Films

2026, 120 min
by Yulia Lokshina

In one of the poorest regions of Paraguay lies Caazapá, the “city of magic and legends”. Here, two young Paraguayan students are searching for happiness, gold and a magic bird. Behind the fences of a gated community, European dropouts are seeking freedom, healing and salvation from Armageddon – for themselves and their savings. Separating them are 12 kilometres of red-earth road which transforms into a quagmire every rainy season. Around them hovers the humid heat and choruses of cicadas. Step by step, the film explores the new community of settlers and the local population; the camera drifts through construction sites, schools, treatment rooms and shooting ranges, gazes up at the sky and into the internet. While the newcomers experience turf wars and loss, the locals follow their own myths which hark back to the country’s missionary and colonial history. They all have a version of paradise. Source of Synopsis

2026, 200 min
by Volker Koepp

“Sarmatische Zeit” (Sarmatian Time) is the name of a poetry collection by Johannes Bobrowski, which becomes a personal, lyrical leitmotif for Volker Koepp in this visually striking, far-reaching exploration of the region between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, along the Memel, Dnister and Pruth rivers. It is a place of different origins, longings and crimes: a melting pot for myriad cultures and affiliations, a point of reference and refuge for over half a century in the work of the great chronicler and the setting of repeated cruelties and destruction. Returning to his own oeuvre with companions old and new becomes a simultaneous process of looking back and bringing things up to date. Like the arms of a delta, connections to German history and the entire European context are created, between past and present. And for a long while, time seems to stand terribly still within this flow, for since the start of the Russian war against Ukraine in 2022, the echo of the experience of violence inscribed into this region becomes impossible to ignore. What originates in poems about the Memel region develops into a monumental contemplation about people in time and space. Source of Synopsis

2026, 92 min
by Sandra Prechtel

“There have only been two geniuses in Germany since the war, Fassbinder in the West and Schleef in the East”, remarked Elfriede Jelinek. When Einar Schleef died far too early in 2001 at the age of 57, he was alone, with the public only finding out about his death days later. How is it possible that this painter, author and pioneer of German theatre direction in the East, later in the West and finally in the reunified Germany – at once recognised and unappreciated, celebrated and misjudged, resolute and misunderstood – remained such a perpetual outsider? The elliptically edited archive material lets Schleef have his own say above all – mercurial, stuttering, unflinching. Sandra Prechtel’s film carefully avoids glorifying or co-opting this 20th century artist, who refused any sort of mass psychology and pushed theatre to its outer reaches. By highlighting different biographical elements, this portrait of a combative, yet vulnerable loner and enfant terrible with self-destructive potential is gradually pieced together. It is an account of theatre and the suppression mechanisms of post-war society and – unlike one has seen before – of the two German realities. Source of Synopsis

Germany, India 2026, 105 min
by Madhusree Dutta

Spurred by her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother’s strange evocation of home-invading tigers, filmmaker Madhusree Dutta travels to Assam, India. Here, she learns about the Flying Tigers: US aircraft that transferred military supplies during WWII across the perilous Himalayas, from Assam to Kunming in China. So begins a globetrotting, decades-spanning docufiction essay on the human-scale experience of monumental logistical phenomena, featuring small histories that unfold in the quiet shadows of History writ large. Teaming up with Kunming-born media theorist Mi You and Assam-based researcher Purav Goswami, Dutta contrasts the smooth international flow of goods today with increasing restrictions on people’s movement across borders. Her film reveals how lived realities of frontier populations have always been fluid and malleable, refusing the homogeneity demanded by cartographic political imagination. Appropriately, Dutta adopts a heterogeneous, genre-defying form, mixing interviews, archival material, performances, animation and musical numbers to craft a personal, wide-ranging work at once intimate and colossal. Source of Synopsis

Germany, Georgia 2026, 31 min
by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

A speculative documentary essay connecting the filmmaker’s medical history with post-Cold War geopolitical shifts and their impact on contemporary politics. The film originates from the filmmaker’s diagnosis with a rare form of cancer, T-cell lymphoma, a condition that causes the failure of the immune system and the body’s defence mechanisms. The medical treatment unfolds in three stages: 1. Remission of cancer cells; 2. Immune transplantation; 3. Adaptation to a new immune system. The film adopts these three stages as a framework to mirror the collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the introduction of the free-market economy as a new system of governance, and a prolonged process of adaptation marked by chronic side effects. Far from claiming that biology offers a model of perfect social order, Graft Versus Host uses medical terminology to grasp complex geopolitical transformations of recent history and the layered roots of today’s unsettling political reality.

