Kyustendil, a city in the Bulgarian mountains, was hit hard by Covid. The local hospital is probably a reasonably representative microcosm of how the medical staff dealt with the worst consequences of the pandemic. Ten years after his debut “Sofia’s Last Ambulance” (DOK Leipzig 2012), Ilian Metev returns with another film about a national health system that opposes the virus with gallows humour and individual commitment.

Metev himself was stuck in London during the shooting, monitoring from afar as co-director Teneva and her colleague Chertov collected the material and edited it alone. The focus is on the hospital staff. And if there is one main protagonist among the countless members of the cast, it’s Dr. Popov. Warm-hearted and always ready with a quip, we even often see him without a mask – the other employees are usually hidden behind protective gear. They all share a tough sense of humour to get them through the days and nights. The logistical challenges of such a film project also crop up: The people with the cameras are frequently mentioned and addressed. In this emergency community of patients, doctors and film crew they seem to be always ready to joke. But death, up in the intensive care unit, is very close.

A collage in black and white, positive and negative, with dancing lyrics, skipping thoughts and ambling sounds. Inspired by the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, this experimental homage celebrates three poets and their passion for sound recording devices: Thomas Pynchon (thought recorder), William S. Burroughs (tape recorder) and Rainer Maria Rilke (phonograph).

Liem belongs to the ethnic minority of the Sedang and lives in a remote region of Vietnam. The observing camera succinctly sketches a daily routine that’s marked more by surviving than by living. With his friends, he prepares for an expedition into the jungle, where the young men want to take time out, continue the tradition of their ancestors, become hunters and gatherers. The more twisting their paths, the deeper the film seems to enter into a different sphere.

We get to know Liem doing everyday activities. Carrying the baby in a sling, he cooks, hangs out the laundry, goes to the field. The giant loudspeakers fixed to the streetlights fill his village with official news and advertising. In his stilt house, Liem prefers to listen to Vietnamese pop music. Soon we feel the rhythm, the unique beat of this life. When Liem and his friends set out in rubber sandals and carrying backpacks, the camera follows close behind, takes their perspective. Shot on Super 16, the film captures the green tones of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, the images develop a mesmerizing depth. The rustling of leaves, the buzzing of insects, birdsong and permanent rain come together in a melodious soundscape. Suddenly time seems to stand still, the separation between screen and auditorium is lifted.

Pregnancy, birthing and parental care are strongly charged social roles. The partly absurd public discourse about them – reinforced by hyper-positive media images and stereotypes – makes natural concerns feel less and less natural. Evolutionary necessities have been turned into ciphers whose collective emotional over-forming leaves next to no space for personal experience. In this phase of life, self-awareness and external perception often diverge substantially. There is usually little room, neither for fears and doubts nor for any other emotion, outside the generally prescribed bliss. Prenatal stages of development seem pre-defined, standardised, tried and tested. Little can be done “right”, much “wrong”. Every decision for or against a pre-natal optimisation measure counts. Nothing is left to chance.
But what if chance strikes anyway? When the ultrasound diagnosis yields a painful result? How does obstetrics, obsessed with detail, handle deviations from “the plan”, how does it deal with the fact that statistically one in six pregnancies ends in miscarriage? Filmmaker and editor Irem Schwarz’s found footage collage is a haunting combination of terribly omnipresent cliché imagery that addresses these relevant questions in a voice that is more than just her own.

There is no return to paradise. There is a rupture between now and then, the realisation that this place no longer exists. Our protagonist, too, must learn this when she lifts the green of the map beneath her like a blanket to crawl under it with a tomato in her hand – back to Sarajevo, to Yugoslavia. Initially, the strangeness of the return flight with its obligatory tomato juice is as nostalgically exciting as the smiley stickers that are everywhere. But by the time she reaches her parents’ home, the past catches up with her completely: In the corridor of the deserted flat, bullet holes cast cones of light on old family photos and when she opens the fridge, the sight of a single tomato suddenly triggers memories of bombs and explosions.
Matea Radic finds haunting and original images to visualise her own traumatic experience of the Bosnian War and its confusing entanglement with her haptic and sensual childhood memories – complete with Dadaistic advertisements for Šipad furniture and Bosnian melodies. Her generous and yet spare animation style brings out the childlike wonder of her protagonist beautifully. She stalks through the world with scraped knees in a babydoll dress. And she learns that it is sometimes okay not to stick a smiley on things but perhaps a band-aid.

Designed as a travelogue about Israel, Herbert Viktor emphasizes similarities to the FRG of the economic miracle years in his film: clean, neat, busy, enterprising. Haifa, for example, is described as having evolved from a “meeting place for Arabic caravans and robber bands” to the most modern port of the Levant. Viktor also pays tribute to the welcoming culture for the persecuted of the world, but omits to elucidate on the fates that lie behind them. The film, spiced up by staged intermezzi to become a statement of sympathy, was released in Federal German cinemas in 1959 under the patronage of Willy Brandt. It was not allowed on Israeli screens before 1962, when the death sentence against Adolf Eichmann had been upheld by the court of appeal.

