Berlinale 2021

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of Unschool, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions, and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz, questioning what cinema can be. Here the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song. "The film is a song you can see," wrote one of the students in a collective constellation of phrases and drawings made during one of the workshops. The phrase is a perfect description of a film that explores a nascent ecology of the senses.

She goes about her monotonous, lonely routine: shelling beans, cooking dinner, cleaning the bathroom and waiting for him. He is nothing more than a ghost in a uniform. Panama's military dictatorship has left its mark on the family. Wounds and guilt are buried in silence, healing is impossible: the experiences have inscribed themselves too deeply. But the body does not forget – neither the torture nor the dancing. A filmmaker's tender portrait of her grandparents.

Although they were risking their lives by doing so, prisoners in concentration and extermination camps took photographs and even managed to smuggle canisters of film beyond the camp gates. Yet their hopes of galvanising the global public into action would remain unfulfilled.

A portrait of urban spaces along the Yangtze River in the city of Wuhan. An engaging communal stage on which people perform in various ways: some dancing, singing, swimming; some shoveling, welding and hammering. An evolving landscape that is continuously sculpted by nature and dramatically altered by roaring machines and rising infrastructure.
March 2020, a Wuhan street literally comes to a halt, passers-by stop moving at the sound of a siren. A few moments later, they set off again on their way. Like many others, this city came to a stop this year but has since come back to life. The currents of the Yangtze river, however, have not weakened. The river, which crosses the city and region, runs through and structures the wide static shots of Shengze Zhu's film. The peaceful images leave us time to explore and take our bearings. We follow the bridges to locate where we are, the city is tied up then untied under the filmmaker's patient gaze. Barely changing the shot scale, she builds a landscape film, a river film, to trace back and observe the anatomy of the territory. Wild animals are close by, we guess that an urban hurricane has hit. Construction works dot the vicinity of the Yangtze, a new bridge now straddles it, everything changes. Not its inhabitants. They are still found at the river's edge: walkers, bathers, dancers, workers. The bustle of this imposing city is discreet. On the surface of the shots, letters appear. They talk about recent bereavements due to the Covid epidemic and the inhabitants' pain. Greater forces then come adrift, but even if the river submerges the new roads, it will never cover the memories of the stories attached to its tireless, insurmountable course, and its banks still receive the narratives of those who have passed by. And while the face of Wuhan becomes disfigured, the river bed does not forget.
- Clémence Arrivé

Shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa Yanomami leads this cinematically rich documentary, weaving beautifully realized sequences of traditional stories with the ongoing struggles the Yanomami people face as they fight to preserve the Amazon.

After Life consists of a sequence of meditative short scenes picturing the ruins of a small Faliscan necropolis Cavone di Monte Li Santi in Italy and its surrounding natural elements. The rock-cut chamber tombs of the necropolis had been illegally excavated before they were archaeologically discovered in 2015 – a phenomenon still faced by many rural archaeological sites

From September 2001 to April 2002 Nan and Nancy along with other Latin American women worked for the asbestos company "Branch," cleaning the luxury apartments, offices, and banks of Manhattan in the hermetically sealed zone of "Ground Zero." The women had neither residence permits nor work permits in the USA, and their dust masks had no filter for asbestos.

There he sits proudly on his motorbike, encompassed in majestic red and the dazzling admiration of the others. Round and round he goes, becoming more and more beautiful and exalted. For only he can explore the jungle. And no, he won't hand over his motorbike, not even on loan. A playful re-enactment with reversed roles that takes aim at the hubris of the colonial conquerors.

After ten years together, Laurent proposes to his girlfriend Marie. It's even going to be a white wedding. Little Poulette is all for her parents tying the knot. Group hug. While it's all plain sailing on the family front, Laurent's job, which he loves, is noticeably taking its toll. As chief of the local police force in the picturesque community of Étretat in Normandy, he not only has to drive inebriated troublemakers out of the bar (Xavier Beauvois in a brilliant cameo), he also has to deal with more serious crimes – from insurance fraud to child abuse to a suicidal Parisian who throws himself off the steep cliffs (ruining a romantic wedding photo shoot for the tourists who had come here from afar). When farmer Julien repeatedly defies EU regulations, Laurent finally blows a fuse. What follows is pure existentialism and the archetypal myth of a man in crisis.

How to portray a murderer? For many years German filmmakers Chris Wright and Stefan Kolbe were in intensive contact with Stefan S., who murdered a colleague 15 years ago after stalking her. Now it's his last year in jail, and he is being prepared for his return to society. This includes undergoing various types of therapy, including group sessions on "Masculinity and Identity."
Stefan doesn't want to be recognizable in the film, so a puppeteer re-enacts his conversations with care professionals. Though Stefan had made such a mild-mannered impression on the filmmakers, the frozen expression in the hand puppet's face also evokes feelings of discomfort.
The film's title reflects the filmmakers' interpretation of Stefan's story, as if it were the history of an illness told by a patient to a physician. The matter of whether the story is true is not of primary importance here. Stefan's counselors believe that lying can be a good sign, because it demonstrates an awareness of shame and guilt. An intriguing portrait of an elusive individual, one that confronts us with our own interpretations of truth—and those of the people around us.

Cairo, 25 January 2013: a spate of sexual aggressions takes place on Tahrir Square, the day of the second anniversary of the revolution. In response, a massive wave of angry women unfurls in the streets and Samaher Alqadi joins them without knowing where this story will lead her.

Shot in the village of Oliveto Lucano in the south of Italy, Autotrofia is simultaneously a documentation of a very ancient pagan fertility ritual that is still practiced in this region, and scripted fiction, based on writings by the painter Vassily Chekrygin and the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky. The scripted content of the film explores the ecological dimension of Russian Cosmism: a desire to transform and evolve in such a way that humans would not need to kill and consume any other living organism in order to produce the energy necessary for living, and instead learn from green plants how to generate nutrition directly from the sun. This idea, first developed at the turn of the 20th century, is juxtaposed with an older, pagan celebration of King Oak and King Holly: a harvest festival in which two trees that represent summer and winter are joint into one supernaturally tall tree, completing and connecting the seasonal cycle created by the orbit of our planet around the sun

Swiss private banker Yvan De Wiel travels with his wife Inés to Buenos Aires in the midst of the military dictatorship. He is searching for his partner René Keys who was in charge of maintaining relations with wealthy Argentinean clients and has mysteriously disappeared. De Wiel encounters a decadent society of landowners, the newly rich, heiresses, aristocrats, army officials, fixers and prelates, all complicit with the regime but concerned with taking advantage of the hypocritical collusion between the Swiss banking system and diplomacy to hide their capital abroad. As he moves from exclusive receptions to private circles and luxury hotels while soldiers arrest bystanders in the streets, the discreet De Wiel must learn to interpret and speak the allusive language of a greater, darker power in order to take on his predecessor's increasingly unclear role. But as we shift from Roberto Bolaño to Joseph Conrad, exiting the maze will lead the protagonist to the mystery's heart of darkness.

Emi, a high‑school history teacher in Bucharest, becomes the target of condemnation when a private sex tape is leaked online. Amidst the COVID‑19 pandemic, she must defend herself at a parent‑teacher tribunal, exposing societal hypocrisy as the film juxtaposes her daily ordeals with satirical essays on nationalism, sexism, and consumerism—culminating in three alternate, provocative endings.

Based on true events, Tracey Deer's debut feature chronicles the 78-day standoff between two Mohawk communities and government forces in 1990 Quebec.

Harris Shaw is still typing on his rickety typewriter, even though he likes to bellow into his (rotary dial) phone that he is long dead. He coughs and swears, drinks and smokes, quite unlike Lucy Stanbridge, heir to the publishing house which made it big half a century ago with the author's successful novel, "Atomic Autumn". While the old curmudgeon has turned his back on life, the energetic young woman jogs through New York's Upper East Side, receiving live updates from her ambitious assistant about (falling) sales figures and (crushing) influencer blogs. A book tour, of all things, with the old boy and his new work is meant to save the publishing house. But the old codger is a real pain in the arse. Spewed out in a British accent, his "bullshite!" quickly becomes the hashtag of a generation of US hipsters – but it doesn't sell any books.

