In a fantastic sphere somewhere between animation, live-action film and performance, a tale of Hun Tun, King of Chaos, unfolds. Hun Tun cheers you on, Hun Tun drives you forward, Hun Tun keeps you awake. He gives you strength for countless hours of overtime and endless leisure activities. But in return, Hun Tun robs you of your sleep and transforms you.
Fragments of everyday life – cups, bottle caps, pill packages – speak of sleepless nights and complete exhaustion, of wanting to sleep and being unable to. Superimpositions of elegantly animated, delicate sand elements introduce rhythm and texture. Danced narrative moments in expressive costumes bring lightness and at the same time convey intense moods, with a precise overarching sound design weaving the various levels into a gripping reflection on a very personal conflict.

Beer is out in Prague … well, actually only at a food stall away from the touristy Old Town. But that doesn’t make the death rattle of the spigot less dramatic for Hurikán, a regular who spends his days and much of his nights at these haunts of lost souls. With a crush on the stall manager, Hurikán takes matters into his own hands. Things get rolling, just like the empty barrel he wants to have filled. An epic parkour begins, starting with small mocking gestures and rapidly expanding into a breakneck chase through the drowsy but steep side streets of Prague’s Žižkov neighbourhood.
With brilliant timing and tongue-in-cheek humour, Jan Saska weaves typical genre elements from comics and action movies together, all revolving around a guy whose life is not easy. This time he needs luck if he does not want to die of thirst.

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times. As a Palestinian gynaecologist practising in an Israeli hospital he was able to pass the strictly guarded checkpoints to Gaza without a hitch. His humanist perspective is expressed in words like these: “Do we need to be sick in order to understand that we are equal?” When the Israeli army attacked Abuelaish’s home in Gaza in January 2009 and three of his daughters died, he picked up the phone. On the other end of the line was Shlomi Eldar, a Channel 10 reporter who decided to broadcast his friend’s despair live to the Israeli audience. A historic television moment; the shelling of Gaza was terminated soon afterwards.
Director Tal Barda has given her portrait the same title as Izzeldin Abuelaish’s book, which was published in 2011. More than ten years after the publication of this memoir, the doctor as well as his now grown-up children speak out in her film, talk about traumas, their new beginning in Toronto and the struggle to obtain an official apology from Israel. “I Shall Not Hate” addresses the complicated ties between the fates of Palestine and Israel. Izzeldin Abuelaish’s conviction that peaceful coexistence is the only chance of survival remains unbroken.

There is a house hanging from heavy ropes, firmly anchored to the rocks. Up there in the cliffs, far above the town below, a father lives with his son in the cold. In his 2D frame-by-frame animation, director João Gonzalez uses few colours, which makes the harsh shadows and extreme camera angles of his drawings all the more atmospheric. He has realised a metaphorical tale that can do without dialogue, relying on sound and images alone.

A piece of land awaits Déni Oumar Pitsaev in the Pankisi Gorge, a Chechen enclave in the Georgian part of the Caucasus. His mother bought it for him, hoping to bring her son, who was socialised in Western Europe, back to his Chechen roots. When he arrives, he realises that the gift comes with strings attached: Relatives and friends from the neighbourhood constantly ask when the 40-year-old Déni with his receding hair intends to start a family. When he counters with his own vision – building a treehouse for adults ten metres from the ground, a childhood dream – he triggers complex debates about the relationship between the individual and society and what historical conditions it is subject to: The region is deeply scarred by the effects of the Chechen War, the wounds extending even to his estranged relationship with his father. In all this, Pitsaev’s manner of confrontation is always extremely delicate, never turning into an attack. With expert curiosity, he approaches a world that is both completely alien and home to him.

Click, click, she virtually recreates a cluttered, narrow kitchen on her computer. Lady Di smiles with creased photo edges from the refrigerator, a half-opened chocolate bar lies on the table. The technical-looking, detailed digital reconstruction runs like a fingertip along remembered images, tracing their nicks. The images feed off a blurred video in which the grandparents and their kitchen-cum-living-room live on – a nostalgic place in the distant Ukraine of childhood.

