Films

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, 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, 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.

2024, 95 min
by Petra Hoffmann

On July 19, 1979, the Sandinista People’s Revolution in Nicaragua overthrew the brutal dictator Somoza and made the world dream. The construction of a new, more social and just society “between the blocks” seemed possible. Tens of thousands from all over the world travel to the small Central American country to support the young government and rebuild the plundered country.From what was then West Germany alone, over 15,000 supporters made their way to the small Central American country. In international brigades, they harvested coffee and cotton, built schools, kindergartens and health centers to rebuild the maltreated country. The purchase of “Nica coffee” becomes a symbol of international solidarity with the country. The Contra, which is supported by Somoza supporters and the USA, attempts to overthrow the revolution and restore the old balance of power. The civil war costs the lives of 50,000 Nicarguans and German “reconstruction helpers” are also kidnapped and killed by the Contra in the 1980s.And then the unbelievable happens: in April 2018, students protested against the former revolutionary hero and current president Daniel Ortega. Over 400 people were shot dead by paramilitaries. The country sinks into a bloodbath. Ortega’s international supporters are also increasingly being targeted. They have been collecting money for projects in Nicaragua for 45 years. Today, they fear for their lives and are fleeing the country. Those who remain no longer dare to raise their voices against the former revolutionary hero.

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, 91 min
by René Frölke

Twenty years after Swiss publishing house Pendo closed its doors, the descendants of its founders repeatedly circle, examine and lose sight of its legacy. Frölke’s film gives structure to this archive via media experimentation.The film gives brief glimpses into rooms bathed in light. The Bolex camera whirs. Twenty years after the closure of Swiss publishing house Pendo, which was founded in 1971, its story is revealed by way of personification: heir Theresia Weigner and her partner, who repeatedly circle, examine and lose sight again of this legacy with all the weight it carries. Here articles of memory are piled high, cared for, stashed away. Remaining stock, no longer hot off the press, but still packaged up for sale, unfinished manuscripts, cover designs, cassettes, office supplies, correspondence and tax documents are all laid out like in a time capsule: books by Margarete Mitscherlich, Dorothee Sölle, Dom Hélder Câmara, illustrated volumes about Robert Lax or the Sihl Valley. René Frölke’s film gives a structure to this archive and becomes a simple chamber of wonders. He finds his own annotations within the inner pull exerted by the artefacts and accompanies these stubborn, overwhelmed preservers on their way through their everyday life amid the piles of material. Written elements from the film script also play a part.At the end of the corridor, jazz music sounds from a small radio. [74 BERLINALE Forum]

Germany, Austria 2023, 90 min
by Bianca Gleissinger

„So schön, schön war die Zeit." - Bianca Gleissinger's humorous debut documentary 27 STOREYS is about Austria's largest social housing estate, Wohnpark Alterlaa, and its former promise of happiness to its residents. The director returns to the place of her childhood and encounters its quirky as well as endearing residents - in the shooting club, at the pool on the roof or on the balcony - and thus provides deep insight into a social biotope. "Living like the rich for everyone" was the utopian premise of the architect with the sonorous name Harry Glück in 1970. But what remains of that pioneering spirit? This film is a witty, very personal approach to an obscure place and an examination of its own roots.DIAGONALE Jury statement: "A microcosm. A social housing and a promise of happiness from the 1970s. A cinematographer who does not create an architectural film and does not succumb to the temptation to remain at a distance. Step by step he takes us into the lives of these people who have created their own world in the Alterlaa housing pyramids. Together with his director and protagonist, he explores this social fabric with great empathy. It's the balancing act of capturing the architectural complexity of the labyrinthine building and giving space to the individuality of the residents that succeeds brilliantly here."