As the VHS news footage that opens the film reveals, when the Palace of Justice in Bogota went up in flames in 1985 as part of a violent siege, the fire also engulfed the judicial archive, countless documents that defined law and order in the country gone forever. BICENTENARIO seeks to fill this void by returning to the man who called the Colombian state into existence, retracing the path taken by Simón Bolívar and his army in the final stages of the liberation campaign in 1818.
The striking 16mm images of towns and landscapes two hundred years later pick out any number of traces of the political leader along the way, alighting on ancient bridleways, statues, advertisements, celebrations, and official events as different people talk of their relationship to Bolívar in voiceover. And these indirect attempts to summon forth his spirit are given a wonderfully ghostly undertone by the séance narrated by the unseen woman across the film, an orange backdrop to house any number of projections.
History is so many things at once: books turned to ash, markings in stone and earth, each flag that is a copy of an older one, the man feeding pigeons in the square, a flame that flickers as the spirit approaches. (James Lattimer / Viennale)

The film is based on interviews with inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh made in 2007, in a time between two wars. As in their earlier works shown in Forum Expanded, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri work with different layers of time: In the past they edited and presented their films live. Here they use the temporal distance to re-evaluate old footage.

Looking like a rediscovered film reel from the early days of cinema and with its "animal drag" costumes, this Dadaist nature documentary imagines a utopia where any and all life forms are equal. Fabulous creatures that defy the binary classification of male and female and the division between human and animal go through the classic cycle of birth, courtship, reproduction, parental care and predatory behaviour.

August 1928: while workers and farmers search "Das Kapital" for answers to some mysterious vampire bite marks, a self-proclaimed baron enters the life of the charming heiress Miss Flambow-Jansen, as well as her luxury Baltic residence. As it turns out, he is actually a proletarian impostor, forced to escape from the Soviet Union because of a political incident involving no less than Sergei Eisenstein and Stalin himself.

Cynthia Beatt raises questions and provokes reflection on a range of issues to do with language and culture, politics and history. Her film is a personal and cathartic confrontation with being a foreigner in Berlin, burdened by the weight of its history, during the 1970s and '80s. Filmed in the area around Potsdamer Platz, the torn-up area right next to the Wall where post-war buildings grew out of the bomb craters, the film paints the picture of the loss of an architectural text whose destruction also meant the disappearance of a cultural context.

Film censor Enid takes her work seriously. With meticulous zeal, she recommends the redaction of extremely violent, brutal, bloody and sexually explicit scenes for censorship, without which no film can be released. Her sense of duty is reinforced by feelings of guilt from her childhood. The mysterious disappearance of her younger sister still weighs heavily on her. Enid has not yet given up the search for her, though her parents have decided to have her sister pronounced dead. When Enid is assigned to censor a film from the archives, it rekindles fresh memories of that time. Becoming increasingly obsessed, she picks up the trail and embarks on a nightmarish, feverish quest during which the lines between fiction and reality become blurred.

Fifteen years ago, frustrated with the authoritarian regime's lack of tolerance, Maryna, Pavel and Denis left the Minsk State Theatre to perform for the newly founded Belarus Free Theatre. Civil disobedience as a moral imperative. Rehearsals are held in secret and the director is connected via Skype from exile. Resources are scarce, and topics explosive. Just like the real lives caught between daily routine and underground activities, their current play is about opposition politicians who have "disappeared" and the loss of any means of existence. In other words – the truth. Anyone who dares to speak out risks repression, even death. Having made a conscious decision to "betray art" as he puts it, Denis has given up acting to protect his family. But, by now, even those who merely observe are putting everything at risk. Because to watch means to know.

As cryptozookeepers struggle to capture a Baku (a legendary dream-eating hybrid creature) they begin to wonder if they should display these rare beasts in the confines of a cryptozoo or if these mythical creatures should remain hidden and unknown.

A young mother and her daughters are sitting under a bridge. The camera scans the surroundings and follows them on a strange journey of changing sensory perceptions, self-discovery and different kinds of society. Like some unruly "painting by numbers", it feels as if they are flying under the radar of symbols – from a Mercedes star to Barbie's horse and the ruins of the world's largest automobile factory in Detroit. How does one grow up in this kind of world?

Over the course of two days and one night, as Lisa moves out of the apartment she has shared with Mara and into the one where she will live alone, many things will break and some will be repaired.

This morning, Etienne has to lie to his mother so that he can join three friends for a secret outing. They have pooled the money to pay for a sex worker and are about to have intercourse for the first time. Although the teenagers have to travel some way for their enterprise, there is no time to think about what they are going to do. Instead, they cover up their nervousness with non-stop bragging, joking and competitive arguments. Nobody in their radius is spared as the protagonists make casually insulting remarks about other people who cross their path. Although most of their quips go unchallenged, they do not remain entirely uninterrupted – for the film also reveals in voice-over monologues what is troubling the many secondary characters. Not only are their inner fears and longings disclosed, we are also told what fate has in store for them. And in this way, we learn more about the young men than they are willing to reveal to each other.

A featureless street on an industrial estate in Bonn – desolate, unfinished and inconspicuous. The street bears the name of a child. It is meant to commemorate the racially motivated terrorist attack that this child did not survive. A public memorial, consigned to no man's land. A film against collective amnesia.

A mysterious break-in exposes tensions and buried conflicts in the life of a middle-class European family.

Rainer toils by the sweat of his brow on a building site. His first job as site manager is his much-needed big break. Rising rents in the city have already forced him, his pregnant wife and 13-year-old daughter Doreen to move into a little house in the outskirts which needs renovating. At first, Doreen is not thrilled about her new life but then she meets her neighbour Mara, a girl whose parents are as rich as they are narrow-minded. Before long the new friends are playing with fire. Mara incites Doreen to play some nasty tricks and also entangles her in a theft. Meanwhile at work, Rainer is demoted and replaced by Jürgen, a cool pragmatist who, with only the investors' interests in mind, ruthlessly steers the building project towards profit. When an older employee is about to be fired, Rainer stands up to his new superior and involuntarily becomes the leader of a burgeoning resistance.

Asli first sets eyes on Saeed in the mid-1990s at a fairground as he is anxiously stepping off a merry-go-round just before the ride begins. They get to know each other while spinning bottles at a party in their student hall of residence. Asli is fascinated by Saeed's charisma and self-confidence. The two students marry secretly even though Asli's mother is against the relationship. In a mosque in Hamburg, they promise to stay together and keep each other's secrets. Caught between asserting herself, conforming to her traditional parental home and her self-sacrificing love, Asli tries to find her own way in life. Then Saeed disappears. His decision changes Asli's life – before it shakes the whole world.

Brandon strokes his pregnant wife Reagan's belly and speaks to their unborn child: "Boy, you got me scared as hell, boy. But it's alright." On the streets of the US-Mexican border towns of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, we meet several people – including a grieving father, a war veteran and a 16-year-old – who are living without a home. At night, many of them sleep in the shelters of the OC, the Opportunity Center for the Homeless in El Paso, but during the day it is a matter of somehow surviving on the streets. Together and individually, they reflect on their past, their backgrounds and the here and now and share their dreams, their desires and their hopes for the future that are keeping them alive.

Fishmonger Polina is sleeping badly because she's worried about her brother. A tea given to her by a strange old woman transforms her sleep into a fairy tale. In a sort of underworld, she takes part in a competition that aims to determine whether or not she has what it takes to become a Tzarevna, or tsar's daughter. The Tzarevna is an archetypical figure in Russia's folklore and world of fairy tales. And the film is itself a fairy tale, in which Polina has to pass various tests in order to return at the end as a different person.

Jason dreams of having his own mountain bike. If he could find the splendid parrots that recently escaped from their cage at the Chinese restaurant he might be able to sell them for a lot of money and realise his dream. His friend Kevin will surely help him. But Kevin is just too angry. A melancholic portrait of a toxic friendship, depicted in broken colours.

Rain-soaked Finnish forests bathed in a nebulous haze. Every morning, the 13-year-old Ramin is awakened tenderly by his mother. The Mehdipour family encounters everyday life in a refugee accommodation in a quiet, simple manner, full of humour and warmth. In the here and now, every moment is savoured as if there were no tomorrow: time with friends, new encounters, parties and – for Ramin – falling in love for the first time. And yet, it is clear that if the family's application for asylum is denied, which could happen any day, things will change abruptly. Moments of courage and joy, despair and worry all add to the loving portrait of a child and his family who, on the threshold of a new life, never lose their dignity.