Germany 2026, 110 min
by Sabine Lidl

Young, curious and full of drive, Siri Hustvedt leaves the wide, quiet landscapes of Minnesota and plunges into the pulsating life of New York City. In search of the protagonist for her first novel, she embarks on a journey that not only shapes her as a writer but leads her to become one of the most compelling voices in contemporary American literature. The film opens a perspective that reaches far beyond Siri Hustvedt herself, discovering women who courageously and independently realise their artistic visions. As Siri Hustvedt and her husband Paul Auster reflect on language, identity and the power of words, life intervenes: Paul Auster becomes seriously ill. In Siri Hustvedt – Dance Around the Self, director Sabine Lidl portrays Siri Hustvedt’s distinctive way of living and thinking, weaving her writing together with the major themes of life: love and farewell. Source of Synopsis

Germany 2026, 91 min
by Daniela Magnani Hüller

A film like a house full of dark chambers long closed. Yet every room will be opened: puppet shows, butterflies, colour, light! This autobiographical documentary debut sets out to deprive silence of its power. Fourteen years ago, the director survived an attempted femicide carried out by a schoolmate, who had harassed her before. An act whose subjective and objective inconceivability Daniela Magnani Hüller will not accept. In images of great sensitivity, she uncovers memories, makes her voice audible in voiceover, enabling herself to find a stronger, own perspective – on what happened, the present of the trauma, a future life without fear. She wants conversations to happen and conducts them in large spaces often shot with considerable distance, with a teacher, a school friend, a detective, the state prosecutor; trying to find out why each of them did (or did not) act the way they did. Matter-of-fact, consistent and impressively composed, she reconstructs events and failures and – years after the crime – poses the question of responsibility: to the individuals, the school, the justice system and society. Violence against women – the unfolding of an internal and external perspective. Source of Synopsis

Germany 2026, 91 min
by Marie Wilke

The Bundeswehr has arrived at a decisive “turning point” (“Zeitenwende”): in Schnöggersburg, Europe’s biggest military model city, defending the nation and the alliance is not just rehearsed, but also directly taught. Marie Wilke’s sober, focused observational documentary puts together a 360-degree view of its subject, which captures the current state of the German army from different perspectives. Between press appointments, swearing-in ceremonies, visitor tours, roleplays and an artificial underground train tunnel, the process of adapting to the present becomes visible. With a sound grasp of representative situations and communication nodes, Wilke gets close enough to her subject to illustrate its complexity – while retaining exactly the necessary distance for open, critical engagement. The shots are mostly static and impartial, bearing witness to a Bundeswehr searching for its self-image while in the midst of grappling with the past, state-of-the-art war simulations and an uncertain future. Szenario is a portrait of an institution that just as equally depicts the society and politics that produce it. Source of Synopsis

Germany, Great Britain 2026, 15 min
by Daniel Mann

In 1904, European leaders of the Zionist Organisation secretly surveyed the Ugandan highlands as a potential “New Promised Land” for the Jewish people. Supported discreetly by British colonial administrators, who described East Africa as a barren and blank imperial canvas and were eager to rid England of its Jewish population, one Jewish delegate began mapping the terrain, climate and life in Uganda towards a new Jewish settlement. What occurred on that mountain that led the explorer to vow never to return remains unknown. Drawing on present-day film location scouting and an email exchange with an Ugandan scout, The Recce meditates on cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with (neo)colonial imagination. Through the recce, land becomes vital both to filmmaking and state-building. It is sought after, colonised and constantly reimagined as elsewhere. At the core of the recce lies a potentially violent act: the erasure of one place in creating another. The recce, as this test is often called, is seldom regarded as a film, but embodies this very violence and the ongoing shadow of coloniality in its form. Source of Production

