In her childhood, Maka attended her hated piano lessons in tears. When she asks her mother about it, she is told that this torment is extremely important for discipline. The conversation prompts an examination of whether current pedagogical routine in Georgia has strayed far from such a concept of education. A music school in which brutal emotional and verbal pressure is part of the curriculum; a ballet school where little girls must endure intense pain while stretching; a primary school class where even the most passionate recitation of a patriotic poem about the heroes of the motherland is cause for criticism. We plunge into a somewhat surreal, at times hilariously rigid world, reminiscent of a Palaeolithic dinosaur desperately trying to save itself in the present day.
“Steel is tempered by fire,” says the mother. Her words express the burden of responsibility for her beloved daughter and convey many warm, previously unspoken feelings. “But I am a human being first,” Maka replies. The loving daughter insists that the idea of humanity based on authoritarian power structures must be overcome, because it is still reproduced in the most private relationships, including those between parents and children.

Lazy and yet insistent, summer knocks on the doors of a Berlin trailer park. Right next to the busy Ostkreuz intersection, this settlement stands in the way of the hectic hustle and bustle of the capital. A green oasis. This summer, among the plants and trees in full bloom and fruit, wild shrubs and lovingly improvised dwellings, Aalo, Jone, Royce, Noah, Kï, Neo, Marlek and Steffen must begin to say goodbye to their cozy home. Liberated from the heteronormative conventions of society, the Mollies collective has for years lived a queer-feminist counter lifestyle here.
Dane Komljen manages with great calm to make this hard-won free space tangible, to capture it as a momentum pointing beyond its own duration – even though the eviction has been long in coming. Building cranes rise to the sky behind the green walls, sounds of demolition come closer, the rattling of trains, the sirens of ambulances mingle with the busy humming of the many insects. What lies in store for the inhabitants is left open. But autumn is bound to come and when the leaves fall, the site will fall victim to the city’s development plans. Another space of possibility for alternative lifestyles disappears.

What does it mean to live a nomadic life in Germany today? How do people see you when to keep moving is more important to you than possessions and social status? What are the prejudices faced by people who work outside the 40-hours-per-week regular job model and want to be fulfilled? To get some answers to these questions, Anna Friedrich walks part of the way with four women who prefer travelling to settling.
The journeywoman Magdalena loves the intensity of permanent new beginnings, but travelling also keeps her from working in her dream job as a qualified farmer. As an activist, Johanna lives in her refurbished van, which she has parked at various spots for years, and frequently takes part in political protests like forest occupations. Elwera, a former tightrope artist, and her granddaughter Ghislaine belong to the Yenish community who move from market to market, continuing a generations-old tradition. Director Anna Friedrich uses the conversations to shed light on her own longing for being on the road, but also for a critical reflection of the settled world in the eyes of these women. The potentials of a nomadic existence thus emerge – and how they are in danger of wasting away between settlement permits and garden fences. Stepping to the other side of the fence opens possibilities.

Luciano cuts a slight figure as he wanders through the narrow streets of the improvised Barrio Tablada on the edge of Rosario, taking care of his mother and sister and the makeshift home they share, finding occasional work on building sites as the search for a proper job continues, lifting weights at the gym. Manuel Besedovsky lays out the different episodes of this precarious, if not atypical existence with such deliberate deemphasis that it feels almost like a plot twist when Luciano meets with a consultant to talk about the various options for constructing a penis. And yet this part of Luciano’s experience has actually been there all along – another thread woven often imperceptibly into the fabric of the film with gentleness and care.
Handing CVs out, hormone injections, smoking joints with buddies from the neighbourhood, talking to his mother about the daughter that is no longer there, some slightly awkward rapping, thinking about having children – the most radical thing about this portrait is how each challenge, each diversion, each encounter is presented with the same sense of normality with which Luciano experiences it. Class, gender identity and their seldom-seen intersection shown as nothing more than getting on with life.