SOS – help! A clear and simple visual language to disturbing sounds. The distinguished Lithuanian film and theatre director Vladislovas Algimantas Blinstrubas condenses the violent, centuries-long history of the Baltic in timeless metaphors. The naked, vulnerable human being is at the centre of this filmic exploration. The space opens up to pain and grief.

How does it feel when your body becomes a different one? Milla Cummings and Geneviève Tremblay explore (peri)menopause with a physical, concrete approach: The menopause they show is a living stop-motion organism, a cave with pulsating walls where a naked elderly woman gently inters her last eggs. From offscreen, a number of mature women recount their experiences – of dry skin, especially in the vaginal area, of rage against the universally asserted sex appeal of aging men, and of the increasing loss of their social visibility.
For every negative aspect, these worldly-wise narrators formulate a counterpoint or constructive course of action in authentic audio recordings. And they also report on the positive sides of this drastic transformation: The energy that the body would have reserved for childbearing along with the eggs is now released for new projects! On screen, a curtain aptly opens to offer a view of a shimmering, glittering foam of possibilities. At the end, our protagonist leaves the cave and climbs the nearest mountain. This film describes more than just arduous passages one has to go through: The “passageways” might just as well be transitions to a new life.

An app that assigns a sound and a connected graphic element to every letter of the computer keyboard forms the basis of this live improvisation by CFM. The game of patterns and breaks uses different sound-form combinations from Jono Brandel’s kit to create rhythms, loops and music as well as a video to accompany them.

A purely acoustic collage whose sounds seem by nature indefinable and yet somehow organic. They mesmerise us, occasionally make us shiver at some unknown thing. Gravity seems to be suspended. This piece needs no images, because they will intuitively materialise before our inner eye like thousands of hallucinations.

In this indie game we embark on a journey into the vast expanse of the void. If you like, you can contemplate, rest, observe yourself. If you feel like moving, you can navigate the white space step by step – or just take a break … But not for too long! Or you will miss the chance to uncover hidden secrets and find your own path in the middle of nowhere.

It’s Hungary in the early 1990s and Ákos, Petya and Laci, too, are young and need the money. The Iron Curtain has fallen, Europe lies at the friends’ feet, but train tickets to Stockholm, Paris, Berlin or Madrid are almost unaffordable for ordinary people. Far from losing courage, the three develop a clever method to enjoy the new freedom to travel: They forge the official tickets, still handwritten on carbon copy forms, bleaching the carbon ink out with sanitiser, ironing the paper smooth and dry, getting some stamps, researching the operating procedures of the national railway, studying timetables, prices and routes and filling in the boxes on the forms again. And off they go. But that is not the end of the story. A feeling of blind infatuation sets a business idea in motion. How about making these very special tickets available to others in need? One becomes ten, 150 soon become 1,000 – until a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities begins.
László Csáki’s scintillating gangster comedy is loaded with contemporary history. His excellent montage of drawn fiction, authentic film documents and memoirs broadens our view of the suspended years of social upheaval in his Hungarian homeland.

The beaches of Havana, splashing around, tender gestures between lovers, the sun glistening on the water, hips swaying to music. With this light-handed etude, Néstor Almendros delivers a shimmering testimony of post-revolutionary relaxation – and an early proof of his virtuosity as a cinematographer.
The film was made at ICAIC – and disappeared there, too. The national film art institute founded in 1959 by order of the new government saw no place for such neorealistic extravaganzas in the new Cuban cinema and issued a screening ban. Néstor Almendros left Cuba in 1961 to become a world-renowned cinematographer in the US and Europe. His name was expunged from the ICAIC filmography published in the book accompanying the 1974 Cuban retrospective in Leipzig.

Insects aren’t cute and often not beautiful, but very exciting, Pepe thinks. His favourite animals are dragonflies, which can control their four wings individually and take off faster than a jet plane. But where do you still find these flying wonders? Pepe knows that many insects are dying out in Germany because they are robbed of their habitats. He wants to change that!

Corine Shawi’s father spends four years in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities in Beirut because of sudden paralysis – a time in which the state of emergency becomes routine and filming becomes a strategy: in search of the right balance of closeness and distance, in search of one’s own position in the structure. Shawi sets herself the task of documenting, putting herself in the picture, keeping the family together and at the same time recording movements and changes.

Family life shifts to the sickrooms. The radio plays, the mother smokes countless cigarettes on the balcony, her eyes and fingers graze figures of saints, she attends Holy Mass in the various facilities and shares her worries about an adult son with her husband and daughter. They argue, laugh and sometimes dance around the sickbed. Between the family capsule and drifting through the city – Beirut, night, cemeteries, sensualities –, the filmmaker inserts interview sequences with her siblings, staged on the backseat of a moving car. Attempts to cope and to draw borders, loneliness in company. Brief moments when wishes and projections of mobility are experimentally translated into virtual space – a gauging of possibilities. A touching description of a status quo and a testimony to resignation and renewal.

Magic mobile on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? A young woman slips into a second skin. She goes out, drinks bubble tea with her friends. Selfies are made. The mood is cheerful. But once back home, she and her outward skin melt into each other; a self dissolves. Her own reflection becomes a chimera. A surreal body horror animation about beauty ideals and the compulsion to fit in.