The small town of Marinka lies in the Ukrainian Donetsk Oblast. Almost 10,000 people lived there, even though the town was under constant attack by pro-Russian separatists since 2014. When the war escalated in the spring of 2022, however, Marinka came under heavy artillery fire and practically all residents had to leave the town by September. The local police helped get them out. One of the policemen is Vasyl, the protagonist of this film. In a white van, soon christened the “white angel” by the population, he and his colleagues pull civilians out of the line of fire, recover the wounded and the dead. Vasyl’s helmet camera records the dramatic events of their missions: evacuating scared people from their cellars, first aid for the seriously injured, the hasty gathering of personal belongings, the painful and permanent partings.

Six months after the end of Marinka, the Leipzig-based investigative journalist Arndt Ginzel and his crew return to eastern Ukraine. They find the survivors, rescued persons and rescuers, and let them comment the action cam images. They speak of losses, of pain and grief, but also of hopes and dreams. “White Angel – The End of Marinka” is more than a film about war. It is a document of humanity and the longing for peace.

“Sex does strange things to people!” This sentence reverberates from her childhood. What did her mother mean? What fears did she pass on to Emma? The budding filmmaker sets up the camera in her mother’s apartment, invites mum’s friends, creates an open atmosphere. Coby opens up more and more, talks about a repressed topic. At the same time, she gets to show a wholly different side of herself, performing song and dance numbers in front of her daughter’s lens.

The summer after graduation: Own life plans and expectations of the parents’ generation collide. While Shuli films his friends with a Super 8 camera, his mother wants nothing more than for him to get married. She resolutely refuses to speak about the fact that her son loves men and has been living with his boyfriend in Beijing for years. A deafening silence. Idyllic family pictures are overlaid by a long overdue confrontation.

An inventive examination of the legacy of the 1990s: In his experimental short film, Ben Young portrays the figure of the then U.S. president – whom he is said to have met once in person in Louisville, Kentucky – as a foil for the questionable political developments, the beginnings of a globalised world and a society marked by collective amnesia. The director’s intelligent, witty and very personal reckoning with Bill Clinton.

How much do staircases and doors leading nowhere in the Californian Winchester House reveal about the owner’s superstitions and how much about the years of converting and rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake? In the centrepiece of his trilogy, Jeremy Blake fills the labyrinthine interiors of this architectural rarity with unreal light and colour apparitions of impressive beauty and oppressive impact.

In the third part of this study of the Winchester mansion in San Jose the eye wanders to the “Century 21” cinema built opposite the street in 1964. Jeremy Blake makes the dream houses correspond visually by means of overpainting in time-based painting technique and visual mass media quotes. The film house contributed to the myth that at the frontier a home for the American Dream was built by gun violence.

From 1884 to 1922, the widow of arms manufacturer Winchester transformed a modest manor in San Jose into a residence of temporarily more than 500 rooms. Rumour has it that it was to protect herself from the ghosts of those shot dead at the frontier. Jeremy Blake starts his Winchester trilogy with a diagnosis of the state of mind of the eccentric building in a Rorschach test of fantastic folded images.

A vineyard in winter. The wind hisses through the bare vines. Hunters are on the prowl, watched by a pair of lovers. A summery mood sets in. An associative round of images unfolds that takes us from the landscapes of Piedmont to ancient Egypt and reminds us of the dancer Ester from Clavesana, who performed at the premiere of Verdi’s opera “Aida” in Cairo on Christmas Eve 1871.

On the occasion of the GDR Landeskulturgesetz (Law on the Conservation and Protection of the Environment), passed in 1970, the speaker explains the various aspects of environmental protection through vivid, visually pointed examples. The film repeatedly refers to the fundamental contradiction between exploitation and preservation of nature in a developed industrial state but is unable to resolve it.

A jumble of emerging history is contrasted with the present efforts to optimise profit through ventures and ominous business ideas. In the midst of this labyrinth is a duo of artists who only want to make films. Their misfortune: the German film funding system allows only those who work in an artistic-documentary style to realise science fiction films. Cause enough to find true science fiction material on real German soil instead of looking for a fiction.

