Films

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

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, 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, 132 min
by Marcin Wierzchowski

Germany, Spain, Peru 2025, 10 min
by Anne Thieme

The Peruvian Amazon is the all-encompassing monster that swallowed Melisa, who disappeared without a trace while playing on her doorstep. The fragments of lives she might have lived haunt her loving parents, who are left to deal with the loneliness of her absence.

Germany 2025, 97 min
by Martina Priessner

Thirty years after the racist attacks in Mölln, survivor İbrahim Arslan discovers hundreds of forgotten letters of solidarity. The film follows him and his family in their struggle to foster a new, victim-centred culture of remembrance. [75 BERLINALE Panorama]With Hava Arslan, İbrahim Arslan, Namık Arslan, Yeliz Burhan.

Austria, Germany 2025, 88 min
by Chiara Sambuchi

As a child, Alisa survived the Yugoslav Wars just a few kilometres from the border to Bosnia. Her father Sejfo, a Bosnian, and her mother, a Serb, remained in Srebrenica. Sejfo recorded messages for his daughter on VHS cassettes. We accompany her as she uses the material to search for traces of her father and thereby the genocide that took place.

2024, 78 min
by Kamal Aljafari

During the military intervention in Lebanon in the summer of 1982, the IDF seized the archive collection of photos and film from the Palestine Research Center in Beirut. Kamal Aljafari reclaims these images, which have been stored by the Israeli army and Ministry of Defense, thwarting this attempt to erase a people deprived of their visual memory. Reel B75-92 shows scenes of orange-picking in Qalandia in 1957, which, according to the Hebrew description, are images of “terrorists”… They come from a collection of films and photos that were kept at the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut, until it was looted by the Israeli Army during the invasion of Southern Lebanon in 1982, and transferred to the archives of the Hebrew state's army and Ministry of Defense. It was only in the 2010s that academic circles - in Tel Aviv, in particular - began to question the aims of this systematic plundering of the entire Palestinian visual memory, which became war booty in part renamed for ideological reasons: the occupying power de facto ensuring control of the captured material. In A Fidai Film, Kamal Aljafari(An Unusual Summer, VdR 2020) turns this primordial plundering against those who perpetrated it. By revitalizing these lost images through his vibrant editing process, he unleashes the subversive power of a counter-narrative that has been erased over the decades, portraying life in Palestine before and after 1948 - particularly during the British mandate of the 1920s-1930s, when the tangible signs of future spoliation, humiliation and violence were already apparent. The Palestinian filmmaker thus meditates with a unique space-time depth of field on the fate of images produced by a people doubly dispossessed, both of its land, and of its history. [55 VdR catalogue, Emmanuel Chicon]

Norway, Germany, USA 2024, 84 min
by Julie Lunde Lillesæter

When Amy, Marina and Hanna’s rape cases are dismissed by the Austin police, all three women try to find a way to rebuild their lives. They join forces with twelve other women in a ground-breaking federal class-action lawsuit, the first to argue that sexual assault isn’t prosecuted because it’s a crime that predominantly affects women. The group is determined to hold police and prosecutors accountable for their inaction, but their resilience is tested as they face setbacks from the system they hope to change. Ultimately, AN ARMY OF WOMEN offers a hopeful look into a movement that aims to change the future for women everywhere.The film is produced with support from the Norwegian Film Institute, Fritt Ord, Still Water Foundation, Viken Film Center, Arts Council Norway, NDR Norddeutscher Rundfunk, NRK, SVT & DR.