Germany, Serbia 2026, 17 min
by Mina Simendić

Treating language as a device of meaning, the film deals with the transposable power inherent in language itself – the value that derives from the device, rather than from the meaning. Given the opportunity to work with alluring and costly 16mm film stock within a restrictive political climate, a filmmaker reflects on the transactions made in the process of immigrating to Germany. What does one have to give up to be able to live in the “promised land”? By conceiving analogue film itself as a linguistic device, the film turns back on its own means of communication, questioning the use of film stock in current times. Source of Synopsis

Germany 2026, 16 min
by Vika Kirchenbauer

At a time when elements of fascisation are becoming ever more apparent, ever more pervasive, artist Vika Kirchenbauer takes a personal look at what is in the air in present-day Germany. This Suffocating Now witnesses the historical present as a condition marked by vectors of violence that have continuously and habitually existed, and puts its focus on the fault lines that have most explicitly exposed the illiberal underbelly of a liberal state and society in recent years: Palestine solidarity as well as queer and trans rights. Drawing from a vast variety of source material, the 16-minute essay film flows in an uneven rhythm through still and moving imagery. Observations from the past three years – such as the increased police presence and recurring police violence, which Kirchenbauer captures from her balcony in Berlin – are viewed within a broader German historical framework. Over mundane images of her home improvement efforts, the artist problematises her own social ascent to becoming a university professor and civil servant. This personal reflection serves as an entry point to addressing the intimate relation between state and contemporary art in the German cultural system as a whole. Source of Synopsis

Germany, Netherlands 2026, 85 min
by Viv Li

Viv, a Chinese wannabe artist, found herself stuck in Berlin after the pandemic and accidentally ventured into the city’s vibrant alternative culture scene. Drifting between new environments and traditional expectations, Viv is constantly adapting to shifting opinions about herself, the world and, of course, China, only to feel more lost than ever. Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest follows Viv’s eclectic encounters and the nuanced culture clashes that shape them. Told in a deeply personal and humorous voice, the film takes a witty yet sharp look at the quest for a sense of belonging in a globalised world and how different societies define our lives. ' A story of the perpetual search for oneself, identity and acceptance, woven into a spiral of surreal yet tangible moments. Source of Synopsis

2026, 14 min
by Pavel Mozhar, Pavel Mozhar

An abandoned GDR factory. More than 400 dusty job application letters from the years 2004 to 2008 lie scattered in the cellar of the administrative building. Alongside the traditional phrases of a covering letter, the documents contain descriptions of personal circumstances and memories. The wishes of the applicants, as well as their fears and pain, are laid bare in their effort to find a place in the free market economy. A documentary contemplation of the individual behind the workforce. Source of Synopsis

2025, 64 min
by Stephan Hayn

In 2024 (2023), Stefan Hayn reveals layer by layer what he sees, where he is and what he does. He paints the city of Berlin, where he lives. He portrays his family. The daughters are used to it and do not pose. It is a togetherness in relationship that is reflected in his painting, and a struggle for the image. Wouldn't it be easier to take a photo? Painting takes time and gives time, it shows the variation of seeing and how necessary it is to be within reach of what is being depicted. What shows itself? Hayn also makes this struggle for the visible - every day, for hours on end - his subject. He himself becomes a motif, as a street painter with a large canvas, in front of the Jewish Museum, the Haus der Deutschen Wirtschaft, the Amerika-Gedenk-Bibliothek. In 2024 (2023), his first film shot solely on a smartphone, the “painter-in-film” director takes diary-like and very personal samples of the two years that give the film its title. Without forcing a reading, light, weather, turpentine, tired limbs and fleeting encounters create an airy, sharp critique of the availability of images. A social medium.