Running. Rapid breathing. A shot in the silence. The opening strikes the keynotes: caution, curiosity, thrills. A documentary film team spend 963 hours on the adventure playground of the video game DayZ. Online gamers explore the territory of a post-Soviet disaster province, permanently exposing themselves to the risk of being killed by hostile gamers. Despite their “press” badges, Guilhem, Ekiem and Quentin, as avatars, are subject to the same rules when they interview the gamers in their virtual world. The community is heterogenous: marauding gangs, cowboys with Samaritan ethics, curious wanderers.

Reality is never far away. The gamer “Feesh” is torn from her console during the interview because her IRL (in real life) child is crying. In the course of their conversation, “Iris” shoots her “toy”, a prisoner, before the eyes of the shocked documentary team – a conflict of documentary work opens up. “Knit’s Island” is a disturbing, melancholy to heartwarming tour of chance meetings and friendships of sleepless persons in the artificial world. Some avatars constantly twitch nervously and grotesquely because they act out darkest desires. Others “trick the game” and enter fascinating techno-psychedelic spheres. Game-playing and role-playing persona – sometimes they are one, sometimes two.

Quietly and discreetly, the French director Sarah Mallégol follows a group of thirty-something protagonists who survived the 1994 Rwanda genocide as children. They have no memory of the events – neither those whose fathers were murdered nor those whose parents were responsible. A confrontation begins: focused conversations between generations which, captured by a gentle camera, are meant to cautiously break the long silence – in order to be able to understand, process and mourn.

Sarah Mallégol herself grew up in Rwanda, before the genocide. She has no memories of her childhood either. But there are home movies shot on Super 8 that show carefree days in a still peaceful countryside – and her nanny from back then, Christine. She died in 1994, which is all the director knows. Her motivation for this filmic search is thus personal. But after the short introduction, she gives all the space to those who live in Rwanda today with the trauma that has spread over the country like a shroud. Grief is at the forefront and the film work contributes to a much-needed coming to terms – accompanied by chants and landscape shots added to the memories of the survivors that bear a different form of witness.

Many people probably know Chris Marker’s story of a time trip from a dystopian future back to the present, in which the hero experiences a traumatic event again, only through Terry Gilliam’s extroverted remake “12 Monkeys”. The original, Marker’s experimental science fiction classic “La Jetée”, however, was groundbreaking rather because of its minimalist narrative form: The 28-minute black and white photo novel with a single moving shot has made film history.
Dominique Cabrera now takes a very personal approach to putting the influential work in a historical context: The year of its creation, 1962, was also the year when Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule and hundreds of thousands of French people with roots in Algeria, the so-called Pieds-noirs, left their homeland to enter exile via Orly airport. In France, a new, uncertain existence awaited them – including Cabrera’s family. Six decades later, her cousin, who happened to be present on the pier of Paris-Orly when Marker took photos for his film, is convinced that he recognises himself in the fifth shot of “La Jetée”. This is the prelude to one of the most thrilling and at the same time loving time trips one can imagine – and the beginning of a detective and cinephile research with ever more astonishing twists.

Breasts lifted, bottom tight, feathers smoothed. She is ready for her date. But her daughter clings and refuses to let her go to this as yet incomprehensible, repulsive ritual of desire. Very soon the fully-fledged adolescent will indulge in sexual lust herself … and experience disappointments. In the conflicted world of the two women, men evade partnership and fatherhood. The faithful bitch offers the only support.

As in her previous film, Carla Melo Gampert transfers her impressive but uncompromising analysis of family relationships to the lives of wading birds. Human traits show through in the anatomy, but the bird’s bodies including their feathers and sounds lend themselves perfectly to the apt exaggeration of emotions. Delicate strokes turn into cuttingly sharp movement lines of the animal characters, both in their erotically crude acts of love and their “hands-on” disputes. Soft splashes of watercolour glow incandescently in the heat of lust and warningly in the hopeless fury.