Buenos Aires, 1996. Three influential men are being recorded as they take part in an orgy in a hotel suite with all the usual ingredients: alcohol, drugs and sex. But after one too many lines, a prostitute dies and the compromising video suddenly disappears. This sets off a chain of events that quickly embroils not only the city's entire demi-monde and underworld, but also the corrupt police force. Corpses are being found, a gangland boss's pigs are served plenty of fresh food and the police accidentally torture the wrong person in their search for the video cassette.

There's a monster in the Nahuel Huapi Lake. In the twilight, it spreads itself out across the surface of the water like a taut cowhide, grasping at its victims with sharp claws. Another monster also lurks in the surroundings of the lake, which is close to Bariloche in the Argentine Andes. It is called Capa Negra: the Black Cape. It haunts the ski slopes by night and should be avoided at all costs.

Berlin, 1931. A milieu between sublets and the underworld, where brothels are artists' studios, Nazis are yelling abuse in the streets and Babelsberg is dreaming of producing "psychological cinema". Life is surging, society is fermenting and corroding. As long as he still has a job, Jakob Fabian, who has a doctorate in German studies, writes advertising copy during the day and frequents the city's more outlandish establishments with Stephan Labude at night. While his friend – who later confesses to having failed "in the subjects of life and profession" – is a go-getter when it comes to communism and sex, Fabian remains sober and distant. Without really believing in it, he is waiting for the "victory of decency". His love for Cornelia is the only thing that makes him question his ironic fatalism. She becomes a ray of hope in his crumbling existence.

After successfully escaping North Korea and spending months in a social inclusion facility, Jina moves into her new apartment in Seoul. However, the path to a self-determined life continues to challenge the young woman. Her mother, who has become a stranger to her, lives somewhere in town, while her father is still stuck in the north. In order to raise the money for his escape, Jina toils day and night. Following a period of setbacks, she changes her tactics. While working in a gym, she puts on her boxing gloves. The sheer tension of her body reflects struggle for recognition far beyond the boxing ring. The film carefully tells the story of a refugee's fate in a divided country, the inner border of which is not just on the map.

Frances Price, a stern, widowed Manhattan socialite, discovers that her luxurious lifestyle has brought her to the brink of insolvency. On a whim, she decides to escape the situation by boarding a cruise ship to Paris with the little money she has left. She is accompanied by her 32-year-old son Malcolm and their beloved cat Small Frank.

FROM THE WILD SEA is a poetic documentary film that zooms in on the complex collision between human and nature. We are taken on a disturbing and fascinating journey into the emerging Anthropocene Era, seen from both the human and animal perspective.

Every evening in a popular area of the city of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso, Mrs. Coda welcomes the children of prostitutes at her home. The young women then stroll through the "Black", a lively alley in the city center, until daybreak when they come to pick up their babies.

Monika Treut's Gendernauts was one of the first films to portray the transgender movement in San Francisco. Twenty years after the film screened in Panorama in 1999, Treut seeks out the pioneers of that time. What has changed? How have the lives of the protagonists evolved? San Francisco was once, as Annie Sprinkle puts it, the "clitoris of the USA", but today the tech industry has a firm grip on the city. Aggressive gentrification has displaced the genderqueer community of yesteryear. Under the Trump administration, hard-won transgender rights are under massive pressure as protection against discrimination in healthcare and freedom of choice in the use of public toilets are rolled back.

Ballad of a White Cow

Alternating between waiting in the break room, having sex and lining up for the next john: Maria, a self-confident Italian in her mid-twenties, is new to the Berlin brothel where Sascha has been working for a long time. With her tattoos, her piercings and her penchant for writing poetry in a notebook during breaks, she is quite different from the others. The two women are immediately attracted to each other. Maria keeps her cash in a locker in the Berlin State Library. She regularly assures her father on the phone that she is doing well and earning a lot of money. For Sascha, the regional train connects her not only with her old life in provincial Brandenburg but also with her 11-year-old son who lives with his father. When she takes Maria to a village festival and introduces her as her new girlfriend, Sascha brings with her the assertive, non-conformist ways of the city. For the first time she is trying to be true to who she really is.

As with the rest of his oeuvre, duplication and mirroring of female characters once again informs Ryusuke Hamaguchi's latest work, Guzen to sozo. It would not be out of place to make a literary analogy and, if one were to regard his two previous films (Happy Hour and Asako I & II) as novels, this new work could be described as a collection of short stories.

Like a seismograph, 13-year-old Guo moves through Han Shuai's feature debut: locked in a series of close-ups, more of an observer than a participant, quietly registering all of the tremors causing the fabric of her working-class social environment to crumble. Guo becomes witness to her friend accidentally drowning in the river, which results in her inability to deal with her feelings of grief, guilt and longing. The summer heat is as oppressive as the overbearing advances of one of her classmates, the shrill chirping of cicadas permeating the desolation of her loveless home on the outskirts of Wuhan – far away from a mother whose presence in her life is limited only to voice messages. A tender portrait of a young girl defying the confines of her circumstances and coming of age in the process.

Where does one feel at home? In Stadtallendorf, a German city with a complex history of both excluding and integrating foreigners, genial teacher Dieter Bachmann offers his pupils the key to at least feeling as if they are at home. Aged between twelve and fourteen, these pupils come from twelve different nations; some have not quite mastered the German language. On the brink of retirement, Bachmann is eager to inspire these citizens-in-the-making with a sense of curiosity for a wide range of crafts, subjects, cultures and opinions. Watching this absorbing, sensitive documentary, one is overwhelmed with the realisation that, if only all children were blessed with such emotionally intelligent, ever-patient educators, conflict would be mitigated via discussion and John Lennon's "Imagine" could be our reality. Those who, like filmmaker Maria Speth and her cinematographer Reinhold Vorschneider, are able to recognise and highlight so beautifully not only the importance of education but also what a quietly spectacular process it can be, are heroes in their own right, too.

Antonin is a bit of a dandy. He has a way with words that could have made him a famous writer, but instead mostly serves to get him out of trouble. Torn between twin urges to be part of society and also to escape it, his charm and wit are put to the test by five women who are about to lose their patience with his live and let live attitude: his sister, his wife, the woman he desires, a tax collector and a victim of his mischief.

Alma is a scientist at the famous Pergamon Museum in Berlin. In order to obtain research funds for her studies, she accepts an offer to participate in an extraordinary experiment. For three weeks, she is to live with a humanoid robot whose artificial intelligence has been designed to allow it to morph into that of her ideal life partner. Enter Tom, a machine in (handsome) human form, created to make her happy. What ensues is a tragicomic tale that explores notions of love, longing and what makes us human.

"I hate my name. Life is not a Wagner opera after all," says Tristan. "I've never looked at your penis, you'll have to take my word for it," says his father. "Perverted? What's wrong with perverted?" asks his mother. "Actually, in order to change the world we have to treat God. And we can get to him through you," says his therapist. "May I ask you to respect the privacy of our protagonists," says his taxi driver.

In January 1988, Birgit Scherzer's "Keith" is a phenomenal hit at the Komische Oper in Berlin, capital of the GDR. The dance piece marks the young choreographer's breakthrough. Seven dancers perform in "Keith". Less than a year later, four of them – including Birgit herself – will have left the GDR, some of them fleeing during guest performances for the "class enemy".

Alexander's transgender identity means he is obliged to lead a life of secrecy in his home country. Being identified as "female" in his passport means he cannot legally find work, either. Since even a visit to the doctor is a risk for him, he has begun hormone therapy to transition on his own with support from internet forums and the local transgender community. Desperate to escape their hopeless situation and leave the country, Alexander's wife Mari decides to become a surrogate mother for 12,000 dollars. But their ostensibly pragmatic plan backfires when Alex and Mari gradually develop an emotional bond with the unborn child.

On International Dawn Chorus Day, birds from around the world zoom in to gossip about dating, the weather and, of course, cats. They also discuss serious matters, including the recent deaths of two Egyptian activists: the filmmaker Shady Habash and the queer activist Sarah Hegazi.

Youngho is summoned by his father, who is a doctor. Finding him busy with his patients, one of whom is a famous actor, Youngho has to wait. When his girlfriend Juwon moves to Berlin for her studies, Youngho shows up in the city to surprise her. Through her mother, Juwon has found accommodation at the home of an artist whose beauty intimidates her. Some time later, Youngho goes to lunch with his mother who wants to introduce him to a colleague – it is the same man Youngho met at his father's clinic. Youngho asks his friend Jeongsoo to accompany him, and after lunch they go to the beach. Youngho falls asleep, and dreams of Juwon. When he wakes up, he braves the considerable cold and goes swimming, while Jeongsoo watches.