Rothenstein, south of Jena. A mountain, hollowed out and built on. Labyrinthine corridors cast in concrete spread over a distance of more than five kilometres. The film precisely constructs – stone by stone, image by image – a story which, composed as a mirror of German history, touches on archaeological finds from twelve thousand years ago and at the same time projects into the uncertainties of the future. Bizarre energy fields, myths and tales of dragons, plans of U.S. preppers fleeing from the end of the world meet facticities of National-Socialist exploitation and forced labour, stories of flight from the 1930s, and the military history of the GDR.

Luciana’s office is a place of miracles. This is where strangers confide in her, share their most profound desires and concerns. And Luciana? She circles her huge magnifying glass over the pages of old books to soon find the perfect coordinates for a spiritual new beginning. In his new film, Peter Kerekes becomes nothing less than a witness to psychomagical acts. The Neapolitan astrologer is not only able to calculate the perfect birthday spot for those who seek advice – in her blunt way, she aims right at the centre of personal dramas. A pair of identical twins, for example, argue whether one of the sisters should fulfil the other’s longing for a child, while an unhappy mother yearns to rekindle her relationship.
Luciana sends the twins to Beirut, the mother to Alaska. Kerekes accompanies them on their journeys of salvation, even if Alaska turns into an air conditioner and a few buckets of ice cubes for reasons of practicality. He always brings out the comic potential of a story while pointing out complicated conflicts with astonishing poignancy: possessive mother figures and absent fathers, loneliness in a relationship and the fear of change. “Wishing on a Star” is a charming consultation that boldly confronts the big questions in life.

“I don’t want to say it out loud, but my flat’s lower down,” the narrator remarks. The camera at first follows her legs climbing up the stairs of the hallway. That is all we see of her. Very soon, her gaze determines our perspective in this unsettling story. At first it all sounds like a mistake, but at some point, the tenant gets used to the fact that in some inexplicable way and completely unceremoniously she is pulled down from the fourth floor to the coal cellar, floor by floor. A decline that the neighbourhood lets happen in deafening silence.

The “falling” protagonist’s irritated soliloquy, sometimes resigned, often full of calculated optimism, is accompanied by charcoal drawings. Their clarity and architectural detail – down to the curlicued decorations of the upper-class mansion – gradually fade over the course of events. The spatial representation becomes more and more vague and is reduced to a few strokes, only to dissolve into soft areas of charcoal dust in the end. In this nightmarish story, reality no longer offers any support, only one’s own ego. Susi Jirkuff has adapted Ilse Aichinger’s eponymous, multilayered story, which was first published in the mid-1950s, with a remarkable urgency that demonstrates the topicality of Aichinger’s text and writing.

On Guadeloupe, an archipelago in the Caribbean, the past speaks up. Sylvaine Dampierre has the workers of an old sugar refinery read passages from the transcripts of an 1842 court case, while the machines roar and groan in the background. The testimonies of the slaves from back then in the rusty halls of today give rise to a polyphony both explosive and poetic in nature.

The “Grande Anse” sugar refinery is a monster from a distant past: Flames like long tongues spew from the furnaces, piles resembling bones everywhere. The workers cut them with machetes in the plantations of Marie-Galante, a tiny island that belongs to the archipelago of Guadeloupe. The long bones, the sugar cane, are the scaffold that keeps everything together here. Sylvaine Dampierre is in the thick of it, shows the pulsating factory and the hard labour that goes on inside. Seasonal workers come and go; the men organize themselves. They are free. There are occasional flashes of the peculiar bond with France, of which this overseas territory is an integral part, but Dampierre foregrounds the transcripts of a court case from almost two hundred years ago, in which slaves testified against their violent master. An act of self-empowerment, whose gestus the director brings into dialogue with the present.

Behind the bark of a tree, a clever little bark beetle girl lives with her colony. But people put the forest idyll at risk. After a major fire, she finds refuge in a school. Scared at first, she slowly learns to communicate with humans and finds her way back home with the help of new friends. A short ode to learning.