Germany 2024, 92 min
by Johannes Blume

Berlin is teetering on the edge of complete gentrification. The punk movement is fading, and the remaining left autonomous and anti-fascist spaces are facing an existential threat. Gentrification jeopardizes their very existence, eradicating the once vast diversity in Berlin’s urban landscape.The capitalistic structures driving gentrification prioritize individual wealth and financial growth, undermining the importance of solidarity. The squatter scene — or the heritage of it — is the antidote. House communities live in and share what would normally be considered personal possessions: the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room — everything is communal. Activities and conflicts are resolved through consensus, and interaction with others is inevitable. Living in a house community is a full-time commitment, a synthesis of people, work, materials, and history.BERLIN EVICTION aims to rediscover the relevant values of the subculture for today’s society. We engage with people who have a rich history and are willing to speak candidly on camera, free from masks and control. We explore places and individuals that have repeatedly captured the attention of the national and international press due to their fight against the system and eviction, such as Rigaer Straße, Liebig 34, Syndikat, Drugstore, and many more. The imminent evictions of Potse and Köpi Wagenplatz, both iconic symbols of the autonomous and punk scene, serve as the pivotal narrative structure of the film, emphasizing the scene’s ongoing struggle throughout the years.MAX OPHÜLS PRIZE: BEST FILM MUSIC"Quotation from the film: "We had our time and now it's over." Music plays a very important role in this film, it is an expression of protest, anger, sadness and transports the content of the film. With a convincing interweaving of original music and film score, the film tells of the almost lost struggle for freedom beyond conventions and beyond capitalist constraints." say the members of the jury Jide Tom Akinleminu, Wolf-Maximilian Liebich, Andrina Mrancikar

USA, Germany, Denmark 2024, 113 min
by Connie Field

Three brave women are fighting to expose the corruption and incremental destruction of democracy in Viktor Orbán's Hungary – a white nationalist regime that is the envy of authoritarian movements around the world. Few politicians in the 21st century have been as corrupt and adept at undermining democracy as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán is a hero to his country’s Christian conservative population, and a role model for the right-wing political movement in Europe and for Donald Trump in the US. Orbán takes careful, methodical steps to dismantle Hungarian democratic institutions while maintaining his popularity with a majority of citizens. Oscar-nominated director Connie Field follows three courageous women – opposition politician Timea, journalist Babett and nurse Nikoletta (Niko) – who fight tirelessly to expose the lies and corruption embedded in Orbán’s government. But they face a well-funded and sophisticated opposition in Orbán’s ultra-conservative Fidesz party, which has a strong influence on voters and has already changed key democratic constitutional laws to further cement one-party rule. [21 CPH:DOX]

Germany, France 2024, 216 min
by Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell

Taking its title from the tactical protest strategy of the same name – "an action that seeks to achieve an end directly and by the most effective means" – DIRECT ACTION is a contemporary portrait of one of the most important militant activist communities in France – a 150-person strong rural collective that survived multiple violent eviction attempts by the French state, successfully resisted an international airport expansion project, created an autonomous zone from 2012-2018, and spawned a remarkable new ecological movement in 2021. Through a collaborative and uniquely immersive observational approach, DIRECT ACTION documents the everyday of a diverse ecosystem of activists, squatters, anarchists, farmers and government-labeled 'eco-terrorists' – so as to better understand how the success of a radical protest movement can offer a path through the climate crisis facing us all."The jury wants to salut the very patient and non judgement dedicated approach. We deeply enjoyed the quality of observation of this radical film." Tizza Covi, member of the jury said at the award ceremony.

Germany 2024, 70 min
by Lara Milena Brose

August 2021. The world watches as the Taliban come back to power in Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people flee. Many of them end up trapped in the non-EU state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.Like Nahid, a 15-year-old girl who is stranded in this nowhere place after a nerve-wracking flight from Herat. The voice messages from home increasingly sound like a distant echo. But there is no time for nostalgia in this daily life between illegality and pushbacks. There is just one goal: get her family away from this ramshackle camp. Luckily, there are people like Ferida and the shady but good-hearted coffee shop owner Elvir in town.Ferida lives right at the border and as she watches people return humiliated from their attempts to cross the border, memories of her own past slowly come back to her.While Ferida loses herself in reminiscence, Nahid discovers that the cycle of war and loss connects her to the place more than she expected.