In the early 1980s, London is a safe haven for anyone who is different – not least young gay men. Escaping the stuffy small-town life of his parents' home on the Isle of Wight, Ritchie ends up in the big city where he quickly swaps his law degree for drama. Colin comes from Wales to take up an apprenticeship at a men's tailors. And Roscoe moves to London because his Nigerian-born parents refuse to accept his queerness. Their paths soon cross in the city's nightlife and the queer flat-share "Pink Palace" becomes their home. Together they launch themselves into a promising future, unaware that a deadly virus is spreading, threatening to destroy this future for them and their friends.

How do you put together the puzzle if the image is missing? You start from individual pieces and see how they fit together. There are the four young actors on a trip to Kanchanaburi, "a city so meaningful, I'd rather die if I don't get to be with you", as the song goes. They stay in a hut in the forest by the river, drink on the terrace, talk and watch the fireworks at night, the same scene they later re-enact on the stage set back in Bangkok. The harried young woman is lost in the same forest, or maybe in the young actress' dream; when the screen splits into two distinct parts, it's also not clear how they fit together. The foursome came to Kanchanaburi to see the museum, but it's closed for refurbishment, although they still manage to walk along Hellfire Pass. You can hear the sounds of construction as the scenery rushes past on the train; you can see the rails rush towards you from the window of the theatre set. If you follow the Death Railway back from the west, you reach Bangkok too, which was once home to the Dusit Zoo; the actors also cluck, howl and bark, in city and country alike. What if the missing image isn't one place or moment in time, but many?

Somewhere in Berlin. But not just any time, this is here and now. A postman delivers a parcel and, soon afterwards, everything changes. A terrorist attack rocks a family to the core. Maxi – who loses her mother, her brothers and her home – tries to look forward, but is still deeply insecure. Nothing seems to work. Her father Alex is as traumatised as she is. The certainties of the past have been wiped out and the grief that comes with their loss obscures everything. Meeting another young person seems to help Maxi. Karl liberates her from her paralysis and urges her to conquer her fear. He has organised a meeting of European students who are looking for solutions to the catastrophic situation on the continent. The task he assigns Maxi could be the deciding factor in the success of a grand plan. By joining forces with Karl, Maxi is dancing on a knife edge: today in Berlin, tomorrow in Prague, soon in Strasbourg and eventually all over Europe. Je suis Karl – a political takeover.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Berlin, a self-proclaimed priest is preaching to a group of people with addiction and mental-health problems in a run-down building that houses a psychosocial support group. A recent arrival at the facility, which aims to be both a home and a religious community for its residents, is Egon, who is struggling with a psychotic disorder. He cannot sleep, refuses to help on the farm, won't wash, and has trouble following the priest's instructions. More than once, the pastor crosses a line and humiliates his charges. For most people here, turning to religion is something of a last chance, affording them some kind of support. Egon, however, claims to have conversations with Jesus in which the latter condones his defiant behaviour. His attempt to take the Messiah at his word and understand his miracles eventually propels Egon deeper and deeper into his psychosis.

Armed with old-fashioned disposable cameras, four girls set off to find the end of the world. It sounds like an adventure, but when the young photography club members arrive at the final station of Line 1 of the Seoul Metropolitan Subway, on the southern outskirts of the city, it turns out the railway tracks just keep on going indefinitely – as if coming this far has merely made their world even bigger. Undeterred, inspired by the boundless freedom of the summer holidays, they continue their expedition on foot: laughing in the rain, posing on a deserted country road, lost in conversations about the things they come across and the things that move them. In the end, what remains is a feeling, and a picture – of a long summer's day and night on the outskirts, with friends.

In photos of Paris from the late 1960s, he can be seen in the crowd, not far from Daniel Cohn-Bendit. In Nanterre, he's a philosophy student and activist. He would rather read Foucault than Mao's Little Red Book, which doesn't prevent Jean-Luc Godard from giving him the role of a Mao exegete in La chinoise.

From one perspective, this history of exploitation in Congo is well documented from the colonial era to the present. There are a wealth of images of the copper and cobalt mines that fueled the industrial revolution, of the coltan and niobium mines that fuel the electronic revolution. But even in their efforts to reveal violence, such images often render the engines of exploitation invisible. By recoding archival footage and intertwining it with contemporary images, Kapita exposes patterns of extraction and burial to decode colonial representations—and exploitation—of central African land and people and mines the archival films for what they make invisible: the black-skinned workers evaporated by cameras calibrated to white, the collateral death and destruction interred in infrastructure

Belgrade in 1993. Serbia is at war, people are suffering on account of sanctions and inflation, but everyone is doing what they can. Mother Marijana is holding the family together. Her husband only raises his gaze from the floor when loving moments with his young daughter Minja brighten an endless string of daily chores. It is Minja's eighth birthday. Instead of a cocker spaniel of her own, there's the neighbour's three-legged dog to play with, and the cake has been made with margarine instead of butter. In the living room, she and her classmates leap about dressed up as Ninja Turtles while the adults congregate in the kitchen. An ex-girlfriend rubs her new relationship in her ex's face, there are heated discussions about who is to blame for the collapse of Yugoslavia and they all agree that it doesn't take more than a bit of sperm to become a mother. A boozy evening of unrestrained smoking, flirting and drinking takes its course. An intimate and honest insight into the life of one family in which political identities clash and entangled relationships cause conflicts.

Seven girls live under the same roof but haven't chosen each other, just like a family. Emerging from difficult backgrounds, here in the safe house, the girls find a new community, in a way they'd never experienced before. They are sharing joy and pain, passionately rebel against the shortcomings of their surrounding – the young women's temperaments are different, their lust for life large, their place in society too precarious for things to be all peace, love and harmony. Home director Lora is always there for them when they need her. Or is it the other way around? La Mif was created in close collaboration with the young actresses, who were involved in developing their characters. Each individual fate is a shard and together they form an iridescent kaleidoscope capable of upending hierarchies. The film sensitively reveals the imperfection of the youth protection system, as well as the fragility of social structures and tenderly questions, what it might actually mean to be part of a family.

The spider's web is tailor-made for the fly's eye, says Mr. Emmer in a moment of levity. The strands of the web are spun in such a way that they remain invisible to the compound eye. The fly flies unsuspectingly into disaster. La veduta luminosa is itself something of a web that comes to envelop the viewer – not blindly like the fly, but bewitched by the images, composed of blurred or sharply rendered surfaces, hazy and iridescent. We quickly become aware that the protagonist here is someone whose best days are behind him: the brilliant artist who is unconcerned with the need for social niceties. His name is Mr. Emmer, and his assistant's role is an unenviable one. The two of them are in the car on their way to Tübingen, where a film project awaits. It's about German poet Hölderlin, who succumbed to insanity and kept writing anyway. The obstacles along the way are the Alps, the forest and Mr. Emmer's general state of health.

When Adam's husband surprises him with weekly Spanish lessons, he's unsure about where or how this new element will fit into his well-structured life. However, when an unexpected tragedy turns his life upside down, Adam decides to carry on with the lessons and develops a complicated emotional bond with his Spanish teacher, Cariño. But do you really know someone just because you've experienced a traumatic moment with them?

In an idyllic Philippine fishing village where catches are shared and breathtaking sunsets mark the days, the filmmaker befriends a young boy and captures memories of home during the last days of summer before he must leave for school in the city.

Numerous colonial places, including coastal caves and military bunkers on many Oreums (small volcanoes inside a main volcanic crater) as well as memories of uprisings and massacres are found in every corner of Jeju Island.

Labidi's Paris flat is so small that there is only room for one bed. The young writer, who has only published a short story so far, and his flatmate Alekseï alternate shifts sleeping in the bed and on a camping mat in front of it. In Lyon, where Labidi's Tunisian-born mother runs a café with his father, Labidi meets freckle-faced drama student Elisa and immediately he wants to have it all: true love, total commitment and a grand moving in with each other. But his bank balance is the opposite of grand. His publisher is waiting for his first novel but, what with all the loving and part-time jobs, Labidi just can't seem to make any progress.