Sanjivani, a young woman from a rural area in the state of Maharashtra in central India, is a loving and tender mother. After her husband’s suicide, she lives with her brother-in-law who makes her work in the fields. She is now solely responsible for her two kids, faced with a mountain of debt left by her husband and the structures of a patriarchal society that incapacitates and renders invisible widows like her. It is only when she joins a group of women who suffered similar fates that she slowly gains some self-confidence. She is not alone with her despair and grief – the suicide rate among peasants who took their lives in the face of crop failures and dumping prices on the globalised market is harrowing: 400,000 in the last twenty years.
Kinshuk Surjan not only observes people and circumstances with compassion; he also stands for a cinema that makes a difference. The women’s group he follows here only came together as a result of his film project. In impressive images and with great empathy for the protagonists he portrays, he not only succeeds in producing a careful representation of highly complex contexts, but also a truly documentary intervention into unacceptable conditions – with the aim of improving them.

Filmmaker Elahe returns to her hometown of Mashhad in Iran to help her parents move house. Boxes must be packed, old stuff must be rummaged through together. Meanwhile everyone involved discusses what Elahe should wear at the upcoming big party, because Mr. Hossein, the respected and devout patriarch of the extended family, has invited his relatives to his garden.
Elahe will not wear a headscarf, nor a hat, not even a borrowed baseball cap for this occasion. On previous visits, she was willing to make a lot of compromises in order not to shame anybody at home. But those days are over. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement encourages her to force a change. In Hossein’s garden the director has intimate and moving conversations with sisters and cousins. They have all had similar experiences with hijab and chador but found different ways of dealing with it. Elahe boldly confronts her family’s fears and wishes and films the honest discussions.

There are documentary heroes of such strength and vitality that you fall in love with their charm from the very first moments. As a viewer, you are ready to follow them through fire and water. Naima is exactly such a case – undoubtedly enhanced by the directorial talent and masterful dramatic work of Anna Thommen. Both fire and water will be present.
Naima’s story is the story of a migrant in Europe who has to start her life from scratch when she moves from Venezuela to Switzerland. She used to work in marketing for international companies, but now she ekes out a living with various service jobs. Naima does not give up and fights for the chance to be with her children again. Due to her financial difficulties, the two teenagers live with her ex-husband. When she is given the opportunity to undergo the desired training as a nurse and a preparatory internship in a psychiatric ward, Naima faces significant challenges. Her supervisor dislikes her, which practically leads to the internship not being credited. So there is no shortage of fire and water for our heroine. But Anna Thommen’s portrait is a testament to the human spirit’s ability to endure and even overcome conflagration. It is a must-watch for anyone seeking an inspiring and emotionally touching documentary.

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.

“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!

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.”

Unexpectedly, Marion Guillard captures the perfect shot: A flock of birds pirouette in the evening sky, the camera follows their graceful movements as if hypnotized, symbiotically. The road to this moment was long. Guillard shares her journey to the USA with us, which is not only marked by feelings of alienation from her family – the postcard motifs spread before her eyes also leave her cold. In a voiceover, she talks about her relationship to herself and her body, about an ideal of femininity she does not conform to, and disturbing encounters with men.
“We Had Fun Yesterday” follows Guillard’s stream of thought, both autobiographical exploration and reflection about the way we look at others: animals – wild or caged; nature - unspoiled or shaped by humans. The result is a surprising weave in which mental and digital images arise and crumble.

The six Albanian Burrneshas who tell their stories here want to decide for themselves how they want to live. They realised early on that the patriarchal society severely restricts their freedom. So they became Burrneshas and slipped into the social role of men in order to have agency, be independent and able to support their family economically, to escape forced marriages and harassment. And they have a lot of fun along the way, too. But breaking through gender barriers comes with a price. You stay a Burrnesha for life, sealed by an oath. The price of freedom is usually the renunciation of an openly lived sexuality, children and a family.
The impressive protagonists of this superbly photographed film show how much strength it takes to practise masculine gender stereotypes. Not all of them have enough energy to simultaneously assert and subvert clichés and male claims to power. For the new generation of feminists in Albania, the Burrneshas are role models, but also a warning. Because the goal of emancipation is far from achieved just because an avant-garde of courageous women manage to smuggle themselves into the heart of the patriarchy with a leap. If you are after the system, you must not copy the structures but abolish them.