings and 3D animations make tangible how the immense hatred corrodes the fabric of the community and tears the people apart.

Siren-like singing and rhythmic light reflections segue into a lyrical text and sketched silhouettes of coastlines and waves. Delicate lines and soft shadings on superimposed transparent foils form many-layered networks of shapes and structures. What is offscreen creeps into the frame through reflections and blends in with the visual design of the film. Then and now meet and merge into a poetic narrative about a childhood in Stralsund, at a time when the city was still part of the GDR. A fenced-in, circumscribed childhood, framed by nocturnal floodlights, the bawling of drunk sailors and the crumbling plaster of facades and walls gone grey. The narrator manages to leave this oppressive fortress behind, but she can never escape completely. The memories that have settled like grey dust on her interior will stay with her forever.

In only ninety seconds Marcus Grysczok tells a touching personal story of loss and takes us to great emotional depths. Tune in: an electronically distorted outcry. The protagonist talks to himself and to someone who no longer lives in this world, but all the more in his heart. He looks for a way out of this state of powerlessness, assuming a stranger’s role, a free-roaming paper dog that runs between real shelves and across tables, races past people on black-and-white photographs and everyday objects, chases himself on a plate rim. The images convey a feeling of home – a home for memory and for life. Tune out? As soon as the dog stops, reality puts an end to this restless racket and brings the awareness of enduring loss. Poetic in language and design, the film formulates a moving but clear-eyed farewell to a brother.

The inauguration of the “National Buchenwald Memorial”, the first national memorial of the GDR, took place in 1958. The monumental site was also meant to demonstrate the state-supporting importance of a selective culture of remembrance, commemorating the communist resistance fighters – and omitting the fact that the graves were mainly filled with Jewish victims. In 1961, DEFA completed this “introductory film”, commissioned by the Buchenwald committee, which talks about Goethe, Schiller, Thälmann, but only very marginally about Jews. Every visitor’s memorial tour started with this until 1975. Its scriptwriter and production manager was the playwright Heiner Müller, a fact that was not known until 2004.

Danusia and Basia are a mother and daughter, sharing a life presented by director Karol Pałka as supremely secluded. Far removed from any comfort, the seasons pass, a priest comes to visit, the women wade through mud and cultivate their habits. But, unnoticed by Danusia, Basia moves on a few back roads of her own that lead in other directions.

The nearest town seems light years away. Danusia and her daughter Basia lead a reclusive life in a ramshackle house in the country. The rooms are decorated with flower arrangements, scattered with devotional objects. Mother and daughter cultivate their connection to the supernatural, either in the shape of a strict Catholicism or as small rituals in nature. In one scene Basia dances around a fire like a witch. She is also the one who repeatedly seeks contact with the outside world. We see her with a mobile phone then, but the person at the other end remains intangible, unable or unwilling to break the spell around the mother-and-daughter team. It is a dense, almost deserted world which Karol Pałka in his debut film renders in gloomy, shadowed images that grow brighter only when spring comes. But even then, the dramatic opening piece “Specially for You” by the Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha still resonates.

At American high schools, the threat of school shootings has become omnipresent. In addition to regular drills of how to act in case of assault, security forces and metal detectors are now part of everyday life in the schools. In the name of security, a whole industry is busy developing bulletproof hoodies and blackboards, arming teachers and installing ever more surveillance devices. Is this prevention? Or a self-fulfilling prophecy?

While cheerleaders rehearse, basketball teams play and homecoming queens are crowned, adults in the background prepare for the emergency: What to do if a school is attacked – from inside or outside? Behaviour and meditation training to prevent violence in the first place are one thing. More money, however, is spent on armament. The so-called security industry has long entered the school market. Todd Chandler’s restrained observation takes a look at the arms and service industries and the media, at social psychologists as well as teachers. He cleverly focuses not on individual schools and incidents but rather on how a whole system responds to a threat.

Eating dirt and burping with relish – an earthworm refuses to be satisfied with this embarrassing evolutionary outcome for his species and sets out to learn better things. But imitating many-legged and winged insects does not result in distinguished behaviour but rather leads to mortal danger. Ethan Barrett demonstrates magnificently that clay is the pinnacle of the evolutionary pyramid of animation, especially when it is set to such a light and poignant score.

A genius of independent cinema looks back on his hitherto unrecognized work. From now on he will leave this unprofitable art well alone, be part of the big business, sell himself and be bought. A brilliant future seems within reach. A torrent of buzzwords from the beginner’s guide to self-marketing. Burning ambition. Caustic sarcasm. Biting irony.