Director Yvann Yagchi, the son of Palestinian migrants, and his Jewish best friend spend a carefree childhood far away from politics on the neutral ground of Switzerland. As adults, both long for religious and ethnic affiliation. Yvann wants to visit Palestine at last and break generations of silence about the fate of his family. His friend moves to a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Thus begins the story of a failed reunion.
With frankness and patience, Yvann’s film, addressed directly at his former closest confidant, documents his own emotional development: Initial optimism and diplomatic reserve soon give way to an underlying unease. When a Palestinian refugee challenges him to give up the platitudes about striving for truth and formulate his opinion clearly, we realise that there can be only one standpoint for Yvann. There is a rift between the friends, vividly illustrated by animated doodles. Reflections on a lost friendship turn into a search for identity, made immeasurably harder by the ongoing destruction of Palestinian existence.

When Hollywood star Errol Flynn appeared on the Leipzig festival screen in 1960, he had been dead for a year. The audience saw him in his last role: as an aged lover – of Havana, casinos and cocktails, as the nemesis of the Cuban liberation movement, which had declared war on corrupt bon vivants like him. The movie swashbuckler rhapsodises about his Cuban counterpart Fidel Castro and nonchalantly moderates the history of the dictatorship and liberation of the island state, cigarette holder in hand.
Did Hollywood call Leipzig to recommend this film? It was probably Moscow, because its world premiere is said to have taken place there in 1959. But how did the self-confessed anti-communist Errol Flynn come to make this declaration of love? Maybe his new friend Fidel did not tell him the whole truth?

A typical workday at the East Berlin precinct 14, Brunnenstraße, near the Wall, at the “interface to imperialism,” as one of the officers puts it. At first, Heise and Badel are free to film unhindered: car patrols, deployments to escalating disputes, criminal charges of “decadent appearance,” missing person reports. The director and cameraman appear to be authorised by the Ministry of the Interior and are allowed to shoot without restrictions. When they are eventually required to show their papers, which turn out to be nothing more than ordinary identity cards, the misdirection is noticed: Shooting is stopped, the footage disappears in locked cabinets. – The film premiered at the 25th Duisburger Filmwoche in 2001.

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.

An Athenian filmmaker is struggling with insomnia and seeks help from a tarot reader. She says that when she does manage to sleep, her dreams are strange, she dreams of her childhood apartment, where everyone has turned to stone. Yet such surreal thoughts hardly sound outlandish given the current state of Greece: petrified monuments to past glories as far as the eye can see, even as any sort of movement in the present has slowed to a standstill. She sets out to understand this curious paradox, dipping into literature, fiction and documentary to do so, disparate elements given unity by playfulness, political sensibility and shimmering celluloid.
Conversations with locals on the streets of the Greek capital about the nature of statues; the 1944 manifesto by poet Yorgos Makris that proposed blowing up the Parthenon and the groupuscule that now seeks to complete his work; the story of the political prisoners forced to rebuild the same monument in miniature; a rogue Caryatid now discovering love. Such times are hard to make sense of, whether in Greece or beyond, and perhaps there is only one way to proceed, to move forward, to live: everything bit by bit. “When will we gather the world together piece by piece?”

A dimly lit, scarcely furnished flat, the hissing and buzzing of an open microphone. What follows is an argument in Arabic between mother and son. She complains about his lethargy. He sees no point in school while the country is at war. At last, the boy sets out through the busy streets of his neighbourhood which is a chaotic patchwork of everyday life and the debris of war.
Using 3D graphics software, Husein Bastouni reconstructs from his personal memories the situation in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in the south of Damascus when the area found itself between the frontlines in the Syrian war. Visually and acoustically – indeed, almost olfactorily – his film draws you into this world from the first second with terrifying immediacy, and yet poetically. In a moment of shock, the rhythm slows down, the images become sparser, but the protagonist’s reflections become crystal clear. In the silence of thought, the eye glides like a deep-sea diver through a sunken city and a lost home.

In the early 1980s, Poland is in a state of emergency. The country’s democracy movement, represented by the free Solidarność trade union, is to be suppressed. To this end, President Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law on 13 December 1981. In collusion with the Soviet Union a threatening scenario is staged to justify the “stan wojenny”. As a result, Western nations like Great Britain and the USA impose economic sanctions on the Eastern Bloc state. This produces a complex field of tension in which the Polish population are confronted with existential shortages on the one hand but continue their struggle underground on the other – despite curfews, telephone surveillance and a media system controlled by the military.
In his found footage film, Tomasz Wolski brings the explosive, the everyday and the iconic together to provide an insight into a situation that is as absurd as it is dangerous. The extremely dynamic (and musical) montage illustrates the rapid and convoluted succession of events while at the same time intervening through comments, quite often with a notable sense of humour, for example, when Wolski helps a British news correspondent not always on top of events to a bit of retroactive glory: “Most fundamental is the … Hang on, sorry, sorry, could you … Photography and filming will be widely controlled …”