In mining, a slag heap refers to an artificially raised hill consisting of the cleared waste that accumulates during the extraction of raw materials. Birch trees now grow where workers from near and far once went underground to labour hard for very little money. Nowadays, this is a place where men meet to have anonymous sex and share moments of intimacy.
"I think he was gay too," says one of these men about his father who was a miner. Today, as in the past, those who cannot find shelter elsewhere live here. Home is far away, returning is impossible. Human beings need more than water and a tent.

Rookie policeman Will Ren and his partner, the veteran cop Cham Lau, are pursuing an obsessive and especially brutal murderer of women. To lure this "hand-fetish" ripper, they use the criminal Wong To, who needs to atone for causing an accident involving Cham's family, as bait. But this young woman is both unpredictable and insubordinate. Surrounded by ever more insane bouts of violence and increasingly in danger of falling victim to the bestial serial killer herself, she fights the traumas of the slums by her own means. The ultra-long showdown really packs a punch: if you don't shudder, you'll scream.

A man lived on the Caribbean island of Curaçao for many years during his working life. After his retirement he wants to spend his last years there. The preparations are going well: he sells his house and all his possessions are put into boxes. But then his health fails him. By the time he leaves, dementia has affected his memory.

One rainy night, Gonçalo sets off to give his lost love one last letter. "Beware of the slippery road!" warns Diana from the street corner. In vain. An accident that is both an end and a beginning.

Tehran in the near future. Pollution and a lethal virus have reduced the city to a dump and forced the population to emigrate or live in quarantine. Peyman is a poet and a junkie who lives with his mother in a neighbourhood that has been placed under round-the-clock surveillance by quarantine officers. Struggling to survive, Peyman divides his days between spending time with his no-less-bewildered teenage daughter, a woman living in the USA whom he has married in order to emigrate, conversations with his two closest friends Ramin and Mozhgan, and an illicit affair with a girl with whom he is hopelessly in love. Rumours of an imminent war are growing and one by one Peyman's friends are departing, leaving him alone and tormented by ghosts. In which world does Peyman live, the real or the fictional? In which of the two will he find redemption?

The months of May, June, and July are represented with peonies, fireflies, and the year 2020. A rollerblader (Jahleel Gardner) traverses Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington D.C.

The plot is simple, even archetypical, that's why it lends itself so well to being repeated. Yono is a sulphur miner living in eastern Java. One day, his wife Oliv leaves him, and he tries to get her back. Another day, his mother falls ill, and he tries to get her well. The plot's outcome is unchanged with every repetition, although the three resultant variants are far from identical, as one of the belief systems that usually inform life in conjunction is brought to the fore each time: animism, Islam and finally capitalism. Oliv is thus to be won back via magic, pilgrimage or Facebook, while the cure for Yono's mother lies in ceremony, prayer or simple vital signs. Greenery gives way to billboards and neon, and cryptocurrency and mobile phones cast new spells, even if each fresh facet teased out of the setting contributes to a portrait of one and the same place. Regardless of what's practised around it, the mountain keeps spewing sulphurous smoke, making outlines indistinct and boundaries blur, like the film itself: a billowing, uncategorisable cloud of anthropology, parable, metaphysics, observation and collaboration, where even the filmmakers themselves briefly come into view.

Maia lives in Montreal with her teenage daughter Alex. On Christmas Eve, Maia receives a box containing the journals, tapes and photos that she had entrusted to her best friend when she left Lebanon. She refuses to open this Pandora's box but Alex, who is stuck at home due to a snowstorm, cannot resist the temptation to secretly go through the box of her mother's memories. In doing so, she unveils a troubled adolescence spent in wartime Beirut

In this portrait that is multi-layered both in terms of form and content, a gay man confronts the ghosts of his past and explores hidden longings, unrequited love and tormenting feelings of guilt. Miguel was born in 1963 to a conservative, Catholic Lebanese father and an authoritarian mother from a wealthy Syrian family. Numerous conflicts over his national, religious and sexual identity compelled him to flee to Spain in his early twenties. In post-Franco Madrid where he lived an openly gay existence, his life resembled one long Almodóvarian orgy, full of excess and sexual taboo-breaking. This was followed first by a collapse and then a new beginning

Danny is pregnant by Max but she doesn't get around to telling him at a party. Meanwhile, Max is busy trying out his girlfriend Avishag's sexual fantasies with her. She wants him to hit her when they have sex. Avishag takes her bruises over to Dror, whose dog she sits. A familiarity develops between the older man and the young woman that neither of them expected.

A children's service at a chapel in the German heartland. Though even the weirdest presentations are met with applause, Ulja's astronomy lecture gets cut off. But the 12-year-old future scientist has just discovered her first asteroid! Unwilling to reconcile divine providence and science, Ulja's Russia German grandmother unceremoniously disposes of her granddaughter's technical equipment. An angry Ulja sets out with schoolmate Henk in the family's hearse for Belarus, where her asteroid is supposed to impact soon. A quirky chase begins, with colourful stops along the way which highlight long-smouldering conflicts and make them appear in a new light. On their winding journey, moralisers are exposed as hypocrites and divided families, friends, lovers and nations are reunited.

When a grave illness strikes down her father Paris, Artemis decides to return home to Greece after an absence of some years. Being the sole child of divorced parents, she is the only one who can look after Paris, who requires daily care. Father and daughter embark on a journey into knowledge and revelation, which heralds a new beginning for their relationship.

During a conversation late at night, a woman asks her mother how to be a good person. As they talk, the woman thinks about an old lover. Seasons change and memories accumulate that bring no respite.

It's essential to generate life, dialogue, understanding, and to celebrate humanity. In times of widespread pandemic, raising questions about the preservation of democracy, the integrity of public health, and our own notions of individuality, we are dragged into a process of change. Mudança is an encounter between the artist Welket Bungué and the Portuguese parliamentary politician Joacine Katar Moreira. Here they question the essence of their crafts, making an unexpected paradigm of imminent revolution resound.

In intimate close-ups the camera captures an idyllic scene that seems to belong to a different era: ripe cherries, black-and-white photographs and a summerhouse full of memories of the seemingly carefree childhoods of several generations. Old aunties talk about the past and Uncle Tudor, too, answers the filmmaker's questions. Little by little, she confronts him with her trauma, for which he is responsible.

Daniel Brühl is not just a versatile actor (having appeared in such diverse roles as Alex Kerner in the festival hit Good Bye, Lenin! or Niki Lauda in the biographical drama Rush); he is also a talented director, as he showed with his debut Next Door. He also played one of the film's main characters, bringing a wonderful sense of self-irony to the role of Daniel – an actor whose life is going great until he enters a small bar and meets the disillusioned Bruno. Bruno decides to take out on Daniel his anger about all the things that bother him, from German reunification to the gentrification of Berlin. An occasionally funny, occasionally chilling comedy founded on carefully written dialogue, Next Door premiered in competition at the 2021 Berlinale.

Nelly has her own special way of seeing things. Where others are spooked, she remains unfazed. Monsters in the basement? One more reason to check the place out! No friends? Nelly will cope. Snooping around in Uncle Hannibal's labyrinthine mansion, Nelly stumbles upon an incredible secret: her family has been keeping the peace between humans, zombies, vampires and other gruesome creatures for decades, as members of an international brigade of monster agents. Nelly wants to hunt monsters too, and proceeds to stir up a fair amount of dust. But what if she has been misled about who is actually responsible for fear and scariness?

Night for Day sets out with a fake mother-son relationship between three real people living in contemporary Lisbon. The 'mother' is Isabel do Carmo, who co-ran the Revolutionary Brigades in Portugal that helped to overthrow the longest fascist dictatorship in Europe, and the 'sons' are two young men, Alexander Bridi and Djelal Osman–astrophysicists running a start-up in Lisbon that attempts to programme computers to recognise moving images. The film collages a subjectivity from fragments of cameras struggling to see at night, of presences out in the cold watching families inside their homes, and images that attempt to describe a loved one in frequencies of three. Their imaginary house is the real family home of the architect António Teixeira Guerra, finished just before 1974, designed in the shape of a triangle and shot at the time he always chose to invite guests–the magic hour

The year is 2043. A military occupation controls disenfranchised cities in post-war North America. Children are property of the State. Niska is a Cree mother desperate to protect her daughter Waseese. But events force mother and daughter to separate, leading Niska to join an underground band of vigilantes to infiltrate a State children's academy and get her daughter back. A female-driven dystopian drama about resilience, courage and love.