2024, 29 min
by Emil Silvester Ahlhelm, Konradin Schuchter

In FAHNENFLUCHT the focus is on the Ukrainian-Russian war. If you’re considered a man, you have only two options in war: stay and fight or leave to protect your life. Not everyone wants to sacrifice their life for their homeland, and everyone should have the right to choose. [64KFF PR]

Germany, Turkey, France 2024, 97 min
by Asli Özge

Faruk, a man in his nineties, increasingly becomes the protagonist in the film his daughter is making about the impending demolition of his block of flats in Istanbul. In the hope of delaying the demolition of a building he has been living in for decades, Faruk regularly attends building management meetings. As the daughter films her father, the boundaries between reality and fiction begin to blur. Shot in authentic locations and based on real characters and events, Aslı Özge’s new film offers an insight into the life of an elderly man in the bustling metropolis of Istanbul. Alongside exploring the implications of gentrification, the work also delves into the complexities of a father-daughter relationship.

Germany 2024, 85 min
by Rea Karen, re karen

Fasia Jansen (*1929; † 1997) – a powerful blues singer; daughter of an African king and a German working-class mother – grows up among antifascist dockers in Hamburg. She barely survives the Nazi regime's medical experiments and forced labour in a concentration camp. Yet, after the war, she begins to sing for peace and women's rights. Together with her spouse, Ellen Diederich, she becomes a driving force in the European women's peace movement of the 1980s. Today, she is an identification figure for Black Germans. This documentary is a newly edited version of the film first released in 1987.

Germany 2024, 94 min
by Niloufar Taghizadeh

Once a pop icon, then 20 years of house arrest – and finally an unexpected comeback. The moving story of Iranian singer Googoosh makes her a voice of resistance. We accompany her on her farewell tour.The singer and actress Googoosh has been an iconic pioneer of Iranian pop culture for over 50 years. Her father, an acrobat and artist, already put her on stage at the age of three and she quickly became a child star. Googoosh’s singing inspired Iranian composers to create a new style of pop music, mixing Persian poetry with blues, jazz, Latin, rock and disco music. Her chansons became international hits, and she was a cult figure on the Iranian pop scene in the 1970s. Under the religious regime of Khomeini, Googoosh’s career then came to an abrupt halt in the 1980s when she was put under house arrest and banned from performing. This documentary tells of her eventful life and her astonishing international comeback in the 1990s. It accompanies Googoosh on her farewell tour in 2022. When the young girl Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the Iranian vice squad in September 2022, Googoosh demonstrated public solidarity with the struggle of the young generation of Iranians rebelling against the regime. She is today a symbol of hope and resistance, her life a testimony to the Iranian struggle for freedom and humanity.

Germany 2024, 79 min
by Katharina Köster, Katrin Nemec

The media call their son the 'patient killer.' He was given a life sentence for his numerous crimes. Life goes on for his parents Ulla and Didi Högel but nothing is the same as before. They must accept the bitter truth, figure out how to cope with everyday life and reposition themselves in relation to their child. A compelling, precisely observed film about parenthood and love. [39 DOK.fest München, Ysabel Fantou]

Germany 2024, 85 min
by Kristine Nrecaj, Birthe Templin

HOUSE WITH A VOICE tells the story of six Burrneshas who, for different reasons, have decided to take on the social role of men. They have done this to circumvent patriarchal structures, to avoid misogynistic attacks, to support the family economically, to avoid compelled marriage and to be free. Our characters communicate with us intimately as they talk about their lives and bring us closely into their personal journey. They speak about freedom and oppression, about the promise of sacrificing their lives for the sake of their families’ survival. But also about the breaking of gender barriers and the power of the human mind to decide who we want to be. The film turns stereotypes and projections of gender discussions upside down. The Burneshas expand our awareness of human life and its universal conditions but in the end their story shows that the essences of life, which are identified as female, are held as less valuable, even less worth living. And that this remains so, worldwide. [TiDF]

