Nina Wesemann

Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor is forced to confront her family legacy and German bureaucracy when she seeks to remove an overly symbolic word from her name.

Marie, Arthur, Emine, and Christian are ten years old. They live in Berlin. Strolling through the city with them, we experience their freedom as well as first notions of opposition.

Nico, a filmmaker, returns to her hometown to lead a storytelling workshop with her childhood friend Lori, a schoolteacher there. Lori’s pupils are asked to imagine their future selves. The children’s thoughts prompt Nico and Lori to reexamine their own decisions in life — as well as their friendship.

In the sixties, Peter Handke was one of the first to show how the business works: the writer as angry young man and pop star of the literary scene. As soon as he was on the bestseller lists, he turned his back on the hype. For many years, he has lived and worked in his house in a Parisian suburb, more quietly and more hospitably. Peter Handke's precise, free gaze becomes perceptible in his texts, his conversations, the cosmos of his notebooks.

It's the largest Arctic expedition of all time. In September 2019 the German icebreaker "Polarstern" is on its way to the North Pole. The best scientists of their generation are on board. Their job are to collect data about the ocean, ice, atmosphere and life. The mission is to understand climate change, because the changes in the Arctic have an impact far beyond the region. The documentary provides spectacular close-ups of the MOSAiC expedition under the direction of the Alfred Wegener Institute together with the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and shows the world of the Arctic during the polar night, from which hardly any data and images existed until now. A scientific, logistical and also human adventure of a community of researchers and crew members who let themselves be frozen with the ship for a year in the ice desert near the North Pole in order to use the natural drift of the ice, captured for the audience in impressive images.

Cheekily inverted gender roles, history revisited, empowerment. The weapons here: long fingernails and AI counterimages that serve to expand the visual canon of imagined collectives. Things never archived become visible and culturally imaginable.