Astronaut. Or beer taster. Or maybe forest ranger. Then there's comic book illustrator, of course. Rakel has no lack of ideas when it comes to what she'd like to be one day. However, being pregnant is definitely not on the list. What kind of sneaky ninjababy is this anyway? First it manages to remain incognito for six months till it's way too late to do anything about it, then it makes a massive nuisance of itself, interfering in Rakel's life at every turn. It's like the baby is in her head too, not only her belly! Now she has to figure out who the father is and get him to take responsibility – or if he won't, at least try to maintain distance from the whole thing. Then she has to talk the comic-book foetus out of trying to get adopted by Angelina Jolie.

Joaquim is at the end of his working life. According to a deal made with his employer, he will be able to retire after a brief period of unemployment. But first he has to submit a few token job applications to prove that he has tried to find work. His tour takes him to industrial areas in the Portuguese countryside where factories stand idle. There is little work, but everyone needs some sort of employment, provided by government programmes if necessary. It is from here that Joaquim set out in the 70s to try his luck in New York, where he worked as a chauffeur and cab driver and saw the world. New York as a rear projection and autobiographical reference point forms an important theme in the film, which plays beautifully with the boundary between reality and fiction.

Three years after the unexplained death of his niece Kalla, artist and filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his Mormon family's home in the small town in Michigan where his father's sawmill is located. His sister Jesse, who had found temporary stability as a mother after a difficult youth and addiction problems, is suspected by the authorities of being responsible, along with her partner David, for the death of their daughter Kalla. While Jesse struggles with her trauma and depression, her mother gradually opens up to the camera. Everything is brought out into the open during emotional discourses including, time and again, the filmmaker's transition which has been the cause of much upheaval in the family.

Just like François Maspero at the end of the 1980s, Alice Diop takes us on a journey across the Parisian region to meet its inhabitants. Humble and attentive, the director takes a fresh look at a multicultural territory marked by History, far removed from the usual media caricatures.

Strict rules prevail at a remote boarding school in the mountains of Anatolia where Turkish teachers educate gifted Kurdish pupils from the surrounding area. Once a week, the boys are allowed to shower and, like everything else here, this process is monitored. One night, twelve-year-old Memo asks his friend Yusuf if he can sleep in his bed. But, afraid of gossip, Yusuf refuses. The next morning, Memo is sick and cannot attend class. The school's heating has broken down and an icy winter's day takes its course. Memo's condition worsens. He is no longer responsive and Yusuf is only allowed to talk when prompted. Gradually, the events of the previous night are revealed.

The camera wanders through two stately homes , both of which are now open to the public as museums.

One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Made up of micro- events from "satisfying video" that swarm on the internet, the abstract narrative unfolds through an appropriation way by referring to trance and minimal music. It's about a desire for groundless waves, blended with today's inexorable entropy of our information societies.

Gilda loves cooking, men and life. She is a free woman who knows exactly what she wants and how to satisfy her hunger for love, noisy passion and boisterous celebrations. But in her neighbourhood on the edge of a favela in Rio de Janeiro, reactionary Christians are rapidly gaining the upper hand, and her unbridled way of life, self-confidence and independence do not go down well with everyone. At first, the graffiti on the façade of her small house barely bothers optimistic Gilda, but her little world between chickens and pigs is becoming ever more constricted.

This is a tribute to an artist whose songs told the story of Italy at a time of rapid social and cultural change. Thanks to the testimony of the singer's manager and friend Tobia Righi, and an effective and original use of archive material, Pietro Marcello retraces the life of Lucio Dalla, making him a spotlight through which Marcello sheds light on a country that rose from the ruins of the Second World War to sever its roots with peasant culture and move towards a future of factories, consumerism and mass car production. Not handsome or dashing like the other singers of his generation, Lucio Dalla embodied a different role model that was closer to ordinary people. For here was an artist capable of transposing the poetry of Roversi, who provided the lyrics for some of Dalla's most beautiful songs, into a musical arrangement that spoke to everyone.

Eight-year-old Nelly has just lost her beloved grandmother and is helping her parents clean out her mother's childhood home. She explores the house and the surrounding woods where her mum, Marion, used to play and where she built the treehouse Nelly has heard so much about. One day her mother suddenly leaves. That is when Nelly meets a girl of her own age in the woods, building a treehouse. Her name is Marion.

Larry Krasner is elected Philadelphia District Attorney in 2018. A powerful and progressive prosecutor, a leading civil rights advocate, he fights a relentless battle to reform a discriminating and violent system. A gripping politico-legal thriller in eight episodes, revealing the divides in a country that is tearing itself apart.

Inspired by the diary of a migrant worker, the documentary weaves several social and artistic threads together: the life a Thai migrant sex worker named Ploy who works in Singapore's "jungle brothel"; the narratives of other migrant workers; an exploration of Singaporean forests and public parks; and the process through which the artist-filmmaker delves into and revisits Ploy's experience. Ploy is a character as well as a collage of several visual forms, including painting, photography, photo-roman (photo-novel), 35mm slide projection, letters, and a herbarium. The film reconstructs the journey of Ploy through an array of visual media

At the beginning, an objet trouvé: a video camera bought by the director at an online auction site during an extended visit to the south of France to see his girlfriend at the end of 2019. His voiceover explains that he found some footage still stored on the camera and wants to use it to make something for cinema. To do this, he has to obtain permission from the camera's previous owner, an older man named Charles.

A chance encounter at the gates of a school in Kutaisi in Georgia. Lisa and Giorgi bump into each other and a book falls to the ground. Clearly dazed, they arrange a date without even having told each other their names. It is love at first sight and, as if enchanted, things begin to come to life: the surveillance camera becomes an evil eye, the drainpipe an oracle, they close their eyes and – ding! The lovers are cursed, condemned to wake up the next day looking completely different. But it is precisely this supernatural obstacle to them meeting again which becomes their ticket to a world ruled entirely by the magic of the everyday – in all its simple beauty, tender comedy and an enthusiasm for football that infects young and old alike, even the phlegmatic street dog Vardy.

How do you stage a miracle healing? Protagonists are cast and different variations are tried out, improved and discarded. Boundaries dissolve between church and theatre, faith and credibility.

Seven hypnotic and erratic fugue-like miniatures. Seemingly harmless at the beginning, they become increasingly intense until they culminate in a psychological kaleidoscope. Grandfather is silent – is he still alive? A man talks to a wardrobe – why? Absent people creep ghost-like into the lives and conversations of couples and families. They are the lost, the repressed and the missing. Young men shock their mothers – one with love, the other with contempt (as well as a sober presentation of the theory that God is a kind of Gandalf). Finally, there is a charlatan who drives naïve sick people to their deaths. It is hard to say who is the victim here and who is to blame. If people are spheres, can they ever meet?

From the earliest voyagers who navigated by starlight to the discovery of habitable planets by astronomers, Rock Bottom Riser examines the all-encompassing encounters of an island world at sea. As lava continues to flow from the earth's core on the island of Hawaii—posing an imminent danger—a crisis mounts. Astronomers plan to build the world's largest telescope on Hawaii's most sacred and revered mountain, Mauna Kea. Based on ancient Polynesian navigation, the arrival of Christian missionaries, and the observatory's ability to capture the origins of the universe, Rock Bottom Riser surveys the influence of settler colonialism, the search for intelligent life, and the discovery of new worlds as we peer into our own planet's existence.

During his childhood and adolescence Sharief Zhairy used to travel four times each year, with his father in his car, between Alexandria, where he was studying, and Al-Zarqa, his birthplace. It was a three-hour trip along the agricultural road system that links distant parts of lower Egypt. After a year of the political instability that happened in Egypt, Zohairy got encouraged in 2012 to rediscover the old journey using a Handycam to document the emotional experience of a traveler inside the Nile Delta. The result of his eight-year-long cinematic journey is a mix of road movie and travelogue, contemplating the diversity of thirty-two cities and villages of the Nile Delta and documenting the contemporary daily activities in this ecologically endangered area.

It's hot and the holidays are coming to an end. Arthur, Yuna, Lucie and Jurijn are restlessly circling each other, desperately trying to connect. A film about the drama that is puberty, as unpredictable as the emotional roller coaster of these adolescents.

