Twofold mise-en-scène. Views of a city and a family. Political Berlin, private Franconia. Painting within the film image. Realities observed within a necessarily shifting frame. A mobile phone film with the potential for deceleration. A social medium.

Tasked with shielding her from the news of her father’s death, young soldier Atom escorts Claudette on a road trip into the conflict-ridden Armenian countryside. A hallucinatory odyssey through the mythologies of a nation in a state of permanent war.

Sasha is non-binary and came to Israel from the Soviet Union as a child in the 1990s. Haunted by memories, they visit the houses they used to live in. A quiet meditation in black and white on what it means to feel at home in a house, a body, and in time.

An alcoholic woman and an ailing man forge a life-affirming bond, but old habits die hard. Kang Mi-ja’s austere drama with the great Han Ye-ri in the lead casts an unsparing eye on the ill-fated romance between two lonely souls, crippled by their past.

A military-set post-horror. Educating monsters. History teacher Alina is received coldly upon bringing her son Serik to the cadet school that will make him a man. A pupil dies, as the smell of past corpses emanates from the cellar of the present.

Since 1986, the Caligari Film Award honors an innovative film from the Berlinale Forum programme. The €4,000 award, sponsored by the municipal cinemas and the streaming service filmfriend, is split between the director and the distributor.

Moving through Italy’s regions, the De Serio brothers come across an alternative popular culture and shoot a square-shaped film about polyvocal songs, music ethnology and oral tradition. Radically contemporary, energetic, close to nature, local. Lyrical.

Spring, summer, autumn, winter... still war in Lviv, western Ukraine. Torn between normality and a state of emergency. For one year, Mansky follows the life cycle of a society’s grieving rites and everyday rituals, where death is the order of the day.

Genealogy, uncomfortable questions and reams of archival material are Tavares-Abel’s tools in discovering the political truths of her family and the Dominican Republic. Election fraud and dictatorship are frighteningly topical. Activism suggests itself.

Taking her dad’s job at the Olin Corporation as a starting point, Lee Anne Schmitt interweaves meditative reflections on her biography and her own body with a history of the rise and widespread influence of conservative think tanks in the United States.

As the child of survivors of the Sinti persecution by the Nazis, Melanie Spitta holds the “thread of the truth” in this film. “Reparations” - a lie! “The courts believed the perpetrators, not us.” Shock, evidence, warning, accusation.

Two young women in the world – a reunion weekend in Melbourne. Em’s on a break, Jessie’s always been chill. Dialogue like a babbling brook, sweet, smart, banal to heavy and back again, honest and unafraid of pathos. A generation of happy wounded souls.

Nana Xu travels to the place built by her father as a prisoner during the Cultural Revolution: first a work camp, later a prison, fruit farm and treatment centre. Conversations with last remaining witnesses, where home is still shaped by a repressed past.

Liat is one of the hostages taken on October 7. The film follows her relatives from right up close, with a focus on her father, as he tries to stay on the path of pacifism and humanity amidst war, trauma and diplomacy.

A young Indigenous woman leaves the village for the city. Cinema Novo, hybrid fiction, road trip and an ecological avant-garde perspective, Iracema shows that trees, animals and people were already being destroyed by extractivist capitalism 50 years ago.

Far away from the big city, Janine is unwelcome, yet an eye-catcher: a sensual, queer subject of projection with wine-red hair. Jan Eilhardt travels with her to engage with his own rural past, opening old wounds and infiltrating a hostile milieu.

The idiosyncratic Bernard covers his books in paper and lives with his sheep Fiete. When his father falls ill, his reality grows even more shaky and he sets out to find his lost balance. A magic realist tale of grief, loneliness, intimacy and new starts.

A film looking at the past to warn about the future, from a little boy’s point of view. A companion piece to American Dreams (lost and found) (1984).

In 1973, Vibeke Løkkeberg filmed the beginnings of the feminist film movement at the First International Women’s Film Seminar, held at the Arsenal cinema. Her footage was lost for 50 years. Today, it confronts us with past battles still yet to be won.

Emerging from the shadows of the rubber trade, the lost stories of Omarino and Aredomi are revealed. A journey through Amazonian archives connects research, speculation and the filmmaker’s own family history, invoking a dialogue between the living and the dead.

A tender posthumous letter to Tamara’s father, who was a film actor in Soviet Armenia. She already watched him on TV as a child before later establishing herself as a filmmaker. A captivating sleepwalk through the landscapes of Armenian film history.

Fresh out of jail, Anita is supposed to control her aggression. Physical warmth, grief and intimacy. Almost without plot, the film draws on light, colour, style, dance and great music to enter a group of friends with someone missing at its heart.

A piercingly open talk between a mother and a daughter about growing up as a woman in Uzbekistan, now and back then. Confessions about sex no one really wanted, about the experience of misogyny and gender asymmetry. Naked truths as a form of therapy.

Life only ends with the final heartbeat. The palliative care unit at Berlin’s Franziskus hospital. For one summer, Philipp Döring documents conversations driven by humanity, institutional bottlenecks and the light that streams in despite everything.

Iván is found unconscious with an injured eye in the jungle. As Meshia reunites him with his family, she is drawn into a foreboding journey. A disturbing look at Peru’s cultural contradictions shot on a coarse mix of analogue and digital formats.