No images of value but “confused material.” For decades, footage secretly filmed in August 1968 in Prague was hidden in archives under this label. Evald Schorm recovered the illegal material and composed it to the beat of Tchaikovsky recordings, in keeping with its expressive nature. The film could finally be publicly shown in 1990.

The vultures are circling over the Cevennes, the south-eastern part of the French Massif Central. They are part of the holistic cycle of becoming and passing away which shepherdess Nathalie seeks to come closer to. Because the vultures are gnawing at the remains of her beloved animals. She considers herself responsible not only for their lives, but also for their death. Elsa Maury’s film is an unequivocal testimony to what it means to wield the fatal knife oneself.

The sounds made by a ewe when a lamb is born seem almost human. And when a little later the newborn turns out to be unwilling to live it seems as if one could detect pain in the mother’s eyes. The shepherdess Nathalie’s empathic look at her flock was transferred directly to the viewer. Each animal here has its own name, each has a biography that Nathalie knows by heart. And it’s ultimately up to her to finally decide when the end of a sheep is near. In diary-like sequences we learn about her feelings, take part in a difficult process of development which results in new self-confidence, perhaps even new wisdom. Elsa Maury shows a perennial school of killing and death. She leaves the events uncommented, but achieves an intensity through images and editing that stays with us for a long time.

The Western culture of self-optimisation is based on the idea that one can control all aspects of life. This VR experience subjects us to a psychological experiment, confronting us with feelings such as frustration, helplessness, stress, rage and grief to show: Control is an illusion. Step by step, we are led from physical activation to contemplative perception.

Lebanese filmmaker Dima El-Horr moved to Paris several years ago. Among the friends who stayed at home is the artist Sirvat Fazlian, whom she regularly visits in Beirut until the failed revolution of 2019, the COVID lockdown, the devastating port explosion and finally the dramatic economic crisis put a temporary end to their meetings. So the director decides to give her conversations with Siro a cinematic form.

Ever since the death of her husband, the well-known Armenian actor Berj Fazlian, Siro has lived alone in a flat filled with souvenirs and devoted most of her time to music and painting. In this film, footage from the years before 2019 blends with recorded phone calls between Siro and Dima and recent scenes from Paris, coming together in a densely woven portrait of life in exile. While snow falls in Paris, Siro talks about warm days on the Mediterranean coast and sings Armenian songs. She rails against the permanent crisis in Lebanon, but her nature is not affected. For one thing, Siro personifies the legendary Lebanese resilience. Yet for the filmmaker she represents that part of the heart that people in exile leave behind. So almost inevitably, “Conversations with Siro” becomes the director’s dialogue with herself.

Michèle Bokanowski’s sounds have been a distinct part of Patrick Bokanowski’s film images since 1972. The origin of her soundtracks often lies in noises that are quite unlike music. Thus, she uses the clacking of billiard balls to describe people working on a field in the distance. Between tape loops and electronic devices, the composer talks about her craft of shaping sonorous material.

Spitting ponies, a cursed TV reporter and a hairy giant who is lovingly combed by his brunette girlfriend while she develops inexplicable fears about her own foot. This will later literally be shot off – the foot, not the boyfriend! A faceless man is also there – acting in alliance with the ponies. This colourful, ominous animated thriller made in analogue cut-out technique addresses states of anxiety, masochistic fights and media criticism. Perhaps.

On the outskirts of the city, the new modern buildings are silent and the motorway bridge drones. Birds are circling in the sky, a young man, concealed by his hoodie, is riding his e-scooter along a park path. The only irritating element is the rifle over his shoulder.

Anton Cla’s film depicts a mood of high alert, while the disaster has in fact already happened. Unexplainable scenes that could not be more disconcerting and grow increasingly drastic unfold calmly. The screaming silence is decisively enhanced by the imperceptibly accumulating mixed drone of the daily sounds of a mechanised world: motorway, tramway, clicking indicators, pulsating emergency signals. What the soundscape adamantly refuses to deliver is a loud discharge that would release the tension. The suburban landscape is steeped in a red theatrical warning light, blurs restrict the view. The 3D computer design masks neither the artificiality nor the computer-based deformations of the images of a normality that has become a combat zone – the machine matrix seems to rule already.

Kwinten is proud of his Dad who is the commander of a naval ship. But a new mission takes his Dad to sea again for three months. Kwinten waits for postcards and counts the days. His best friend now lives in another town, but fortunately comes to visit. Coping with missing his father isn’t easy for Kwinten. Seeing him again is all the more wonderful, though.

Few artist portraits give us the privilege of getting as close to the painter as if we had free access to his studio. Over a period of three years, Pepe Danquart got to accompany the painter Daniel Richter, watching him paint, negotiate with his gallerist, talk to his publisher and joke with fellow artist Jonathan Meese. Danquart interviews collectors, attends auctions and even visits record shops.