Ukraine, France, Germany 2023, 72 min
by Olga Chernykh

Olga Chernykh spent her childhood in Donetsk in the 1990s, before moving with her parents to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Her grandma stayed in the Donbas region, large parts of which were occupied by pro-Russian rebels in 2014. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the ensuing war, only increased the sense of distance between Chernykh and her grandmother.A Picture to Remember is an essay-style account of the war from the perspective of three generations of women. There are frequent video calls between Chernykh, her mother (a pathologist working above a morgue, where it feels surprisingly safe during bomb attacks) and her grandmother. Recordings of their conversations are interspersed with photos and videos from the family archive, and news reports, as well as images of the parasites Chernykh’s mother observes with a microscope. The result is a kaleidoscopic and personal film. Traveling fluidly through time, it connects the current violence in Donbas with the destruction there during the Second World War—as related by Chernykh’s grandmother. A sense of absence and loss prevails throughout. [36 IDFA]

Germany 2023, 64 min
by Khaled Abdulwahed

A photo camera is cleaned. Click. The shutter works. Bright light. A crackle and hiss in the sound. A broken "Hello?" opens a conversation between Khaled Abdulwahed, a Syrian filmmaker living in Leipzig, and his father in Aleppo. The son reconstructs his father's journey, arriving in the GDR as an exchange student in 1956. His son applies for asylum more than 60 years later as a refugee. The civil war in Syria separates their stories, the film BACKGROUND brings them back together and continues them.

Libanon, Germany 2023, 87 min
by Cyril Aris

On August 4th, 2020, the catastrophic explosion at the port of Beirut leaves a large part of the Lebanese capital in ruins. In the midst of the chaos, a troubled film crew faces an overwhelming decision: to continue the production of their movie or abandon it? As they face the aftermath of the catastrophe, they are torn between their firm belief in the transformative power of cinema and a deep sense of cynicism about its ability to effect change in a nation plagued by economic turmoil and societal collapse. Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano chronicles their struggles and highlights the crew's resilience as they strive to find meaning and purpose in their work amidst the devastation.

2023, 43 min
by Julie Pfleiderer

If you were to design your dream house now that you're at the end of your life, what would it look? This question from the filmmaker to her father, retired architect Karlhans Pfleiderer, is the starting point of Das Retirée or the last house of my father. Slowly but surely, the house takes form, first drawn on shifting layers of transparent paper, then glued into a scale model. Between the words and the gestures, the film of the daughter becomes the father's last house, a space in which unspoken words, unfulfilled desires can appear, disclosing coping-mechanisms that have survived several generations.

Germany 2023, 20 min
by Ayla Pierrot Arendt

GAZE IN BATTLE tries to capture and dissect personal experiences of director Ayla Pierrot Arendt in Tel Aviv and the West Bank during her summer stay in 2023 through diary entries. Something external is always present, observing and assessing. This shifts the perspective from mere observation to an intense engagement with the gaze as an affected partaker.

Germany 2023, 22 min
by Franzis Kabisch

What images do we associate with abortion and why? Where do these images and the emotional scripts in our head come from? How do they influence women who (want to) have an abortion, how do they shape the general discussion? Franzis Kabisch’s personal desktop documentary investigates these questions with great precision, clarity and humour (yes, humour, too!).In the process, she moves from early 2000s girls’ magazines to the late 19th century, sifts through troves of feminist knowledge and checks alleged cultural-historical facts (such as the discovery of hysteria in women) that haunt conventional wisdom to this day. At the end of the film, we have not only seen an exemplary examination of image politics and how they contributed to pushing the issue of abortion to the social sidelines and linking it with shame and guilt. Franzis Kabisch manages, almost 'in the same breath,' to break up the false hubris of the documentary and demonstrate that the evidential value of filmic and photographic 'testimonies' must always and implicitly be scrutinised. Ultimately, “cui bono?” – the question who profits, must be considered in every media-critical reflection – not just in the age of stock photos, editing software and AI but, strictly speaking, at the start of every documentary image production. [66DOK Leipzig, Luc-Carolin Ziemann]

Germany 2023, 65 min
by Louis Fried

In the essay film HAMMERBROOK BLUES Louis Fried goes in search of traces in theHamburg district of Hammerbrook. This area was completely destroyed 1943 during the so called 'Hamburg Firestorm' caused by fierce Allied bombings, in which the author's grandfather lost his entire former family.  Afterwards, the district was sealed off and prisoners from a nearby concentration camp had to salvage rubble and corpses, reminding the author of his other grandfather, who had to do forced labor in a concentration subcamp in Thuringia.The film interweaves historical aspects of this urban area and its development with the author's family history.