2025, 90 min
by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese

With Ancestral Visions of the Future, filmmaker Lemohang Mosese presents a deeply personal work. Using a fragmented narrative style and mythical images, he reflects on experiences of uprooting and belonging. Appearing are: The puppeteer, a man who grows herbs that are supposed to extend people's lifespans. And the market vendor, a mother who keeps the language of dreams alive - in a city that has forgotten how to speak it. The film also explores Mosese's childhood and his relentless efforts to escape death and wrest meaning from loss. From the dusty dirt roads where he played with cars as a seven-year-old to the gray streets of exile where he dissolved into anonymity, Mosese confronts moments that shook and shaped him. His memories intertwine with the presence of his mother as a figure of vigilance and defiance. But Ancestral Visions of the Future is more than the story of a man who went into exile - it is an elegy for a city and people caught between the weight of memory and the inevitability of loss. And it is a poetic ode to cinema.

2025, 122 min
by Weiwei Ai

2025CPH:DOXAi Weiwei examines our relationship with animals, from China and Egypt to the Danish mink farms. At times violent, always thought-provoking - and above all, a mirror image of ourselves.In China, men in uniforms kill street dogs with long sticks and turn donkeys into candy. In Myanmar, elephants drag heavy logs through the jungle, but soon there is not enough work for the many working elephants. In Egypt, they tie the camels’ legs together to make them behave. In the Lofoten Islands, they fish and fillet fish in a hurry. In Brazil, a rancher dreams of more cattle, even though most of the deforestation in the Amazon is caused by agriculture. In Indonesia, they hunt whales with harpoons. In Mongolia, tourists can have their picture taken with a wolf. And in Denmark, mink are kept in small cages until one day during the covid pandemic, the Prime Minister calls for them all to be killed. Without judgment, artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei takes us around the globe in a reflection on our multifaceted relationship with the world’s animals. Observant and calm and without judgment, ‘Animality’ paints a sometimes violent but always thought-provoking picture of our collective relationship with the rest of the living world.

2025, 88 min
by Stefanie Brockhaus

Azza had to compromise her life for others since she was a child. Rebellious as a girl she was married at 16, had four children and had no right to continue her education. Through a smart trick she managed to get divorced after years of being stuck in an abusive marriage. As a divorced woman she was banned from her family and was not allowed to see her children. Her solitude forced her into a new marriage, after which she was accepted back into her family.As Azza is caught up by the traumas of her past, she’s struggling in everyday life, but always finds a way to go on. Without a school certificate, she cannot find a job, works freelance as a driving teacher for women and is always out of money. She tries to have a career to improve her life and this of her five children. By all means she does not want her teenage daughters to experience what she went through. But she’s constantly confronted with the rules of her authoritarian society.Azza escapes on a road trip to the desert where she discovers her country and herself. Driving has become the tool to freedom, not only in Azza’s life, but in most women’s lives.Shot over three years the documentary is an intimate look into the life of Azza, her native country and the changing society caught up between tradition and modernity.

2025, 30 min
by Jakob Krese

Hazira survived the massacre in Srebrenica. She has lived in the Ježevac refugee camp near Tuzla for 29 years. She was never able to return to her home village in the mountains above Srebrenica. Today it is located in Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The political and social conditions force Hazira to wait, her days are characterized by routines that ensure survival. She collects firewood, cleans obsessively and defies the harsh conditions of camp life. With black humor and quiet resilience, she faces the trauma of a war that continues to define her life. To prevent it from becoming too painful, Hazira is constantly on the move, always on the run from her memories, but also from the present and the fear that everything could start all over again. This state of affairs is symptomatic of the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica and the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia. The film is a tribute to all those people who are still suffering from the consequences of this war.

2025, 86 min
by Julia Lemke, Anna Koch

Santino is a circus kid. He travels around the country with his family and animals in a caravan - here today, there tomorrow. Home is not a fixed place for him, but rather his parents Angie and Gitano, his brother Giordano, countless uncles and aunts, cousins and especially his great-grandfather Ehe, one of the last great circus directors in Germany. Ehe tells Santino wild stories from his long life: about the magnificent bull elephant Sahib, his own first steps as a clown and the feeling of freedom for which it is worth putting up with all the hardships. On Santino's eleventh birthday, Ehe asks what Santino would like to show in the circus ring one day - after all, he has something to contribute to their community. But how do you find out? Circusboy tells the story of the lives of the last nomads in Germany. About growing up in an extended family, with the animals, and a life without a safety net. A documentary road film with animations about the power of belonging and community.

