Pregnancy, birthing and parental care are strongly charged social roles. The partly absurd public discourse about them – reinforced by hyper-positive media images and stereotypes – makes natural concerns feel less and less natural. Evolutionary necessities have been turned into ciphers whose collective emotional over-forming leaves next to no space for personal experience. In this phase of life, self-awareness and external perception often diverge substantially. There is usually little room, neither for fears and doubts nor for any other emotion, outside the generally prescribed bliss. Prenatal stages of development seem pre-defined, standardised, tried and tested. Little can be done “right”, much “wrong”. Every decision for or against a pre-natal optimisation measure counts. Nothing is left to chance.
But what if chance strikes anyway? When the ultrasound diagnosis yields a painful result? How does obstetrics, obsessed with detail, handle deviations from “the plan”, how does it deal with the fact that statistically one in six pregnancies ends in miscarriage? Filmmaker and editor Irem Schwarz’s found footage collage is a haunting combination of terribly omnipresent cliché imagery that addresses these relevant questions in a voice that is more than just her own.

The winters in the Siberian taiga may be long, but at least Moscow is far away. In the early 1990s, a religious community lead by former traffic cop Sergei Torop settled in the endless landscape at the foot of the eastern Sayan Mountains. After a religious revival he calls himself Vissarion, wears flowing robes, long hair and acts as the Son of God on earth. Misty-coloured portraits on which “the Teacher” gazes obliviously into the distance hang in the homes of his followers. Together they have created the model town of “Abode of Dawn”, also called “Sun City” by the locals, to build a new society.
Director Kristina Shtubert travelled to Siberia five times between 2013 and 2022. Her gaze is observational, less concerned with the search of faith and meaning than with the question whether the Sun City dwellers are happier here than in their discarded lives. And what would their alternatives be? More and more, the long-term observation turns into a post-Soviet narrative of a faded-out state. Meanwhile, the militarisation of the country progresses. Moscow is coming closer.

“You got to try to live your own life,” Arzu, one of the football players from the Turkish-Kreuzberg girls’ team Ağrı Spor, demanded in a 1995 film by Aysun Bademsoy. Today she is in her late forties and leads her own life, like her former teammates Türkan, Nalan and Nazan. Bademsoy visited the four of them for the fourth time, following their lives, recalling their visions for the future from back then. And this time she also talked to their daughters, some of whom on the brink of adulthood, who also think about adaptation, tradition, religion and culture. Little has changed between then and now, being German remains a difficult question to answer for every generation.
Aysun Bademsoy has produced a delicately layered work of German-Turkish perspectives in which female concepts of identity are reflected back at a society where integration is formulated only as expectation. “If others don’t accept that we are Germans, how are we supposed to accept that?” Selin, Türkan’s daughter, asks. You don’t need to know the other three films to understand “Game Changers” – and to appreciate the significance of this project which now spans almost thirty years. The best thing about it: Football is being played again!

A man’s voice from offscreen. He lists individual words, has problems of articulation. At first these are abstract terms, the screen stays black. Sky, street, village and house, however, are accompanied by suitable images. They take us into the speaker’s life. It is his house. These are his automatic shutters. We look into the kitchen where his wife is preparing something. He exercises in a specially equipped room. Later he sits in front of the microphone again, obviously recording his voice to preserve it. Another dimension opens between the recorded words and sentences and beyond the images. There is an inevitability in the room – and a great love. The robot vacuum makes its rounds. Who will put the words stored on the computer into a meaningful context later?

Apulia, 1959: Women in white dresses dance ecstatically in a small chapel. They jump around, roll on the ground, some even climb the altar. They are said to have been bitten by a spider. Their dancing mania requires a ritual exorcism with music. Pictures like these inspired Italian anthropologists to travel to southern Italy. Equipped with tape recorders, film and photo cameras, they tracked down the phenomenon of tarantism.
This essayistic documentary follows the wealth of multi-media archive material produced on this research trip. It brings out the voices of the affected women, who turn out to be experts of their own performances. A special relationship developed between the scientist Annabella Rossi and the “tarantata” Michela Margiotta, with their correspondence at the centre of the film. Even today, these images of female frenzy are disturbing, revealing the loss of control of husbands, families, science and the church. In today’s Apulia, the film discovers living forms of tarantism, tamed as folklore, a tourist attraction. There are new poisons that have infested the system. They, too, must be danced out.

Light is a fascinating phenomenon. Without light, there would be no cinema, no film – and no life. So light is at the origin of everything, and yet it remains invisible to the eye until it hits matter. This moment is – quite literally – the starting point of Thomas Riedelsheimer’s latest work, for the springtime spectacle of rainbow shreds in the cinematographer and documentary filmmaker’s flat became the starting point of a search for the origin of the images we form of this world. For this quest he dived deep into two spheres that seem to follow different laws but always strive to fathom the magical: physics and art.
An intellectual and poetic ping pong game evolves between researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Erlangen and the “Extreme Light Group” of the University of Glasgow as well as internationally renowned artists such as Ruth Jarman, Joe Gerhardt, Julie Brook, Johannes Brunner and Raimund Ritz. In its course, the various perspectives on light lead to new insights on all sides that would hardly have been achieved without this methodical cross-over: about laser power and colour pigments, about black holes and floating sculptures. In brief moments, the uninitiated may even get some idea of the laws of quantum physics, generally considered impossible to visualise.

The camera glides through a nocturnal, inanimate Berlin, documenting disembodied dance floors where the spotlights illuminate emptiness. Tales of longing and desire on the soundtrack. A brief visual reminiscence of lockdowns and retreats into bourgeois privacy, threatening a sex-positive culture that demands the consensual, open encounter of bodies. But people, curiosity and lust reconquer cinema. Exploring softness together, finding out where the bodies lead, allowing skin cells and nerve endings to get to know each other – and asking at every step where the boundaries are. This is the agenda of three couples and a group of sex-positive persons who meet here. “Truth or dare” is played, an age-old excuse to override taboos.
What Maja Classen explores with them, without trying to pin it down, is the question of how consensus makes a new sexuality possible. Even the protection from sexually transmitted diseases is part of the game, personal responsibility in the darkrooms, the images of femininity, masculinity and love dragged in from one’s socialisation that need to be defamiliarised again. Nothing we see transgresses boundaries. Nothing that happens happens without consensus. And yet none of it is taken for granted. “The joy of being there – and exactly there.”