With childlike ease, entertaining and touching, this colourful animation shows the transition of a woman who was born in the “wrong body”. With her family’s support and understanding, Ivan becomes Lada – a happy, content person. Based on a true individual story, this film is also a parable on the ingenuity of the transgender community who sometimes have to take unusual paths to establish a life worth living in an ignorant environment.

A group of old men in an abandoned asbestos mining town on the edge of the Kalahari Desert resist evacuation. They have no place to go because they were once notorious as soldiers of the infamous South African Battalion 32, also known as “The Terrible Ones”. Both perpetrators and victims of history, they become actors in the biblical story of Judas Iscariot in Boris Gerrets’ equally disturbing and fascinating cinematic legacy.

The spectacle under a blazing sun confronts the men, who live in abject poverty, with their unresolved past. Many of them had been forcibly recruited by the FNLA and UNITA resistance movements in the Angolan War of Independence against Portugal. After the communist MPLA took power, they found themselves as mercenaries fighting alongside white South Africans against their own people and finally defending the Apartheid regime in the colonial struggle in Namibia and the South African townships. On the fringes of the surreal film location between the decaying buildings of the old mining town, they speak for the first time about their life stories, talk about betrayal, guilt and remorse. Having been steamrolled by global politics, turned into undesirables, exiles, forgotten, suppressed and broken men, they finally become visible again as human beings in front of the camera.

For Namir, the realisation that his beloved mother is not immortal is painful. He had actually intended to make a film with Siham. Now he is mourning in the church with his father Waguih and his children, who seem too young to understand death – and allowing himself to be filmed. “As always, I’m counting on cinema to help me.” He is convinced that cinema can turn tragedy into comedy – and preserve memories that would otherwise fade away.
Namir Abdel Messeeh has already worked through his family’s biography between Egypt and France, their Christian faith and love of cinema in “The Virgin, the Copts and Me” (2011). But it was Siham’s wish that her son finally realise a film with acting stars rather than his own relatives. Instead, Namir Abdel Messeeh recounts his mother’s love, her longing, and her mysteries using the power of cinema. A montage of home videos, family memories and Egyptian film classics by Youssef Chahine makes Siham appear almost “larger than life”.

Two men by themselves: Zdravko, a war veteran with a hearing impairment who lives as a fisherman in the wilderness, and Stefan, a director with Bosnian roots who has forgotten his mother tongue. The unlikely friendship develops against a both sparse and mysterious background. For while Stefan superimposes his thoughts in text form on the shots, Zdravko sends sounds into the depth with a wooden stick. They are meant to attract catfish that make their rounds in a lake. In the process, the two men summon each other, so to speak, bring to light what was buried, fraternize, overcome inner barriers.

Louis, eight years old, has autism and is starting at a new school. He steps in front of the class to introduce himself and his peculiarities, which can occasionally lead to misunderstandings. And anyway, sometimes things are really complicated in Louis’ mind. But it seems that his new class doesn’t have a problem with this at all.

“Imagine this camera is your mother”, a father tells his daughter. In the 1990s, scores of families from the Republic of Moldova began a ritualised mail exchange between the mothers, who had emigrated for economic reasons, and their relatives back home. The former sent money and goods; the latter sent videotapes. These amateur recordings are the material of this film. They testify to the painful gaps the absent persons left in the lives of those who stayed behind.

Migration is a big factor in post-socialist states buffeted by recession and inflation after the end of the Soviet Union – and in this case, also by the civil war over Transnistria. According to data from 2011/2012, about a third of Moldovan children had one parent abroad. In this small country between Romania and the Ukraine, too, a higher percentage of fathers choose work migration. Otilia Babara, however, is specifically interested in the consequences of long absent mothers, who work for nursing services in Italy, for example, to earn their family’s livelihood, and who express their love through care packages. The loss of connection to their mother – all of whom stay out of the frame –, which affects girls in particular, emerges in the cracks of the staged home videos, when wandering glances reveal that the children no longer believe in their return.