We don't see the woman on the train moving through Sichuan, just the trees, rivers, lakes and houses passing by the window, vanishing behind the blur of vegetation, segmented by the tunnels. Perhaps she's one of the two women we later observe in Leshan, by the river, at the hairdresser, buying clothes, sleeping on the window sill, although the restricted framings mean the city is more heard than seen. Of the women we hear in voiceover, one is an actress, she talks about the play she's working on, an abstract, fluid staging of Brecht's "The Good Person of Szechwan" being put on by a female director that's also set in Leshan. What's fluidity anyway? If it weren't for the intertitle saying this isn't an adaptation, the actress could be talking about this film too, it shares those qualities as well as others from the play. The shifts here aren't from woman to man, but between modes, formats and registers, like thoughts that scatter on waking, from stasis to movement, high definition to grain, words to wordlessness, noise to silence, fiction to documentary; the camera is reflected in the window of the train. Any resemblance to the imagined or the dreamed is entirely coincidental.

One morning shortly before Christmas on the outskirts of Stockholm, mother of two Jenni discovers that both her five-week-old baby and her partner have disappeared. But although the latter reappears in the course of the day, there is still no trace of little Lucas. Resolute policewoman Alice takes up the case. Meanwhile, not far away, lonely Maria picks up her brother from his care facility and takes him home with her for the holidays.

Four short 16mm films: Each Song is accompanied by an image track consisting of black film pierced with a sewing machine. The Songs are without titles or credits, at best interventions. They are satellites of the installation The Song of the Shirt (2020). Its film crew forms a choir and sings the short pieces, accompanied by music experiments from the project ZONKEY (Melitopoulos / Schroedinger). As a choir that doesn't gain visibility and as a film whose surface is pierced, the Songs appear as intervention, as disruption or interruption, like Luddites of film.

How many identities can we have in the eyes of a chance acquaintance on a public bus, in our protected circle of best friends or in the pictures we post on social media? Souad, a 19-year-old Egyptian, is on the cusp of adulthood. In her everyday life, her desire to explore new kinds of freedom clashes with the expectations of society, her family and religious community which she has internalised. On the one hand, she creates a secret cosmopolitan alter ego on her smartphone and seeks romantic connections online. On the other, she is a diligent student, obedient daughter and big sister. But when Souad's notions of a self-determined life shatter, the busy noise of her contradictory realities dissipates, clearing the way to reveal an encounter between two people who have nothing in common but their relationship with Souad. Perhaps it is only now, in this encounter, that Souad becomes tangible.

The fireside get-together is in full swing when news arrives: Renée has returned. She moves back to the rural family home which her brother Modeste now shares with his wife Elenore. The two of them have been bringing up Renée's young daughter Athene as if she were their own. Athene tries to grasp the new situation, even as her mother's feet are already starting to itch. Renée owns an empty lot in Sainte Anne, Manitoba, the one on the photo she shows to Athene, where a house is waiting to be built. But this is hardly the whole story, if you can even talk of a story for much of the time, it's more a set of impressions, fragments, of the Treaty 1 territory, of daily life in the Métis Nation, to which Renée's family belong, as do the director's family who play them, she herself in the role of Renée. A dog in the snow, giggling nuns, hands on laden tables, shadows against corrugated plastic, the sound of the train and the image of the empty lot, again and again: in the flickering celluloid, colours fluctuate, motion slackens, hopes and dreams bleed into reality and past and present merge. Unlike what Athene says at the beginning, you needn't be scared of the places your visions find.

It's Masha, Yana and Senia's last but one year of high school. Among the thriving pot plants in the classroom and to the sound effects of a Biology lesson about physical signs of stress, the young protagonists grapple with themselves and with one another. 16-year-old Masha is the quiet center of Kateryna Gornostai's feature debut. Steering clear of both simplified narratives and overly simplistic psychology, the film depicts her as introverted, sensitive and in love with Sasha, another classmate whose aloofness and passivity she finds a perpetual challenge. When Masha is dancing alone in her room at night, high above the rooftops of a city somewhere in the Ukraine, nothing about it feels staged. Rather, it is an invocation of the moment, of genuine emotion – and of pain.

A photo album bound in red leather. It contains black-and-white aerial photographs, taken at a time when colonial powers ruled and dictated the way things should be interpreted. How can the signs of that time be read today? An exploration of imperial image production and destruction.

A slow piano melody echoes through Sarajevo's prefabricated buildings. Faruk, who lives with his grandmother, battles on like many of his peers in an attempt to escape poverty by doing shady deals. One day in a department store he meets Mona, who comes from a completely different Sarajevo: from the modern, hermetically sealed villas on the outskirts. Boy meets girl. Tabija oscillates between thriller and fairy tale. In multi-layered images, the film tells of the romantic dreams of young people and simultaneously documents tangibly the atmosphere of post-war Sarajevo. At the moment when Mona and Faruk look down from the white fortress on the city into the golden valley, on a world in which their connection is not intended, there is also a declaration of love for Sarajevo.

A powerful man, who is also the former prime minister of Georgia, has developed an exquisite hobby. He collects century old trees along Georgia's coastline. He commissions his men to uproot them and bring them to his private garden. Some of these trees are as tall as 15-floor-buildings.

"Yesterday was quite good, the only disruptive sounds were nine evil jets." Ted K lives a life of almost complete seclusion in a simple wooden cabin without electricity or running water in the mountains of Montana. But then this former university professor, who despises modern life and society's faith in technology, becomes radicalised. What begins with local acts of sabotage, ends with deadly bomb attacks. Ted K is the Unabomber.

1943, World War II. A long winter is about to begin in the endless territories of the occupied Soviet Union. István Semetka is part of a special Hungarian unit tasked with travelling from village to village looking for partisan groups. While heading towards a remote village one day, the company falls under enemy fire and their commander is killed. As the highest ranking officer, Semetka must take over. Wading through a vast swamp, he guides the survivors back to an occupied village where they reconvene with their division.

Hollywood is collapsing. Ghastly murders haunt the night. Frenetic conflicts mark the days. A storm is breaking over talent agencies looking for new investors and ideas. As the battle rages on, Jordan Hines, an agent who is about to marry, receives an anonymous letter inviting him to a mysterious sexual rendezvous. Jordan's world of lies and sinister streams of digital data begins to fall apart. Who has sent him this letter? And who will be waiting for him behind the closed door? His life is at a crossroads: die of fear, or die of desire.

We had been preparing for this moment since we were young boys. The other men in the water beside me had now started to scream in anticipation. I started to feel the shifting sand beneath my feet and, egged on by the voices behind us, we started to wade further into the deep, shoulder first, to break that impending wall of water. Startled by an excited howl I had looked over my shoulder and found the remains of a skeleton, that by now had had the flesh entirely washed off its bones, bracing itself for its last clash with the waves. I felt the pull of currents swirl and grab on to my ankles as I listened to the rising growl of what was lurking ahead. The men beside me had disappeared and as I stood alone looking up at the shadow swallowing me, I could swear I felt sweat run down my leg beneath the waters. Darkness.

What is the meaning of military occupation? Through the testimonies of the soldiers who implemented it, director Avi Mograbi provides insights on how a colonialist occupation works and the logic at work behind those practices. Using the 54-year Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip the director draws us a "Manual for Military Occupation".

After nearly a decade exploring different facets of the African diaspora — and his own place within it — Ephraim Asili makes his feature-length debut with The Inheritance, an astonishing ensemble work set almost entirely within a West Philadelphia house where a community of young, Black artists and activists form a collective. A scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus — based partly on Asili's own experiences in a Black liberationist group — weaves with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. Ceaselessly finding commonalties between politics, humor, and philosophy, with Black authors and radicals at its edges, The Inheritance is a remarkable film about the world as we know it.

Mauritanian citizen Mohamedou Ould Slahi is captured by the US Government in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Suspected of having been involved in aiding or even recruiting the hijackers who steered the planes into the World Trade Center, he spends years at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp without being charged or put on trial. Braving contempt and insult, defence attorney Nancy Hollander takes up Slahi's case and prepares to face the prosecutor dispatched by the military. Acting giants Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch lend their charisma to these representatives of justice who, although on opposite sides, ultimately unite in valuing moral decency. With his uncanny ability to hide his characters' intentions, Tahar Rahim is perfectly cast to portray a man who may as easily be unfairly accused as he may be faking innocence. Slahi had confessed to the crimes of which he was accused. But he did so under torture.