From all this the complex image of an artist emerges who appreciates the abstract as much as the figurative and who seems to be searching constantly for the meaning of his work. Daniel Richter’s paintings fetch top prices on the art market – an aspect that neither Pepe Danquart nor the painter leave out, but that is, fortunately, not the focus here. Openings, auctions and gala dinners structure the narrative, but its heart is Richter’s studio, where we see him as a craftsman, a restless doer, who reflects surprisingly frankly and self-deprecatingly on his work, which to him is always also a political act. He talks about the process of creation, the effect, meaning and significance of his paintings, makes clear statements and, notwithstanding a certain amount of craving for recognition, ultimately doesn’t take himself more seriously than necessary.

Argentine director Agustina Pérez Rial’s debut feature-length film about the ninth edition of the International Film Festival in her native city of Mar del Plata from 1968 seems to find an uncommonly balanced solution to the primal dilemma of documentary storytelling. In an impressively brilliant montage of archive material, a story is constructed which, according to the director herself, is not necessarily true, but realistic.

Historical black and white photos of captivating beauty, film footage from various sources and documents from the now open archives of the surveillance authorities of the time are counteracted by a supposed witness report – de facto a female voice from offscreen. Pérez Rial is in subtle and intelligent control of her cinematic tools, pulling out all the stops: documentary and fiction, historical and contemporary, aesthetic, trivia and anecdotes. On the one hand, the meticulously researched facts unearth a forgotten microfacet of the Cold War, complete with militarisation, persecution and paranoia. On the other hand, they show a film festival as a node of ideologies and describe it as a highly politicised place. This opens unexpected spaces of reflection for the role assigned to such a cultural event – historical or current.

Quiet, dark shots of nocturnal fog, of a mine, a dump truck or a wreck, of huge earth craters and new surface contours created by excavation. Raw material extraction, economisation and exploitation of nature are the themes of this visual study. It’s accompanied by an unobtrusive, but threatening and assertive sound that underlines the mystic quality of the images. Post-industrial landscapes become post-apocalyptic.

Five young people from Ukraine talk about their lives after the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all of them fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the war, however, shattered their life plans. Representing “Generation Maidan”, they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. Theatre director Roza Sarkisian produces a Hamlet adaptation with them in which they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas on stage again.

For them Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is not just a historical text, but a current and existential dilemma that has no clear answer. The film follows the rehearsals where different biographies, self-images and political positions clash: A soldier meets his first LGBT person, the feminist quarrels with the fact that the war has undone hard-won emancipatory achievements. Frictions and differences are exposed, compromises are strenuously negotiated. Eventually the film’s focus widens and leaves the stage to introduce the five as individuals with their own inner struggles. The result is a many-layered, dense portrait of a torn and yet powerful Ukrainian generation who, due to the Russian invasion, find themselves at war again, only a few months after their production premiered.

After reunification, immigration made the Israelite Religious Community of Leipzig grow to considerable size, too big for its old rooms. The Ariowitsch House, built in the 1920s as an Israelite old people’s home, is to become the home of a generously dimensioned cultural and community centre – and at the same time commemorate the residents of the home who were deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. But the start of the development is delayed: neighbouring land owners file a lawsuit. Miriam Pfeiffer intervenes in the ongoing public debate, asking citizens of the city about their suspicions concerning reasons of the refusal that the competent court may not be aware of.

An innovative approach to the subject of National Socialism which uses a composition by Georg Katzer, a GDR pioneer of Neue Musik. The sound level – acoustic distortions and sound bites by leading representatives of the Third Reich – dominates, juxtaposed with minimalist images. A dialogue between viewers and memorial evolves in shots and counter shots.

Somewhere on an ocean the crew of a fish trawler go about their work day and night. Every step must be perfect, every movement automatically leads to the next. Heavy chains have to be secured, nets reeled in, fish swiftly gutted and packed with ice into large boxes. A cigarette is always dangling from the lips and hopefully there’s always something left in the jar of chocolate cream. The camera moves in the same rolling beat as the ship in the waves.

A cinematic journey to the lowest point on earth, in the course of which the universal story of creation, responsibility and doom unfolds. The film was shot at the shores of the Dead Sea, where God once destroyed Sodom and Gomorra to punish the sins of humanity. The waters of the lake have been receding for decades. What’s left are salty crusts, deserted spas and dangerous sinkholes. The ambiguous but never obtrusive montage interweaves the biblical tale of Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt, with the disconcerting question of why we, as allegedly rational beings, react to the current crises by going into a state of shock instead of taking action.