2025, 132 min
by Marcin Wierzchowski

Germany 2025, 79 min
by Michael Schwarz

An unconventional undertaker and his team want to change radically how death and grief are tabooed in our society. Less reticence, more honesty, more empathy. But how do professional undertakers act when they have to handle cases that affect them personally and emotionally? A subtle, a concise documentary about Eric Wrede and his team in action.DEATH IS AN ASSHOLE is an artistic documentary about the innovative undertaker Eric Wrede and his team. How does the new generation of undertakers proceed, especially those who are interested in attending the bereaved with empathy and who want to facilitate new ways of mourning? And how do these modern professional undertakers deal with cases that affect them personally and emotionally? It is not just Eric Wrede's approach which is innovative, but also the film itself: we approach the tabooed topics of death and grief without depicting prevalent stereotypical situations. We observe very attentively: the important and sensitive consultations with the bereaved, the final dressing of the deceased, internal preparations and postprocessing of the team. "If you spend a day with Eric Wrede (...), death loses some of its terror." (Süddeutsche Zeitung)With Eric Wrede, Maria Schuster, Katja Seydel, Siv-Marie Wrede, Gabi Kohn, Marco Ammer

2025, 74 min
by João Pedro Prado, Anton Yaremchuk

2025CPH:DOX2025DOK.fest München – German Competition2025Kraków International Film FestivalA warm film about a hot topic. Is nuclear power the future, or...? The locals of two small European towns throw themselves into the discussion in a film with humor and heart, even though the stakes are high.The climate crisis, Germany’s nuclear phase-out and Russia’s war against Ukraine are just three of the heavy pieces in the dramatic game about the future of energy. A game with global and unpredictable consequences far beyond where the electricity will be coming from tomorrow. And in the middle of the game we find two small European towns with barely a thousand inhabitants each.Gundremmingen in Bavaria is located around a deactivated nuclear power plant, while the small Polish town of Choczewo will open its first nuclear power plant in 2033. What do the good people on the ground think about it all? ‘Fission’ is a stylish film with humor and heart, all of which is a rare sight in films about science, big politics and – ultimately – the future of the planet.Directors João Pedro Prado and Anton Yaremchuk waste no time in their joint debut, which takes a multi-faceted look at the deeply divided debate on nuclear power in particular, fueled by decades of pent-up emotion.

2025, 30 min
by Nana Xu

The “Fruit Farm” is the home of Nana Xu, who is studying in Hamburg - a place that initially only had a number, not a name. It lies behind high mountains in southwest China and in her memory is characterized by dry air, burial mounds, ghost stories, policemen and prisoners. The historical contours of the place are outlined by sound recording, Nana Xu returns to the real place by bus and finds people of advanced age who, perhaps for the first time in their lives, reflect on this very place for someone from the outside. Guochang is the oral history of a non-place: the “fruit farm” was set up as a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution - built by prisoners, including the director's father. Later, all traces were erased. First the place was a mixture of village and prison, then a drug treatment center. A temporary solution as a permanent state for many. For Nana: family history, ghost story, nightmare, dream. Little by little, this courageous film against forgetting and concealment also reveals the ghostly history of violence in the People's Republic of China. An open journey home. Conversations with the last witnesses in their homeland, which is marked by a repressed past.

2025, 14 min
by Daniel Asadi Faezi, Mila Zhluktenko

In 1970, an entire small town was built in Munich for the Summer Olympics. In addition to the subway station, stadium, indoor swimming pool and housing estate, the largest shopping center in Europe at the time - the Olympia-Einkaufszentrum - was also built. Many migrant workers, so-called guest workers, are employed on the construction site. 2016: Nine people are murdered in a right-wing terrorist attack at the Olympia shopping center. All the victims come from families with migrant backgrounds. 1982: Sohrab Shahid Saless, an Iranian director, makes the film Recipient Unknown in response to the rapidly increasing racism in Germany. In the film, people repeatedly walk past houses, walls and facades smeared with right-wing extremist slogans. The colors flare up brightly and then fade again. In retrospect is an attempt to look back and find connections in the history of a place.