In this feature debut by actor and podcast host Dasha Nekrasova, two mismatched roommates discover and relive the murky secrets of their new Upper East Side apartment. The film is as possessed as one of its protagonists: while she finds herself being taken over by the spirits of paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's young victims, the film itself is haunted by Italian "giallo" movies and 1970s psychological horror. Both genres are reincarnated in a work that is well aware of its lineage and sets about challenging and demolishing each and every power and gender relationship. Consistently irreverent in tone, and reaching its peak during a memorable, psychedelic nocturnal trek to Epstein's New York residence, The Scary of Sixty-First exacts ruthless, mocking revenge on the perpetrator, while also taking us on a brilliant romp back through the history of film and the media. Cheekily reviving the tools, style, grain and excesses of cinematic works the director clearly knows and loves, her film puts on full view the imagery generated by one of the most renowned and revolting criminal cases of our time, one which was fed by internet culture, conspiracy theories, cults of personality and capital.

Greek epic poems and first- person journals clash together in Damien Odoul's most recent film. Théo/To, a young man with Down's Syndrome–and a martial arts student–has grown isolated from the world, with his father, in a sophisticated house in the middle of the forest. Once he violently gets rid of his strict custodian, he begins a journey of self-discovery. The plot is divided in tableaux-like chapters and the delirious encounters
that define each of them (a serpent, a ninja, an empress, and a stranger) denote To's late sexual awaking and transform his individual odyssey into a mental journey into the depths of his psyche. In an ironic and naturalistic way, Théo et les métamorphoses approaches the epic tale in order to dissect the complex experience of the world from its protagonist standpoint.

Some time after Earth has been hit by a global catastrophe, the Kepler space colony organises a mission to examine the planet's living conditions. After a difficult landing, a young astronaut ends up alone in a desolate environment. The Earth is now fully submerged, and the tides leave nowhere for survivors to breathe. In the rare moments when the waters recede, small communities scavenge for food. Life is impossible, and merciless violence rules everywhere. As she struggles to survive, the young astronaut comes across a terrible secret and must make a decision that will prove fateful for the planet.

From her early career as the queen of R&B to her record-breaking sell-out arena tours of the 1980s, Tina Turner draws back the curtain to invite us into her private world in a way she has never done before. Revealing her innermost struggles, and sharing some of her most personal moments, Tina is the defining and inspirational record of one of the greatest survivors in modern music.

There is a delicateness and fragility to her, as if she were made of glass. Now, at age six, Ema has to start school – yet most schools are unwilling to accept a pupil diagnosed on the autism spectrum. The only ones prepared to teach her are the staff of a small rural school on the Paraná River. For Ema's family, this means leaving the city behind to start a new life in the country. Being close to nature and spending time with a mare called Estrellita help Ema take some small but important steps. Thanks to the unprejudiced local community and above all the gentle friendship of her classmate Irena, she becomes increasingly able to participate in the world around her, in her very own way. Based on the director's own family history, Betania Cappato's film astutely and tenderly chronicles its young protagonist's inner journey.

What does it take to be a cop in Mexico City? Two professional actors undergo an immersive process to explore this question, gaining a visceral understanding of the responses as they guide us on their journey "inside". The police force, that most controversial of institutions in Mexico, occupies a particular place in society, being both central and an adjunct to the system. This topic has unquestionably held an enduring fascination for the film industry. There is a constant fear and uncertainty associated with having a father, a brother or a daughter in the police force. But there is also the pride or envy inspired by the uniform, as well as courage and a sense of duty. Simultaneously referring to and displacing these familiar representations, Alonso Ruizpalacios boldly integrates the role-playing aspect of the police officer and reclaims the "cop movie" genre, turning it into an audacious experiment at the blurry boundary between fiction and reality. Taken from a police poetry competition, the opening quote playfully invites us to witness this worthwhile exercise in self-awareness.

Vadim gathers his courage and leaves his narrow, familiar square to face all the unknown that the world has to offer. In broad strokes and garish colours, he needs to process all the beauty and all the cruelty he encounters.

According to the encyclopaedia, a "window" – "ventana" in Spanish – refers to the opening in a building designed to admit light as well as to seal it from wind and weather. The stained glass windows of childhood captured in a faded photograph, a light breeze brushing against the skin, a couple at a kitchen table, backlit. Rather like the comforting sensation of nostalgia for a time yet to come.

The slums of Ho Chi Minh City are bleak, unwelcoming spaces that don't let in much sunlight. A Nigerian man goes about his day, apparently familiar with his environment. Has he lived here for long? He and the young son he left back home seem to be used to the meagre interaction that video calls allow. When his contract with a football team is terminated, he moves in with four middle-aged Vietnamese women. Together they revert to a primal state: cleaning, cooking, eating and sleeping together, and having sex.

What do an astronaut, a deep-sea scientist, an economist, a philosopher, a post-humanist and a Buddhist monk have in common? More than you might think. From their different professional and human perspectives, they try to understand the increasingly complex challenges to our planet due to climate change. And no matter if they are at the top of the world, at the bottom of the sea, inside the human brain, at a G-20 summit or in the heart of the International Space Station, they are all looking for constructive ways to save our planet. But is human dominance on Earth perhaps only a small ripple in the ocean of time? Marc Bauder's magnificent, cinematic vision is inspired by the popular German intellectual Roger Willemsen's posthumous essay 'Who We Were'.

A young Nigerian leaves his village at the end of the 1960s and goes to Denmark to study. There he meets his future wife. Together they move to Nigeria and start a family. But 16 years later, circumstances in a politically tense and unstable Nigeria force the family to go back. It may be better for the children to grow up and go to school in Denmark but the husband has reservations. He cannot imagine moving there permanently. Shortly before the family is about to leave Nigeria, he decides to stay. He starts a second family in Nigeria, but hides this from his Danish wife for fear of hurting her. His secret is only uncovered after thirty years of their long-distance marriage.

Anke is disappointed. After her last day of work in a parish office in the Black Forest, she was looking forward to a summer holiday together with her children on the Baltic coast, a place where they lived as a young family and where Anke spent her best years. But her son Max, who lives in Hong Kong, cancels at short notice because the pro-democracy protests in the city have brought life there to a standstill. In the emptiness of her retirement, alone between four walls, Anke decides to fly to Hong Kong to see her son. While Max is away on a business trip, she takes up residence in his flat and cautiously begins to navigate this mysterious new world. Conversations with strangers gradually allow Anke to get her bearings. She meets a young woman who is sad because she has to leave Hong Kong, accompanies the concierge of Max's apartment block to lunch and to Tai Chi, and also meets a psychiatrist, a fortune teller and a social activist. These encounters and her experience of the city help her to break down the inner walls she constructed years ago and make way for a new chapter in her life.

A family on a rare visit to their grandfather. They cook lunch, set the table and sit down to eat together. "Come and show me your film," he asks his grandson who will soon be going to study in faraway Russia. "And pour me some more of that liquor." While one of them dozes off and the other leafs through an old photo album, the day goes by. The sadness of parting is in the air. Then it's time for them to leave again. In Day Is Done, Zhang Dalei picks up where his autobiographically inspired feature-length debut Summer Is Gone left off. Set once again in the director's home town, Hohhot, the film also features the same cast – now a few years older – portraying the same roles and characters.

For Yuko, it's all about the truth. A documentary filmmaker, she helps out as a teacher at her father's private tuition school in her spare time. She's determined not to let the TV station's editorial staff censor her new project. Her film is going to tell the true story behind the public scandal of a relationship between a student and her teacher that ended in two suicides. But when Yuko learns that her father has also had an affair with a student, the filmmaker tries to do the right thing and has to rethink her own principles.

Gerson Liebl, grandson of a German colonial officer from Togo, has been fighting to get German citizenship and residency permission for the last 30 years. As a last-ditch effort he resorts to a hunger strike. Images of his unwavering persistence in front of the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin are accompanied on the soundtrack by statements, testimonies, clauses from laws, legal texts, political positions, and prevarications—then and now

A campsite in the summer holidays, aimless days spent in the shade of trees. Sunlight is glittering on the lake, but nobody is allowed to swim here. A boy has disappeared and may have drowned. Lucie is trying to understand what is going on around her. How long can you hold your breath?