2023, 73 min
by Julia Milz

The attempt to shoot a portrait of Daniel, an outsider musician, fails when he begins to establish his own terms and conditions. The relationship between filmmaker and protagonist moves more and more into focus and thus their different needs and intentions behind doing this film.

France, Germany 2023, 93 min
by Tuki Jencquel

Paris, Summer 2018. Jacqueline Jencquel (74) lives a comfortable life in a splendid apartment in Saint-Germain. Apart from a few age-related ailments, she's in good health. And yet Jackie has decided to die. A mother, grandmother and dedicated right-to-die activist, she sparks a media frenzy by announcing that she will end her life in January 2020.As the clock ticks, she faces the camera of one of her three sons. Taboos are broken in an honest exchange about death, love, desire and motherhood. Though determined to go ahead, she postpones her final act, in order to enjoy one last spring, one last summer. But when Jackie learns of the imminent birth of a grandchild, she begins to waver and she pushes back “the date” yet again. Seizing on this grace period, Jackie’s son records a series of increasingly meaningful encounters with his mother as he struggles to accept her decision and to learn to let go.

Germany 2023, 77 min
by Andreas Wolff

When the most fulfilling element in your life gets taken away: A professional female snowboarder fights against depression and mistreatment by her federation in order to fulfil her dream of an Olympic comeback.Silvia Mittermüller is in a traumatic conflict with her federation. Being expelled from the national team immediately after her first Olympics participation, she plunges into depression with thoughts of suicide. It takes Silvia more than one year to recover. She dares a comeback and decides to tell her story in this film. But the president of the German snowboard federation tries to intervene in the making of the film. Does Silvia succumb to the threats or does she take the chance to start a new phase of her life?

Germany, Austria 2023, 21 min
by Mona Rizaj

2 villages, 2 countries, 2 persons, what unites them, their children.

Germany 2023, 30 min
by Paul Drey

13 years after his civil service in a hospital in Thiès, Senegal, Paul challanges his memories and traumas. With old video footage, interviews and animations he questions his role as a volunteer within the German system of development aid.

Germany 2023, 97 min
by Matthias Freier

Marianne Atzeroth-Freier once brought the 'acid-barrel murderer' to justice. In a mix of archive material and re-enacted scenes, the film reconstructs the difficult investigation Atzeroth-Freier had to pursue in a male-dominated environment. In the 1990s, as one of the first women in the Hamburg Police’s homicide division, Atzeroth-Freier solved one of the most gruesome murders in German history. If anything, by chance. When approached by a mother whose daughter has disappeared, she decides to get involved. On the search for the missing person, she repeatedly comes across inconsistencies within the police’s investigation. But she keeps going – until she achieves the breakthrough.With: Constanze Andree, Cornelia Uetrecht, Claudia Haarbrücker, Andreas Lohmeyer, Elke Lorenz u.a.202331 FFHH Filmfest Hamburg

Germany 2023, 80 min
by Sarah Klewes

Director Sarah Klewes is merely twelve years old when she meets writer Claretta Cerio, 65 years her senior, in Tuscany. They begin a pen friendship that lasts 15 years. Then Claretta dies. The world loses an exciting author – and Sarah loses a dear friend. She is left with a box full of letters – and the feeling that Claretta somehow is still there. With the letters in her luggage, she travels to Italy in 2022 to remember her friend – and dares to glimpse into the past.In a mix of fictional scenes and documentary interviews, the portrait of a fascinating writer unfolds. Despite numerous strokes of fate, Claretta Cerio was independent, passionate and an exciting contemporary witness.

Germany 2023, 92 min
by Grit Lemke

What makes us who we are? In search of her own roots, the director explores an indigenous people in Germany: the Sorbs, the smallest Slavic people. Their language and culture are severely threatened by centuries of oppression. But a new generation no longer wants to accept this: They are committed to self-determination, come to terms with the trauma of losing their villages because of lignite mining or redefine being Sorbian as alternative, anti-fascist and feminist. And the German Anna becomes a Sorbian Hanka. Metaphorical images of nature, poetic reflections of a first-person narrator and archaic but experimental Sorbian music in the first ever film about Sorbs.