Belgien, France, Germany 2024, 106 min
by Ilyas Yourish, Shahrokh Bikaran

Zahra was the first in her family to study in Kabul and researched the significance of the kamay plant as an animal feed used by the mountain farmers of Hazarajat. Her suicide hit her parents and siblings hard. In their grief, they fight against a thicket of discrimination, harassment and infringements of justice. In quiet, poetic and monumental images, KAMAY tells the story of an unknown side of Afghanistan. [39 DOK.fest München, Silvia Bauer]55VdR Interreligious Award jury statement: "The film’s poetry, unfolding in the narrative of a sister, embodies the relentless and courageous yet ultimately hopeless fight against an unjust and misogynistic regime. The family members remain united in their dignity and love for each other. The decision of the interreligious jury was unanimous. The visual language and unique storytelling of the awarded film, gradually impact the audience. Through observing the pain and suffering of Afghan women, the directors have created a unique work. The only response to it can lie in human dignity".

Germany 2024, 30 min
by Daniel Burkholz

Lore Krüger was a German-Jewish photographer and a political activist. She was also a buddy of Lisa Fittko. Together they managed to escape from the French concentration camp Gurs. Lore catched the last steamer over the Atlantic, just before the Nazi-Wehrmacht took over in Marseille. Lisa Fittko saved many refugees, artists, intellectuals, etc., many of them having a Jewish background, by bringing them over the Pyrenees Mountains to Spain – out of reach of the German Nazis and their French Fascist collaborators.

Romania, Germany 2024, 89 min
by Alexandra Gulea

Maia (Alexandra Gulea) was born into a semi-nomadic population under ethnic cleansing. Her granddaughter has produced a vivid visual reconstruction of her journey through the 20th century. Her history blends into the larger History.The Aromanians (Rrãmãnji) are an ethnic group found mainly in today’s Albania, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. For filmmaker Alexandra Gulea, this question of heritage is connected to the name she shares with her grandmother, who was born into a traditional Aromanian life, and is fluent only in an Aromanian language. The older Alexandra's father suffered a violent death in an uprising for his people's rights, which forced the family out of Greece and into a politically treacherous Balkan landscape deep in the throes of nationalist upheavals, until finally, they found a home in Romania.Through early documentaries from the period, ethnographic objects and importantly, through her own imagination, Alexandra begins her journey back into her grandmother's world. Maia – Portrait with Hands delights with a mix of techniques which include proto-animation (the drawing of sheep on a meadow tacked against the side window of a car), puppetry (the play with the floating velvet dress) and simple reenactments, all lending her journey a desire for a lost simplicity, an earthiness. [53 IFFR, Olaf Möller]

2024, 30 min
by Sarvnaz Alambeigi

An Afghan teen girl, with immigrant parents in Iran, strives to pursue her dream of becoming a professionel Muay Thai boxer despite her family's conservative mindset, enduring physical abuse, and anti-immigrant surroundings. Working day and night, she finances her Thai Boxing classes without her family's knowledge. Through this sport, she aspires not only to succeed in the ring but also to overcome life's obstacles. MAYDEGOL portrays the perseverance of Generation Z to escape their seemingly bleak destiny, asserting their rights, especially as women, seeking freedom in life despite the risk of losing it. It also serves as a mirror for them to recognize their strenght, find inspiration, and gain confidence.With Maydegol, Mohadesseh, Farzaneh

2024, 82 min
by Jennifer Mallmann

The controversial conviction of six refugees for the fires at Camp Moria marks the beginning of a moving search for humanity – uncovering the dark sides of an oppressive, often inhumane system. In September 2020, six refugees are sentenced in a questionable trial for burning down the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos. The director begins a correspondence with Hassan, one of them. At the same time, a new high-security camp emerges, a symbol of the dehumanizing gaze with which so-called civilized Europe views migrants.DISTRIBUTION GermanyCINE GLOBALhttps://www.cineglobal.de/moriasix/WORLDSALESFEELSALES https://feelsales.com/en/catalogo/moria-six-2/