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.

Director Nora Rosenthal brings a very specific focus to this portrait of her parents, Heidi and Alan: She shows them dancing. But these are far from “easy dances.” Rosenthal realises quickly that her own inflated expectations threaten to make her ambitious project fail. She hires two professional dancers – mirror images and, as it were, interaction partners for Heidi and Alan – to spread the enormous pressure on robust shoulders and with whom they can waltz or even do a disco number.
Abstractly playful, yet empathetic, “Nine Easy Dances” addresses heavyweight subjects like transience and illness, opens the door to the family archive and tries to tell a story whose end already hangs in the air. A multilayered endeavour, associative, free and intelligent.

“Who are you to change anything!?” Yisrael Meir Lau, once Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, rages against non-orthodox movements in Judaism. His nephew, queer activist Amichai Lau-Lavie, has an answer that packs a punch: born in 1961 on Israel’s Independence Day, 38 generations of rabbis in his family tree, son of a Holocaust survivor, drag queen, today also an ordained rabbi and spiritual leader of an interdenominational Jewish congregation in New York. Amichai wants to be a “virus inside the system” to break patriarchal traditions and make Judaism more humane, more open. His drag alter ego urges: “Redemption will only come through transgression!”
Director Sandi DuBowski followed his protagonist over more than twenty years. The long production period enabled him to document different phases in Amichai’s life, to show him celebrating, crying, doubting and triumphant. Supporters and critics comment on every decision and life change. The result is a complex portrait that sensitively introduces not only Amichai but also his family and congregation. An inspiring story that gives us hope.

Inspired by the estate of a Romanian photographer in which 5,000 glass plate negatives from the 1930s to the 1950s survived undiscovered for a long time, a touching love story evolves. In 1939, Anna Florea meets the young soldier Jean Mihail in her home village in Bukovina. A moonshine kiss seals their affection. But all too soon, Jean is ordered to the frontline. His passionate letters keep the connection alive. But when Anna must flee the site, the contact breaks off.
Their great love is fragile, damaged by war and time – just like the old studio and everyday photographs this animated documentary uses to illustrate optimism and impending loss. Anna Florea herself narrates the film: in retrospect, at the age of 91. Her warm and gentle voice reanimates the memories seemingly stored in these pictures. Those “frozen” on the photographic plates begin to move, are made to glow in oil-on-glass overpaintings, blossom and take us with them into the past.

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!

The filmmaker’s grandmother moved into this house in 1971. When Rolande Ségalini died, everything remained as it was during her lifetime. But what to do with all the accumulated things? As her granddaughter Céline begins to film this material legacy, she realises that her grandmother has remained an enigma to her to this day. Room by room, she inventories, classes, counts, sorts the possessions retrieved from wardrobes, drawers, cabinets and boxes and arranges the objects into new still lives. It is an attempt to understand the deceased woman better and find out more about her. Step by step, the heiress discovers various connections to France’s colonial history.
The film unfurls the facets of a discreet relationship with one’s origin – searching, questioning, interpreting, at the same time investigating the construction and external perception of identity, the practice of passing. The things of a life, displayed like the findings of an archaeological dig, are laid out ready to be analysed. They express a desire: to be recognised as a white Frenchwoman.

The 1990s were the heyday of the lightweight and affordable Hi8 cameras, a time that brought forth many first-person documentaries. Unlike most of these films, Cabrera’s diary, shot in 1995, is not a purely introspective work. She focuses primarily on the others: her adolescent son, her ex-husband and her new love, her mother and the strangers on the train and in the streets. Her form of autobiography is always collective, social, polyphonic. It is only the other’s gaze, the returned gaze, that makes understanding and insight possible. The camera serves as a catalyst of communication, creating trust and distance at the same time, opening eyes and ears.

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.

Luciana’s office is a place of miracles. This is where strangers confide in her, share their most profound desires and concerns. And Luciana? She circles her huge magnifying glass over the pages of old books to soon find the perfect coordinates for a spiritual new beginning. In his new film, Peter Kerekes becomes nothing less than a witness to psychomagical acts. The Neapolitan astrologer is not only able to calculate the perfect birthday spot for those who seek advice – in her blunt way, she aims right at the centre of personal dramas. A pair of identical twins, for example, argue whether one of the sisters should fulfil the other’s longing for a child, while an unhappy mother yearns to rekindle her relationship.
Luciana sends the twins to Beirut, the mother to Alaska. Kerekes accompanies them on their journeys of salvation, even if Alaska turns into an air conditioner and a few buckets of ice cubes for reasons of practicality. He always brings out the comic potential of a story while pointing out complicated conflicts with astonishing poignancy: possessive mother figures and absent fathers, loneliness in a relationship and the fear of change. “Wishing on a Star” is a charming consultation that boldly confronts the big questions in life.

Renata Lučić, both director and protagonist, returns to her hometown to visit her father in a small village in the Croatian part of Slavonia, near the Bosnian border. She has always hated the rural area on the banks of the river Sava, “those endless meadows and gardens,” as she reveals right in the opening sequence. Even as a child she knew that she would leave. Like her older brother, like her mother. And like 124,667 other women who “went West” after the war, usually to Germany or Austria, to work – and never to return.
She now hangs out in the almost abandoned and womanless village with her estranged father Tomislav and his best friend Joso. The men follow their routines, working in the forest or eating river fish they caught themselves. Emotional closeness and intimacy gradually form in at first seemingly trivial conversations and despite initial misunderstandings and distinctly different world views. The film project, which started as the story of an emigration, gradually turns into a sensitive study of loneliness, human relationships, friendship and love; about the beauty of the little things that leads to larger insights – not just for Renata.