When an illness brings life to a standstill, everything is suddenly called in question. We are used to functioning – using our body and mind to achieve goals, to fulfil our potential, to be there for others. But how do we react when this supposed normality no longer exists? When life as we knew it threatens to fall apart? “The Core” is a film about the fight against this disintegration and the struggle to answer the question of what constitutes life. Life as a filmmaker, woman and mother. Life that was already complete before the illness appeared and that now competes with the latter – for time and attention. Where is the essential core of a person, what can’t be surrendered without giving up one’s self? This auto-fictional film begins on a very personal note but shows clearly how much our approach to illness is shaped by society and how the insistence on “normality” makes life harder for those who fight for it every day.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Luscious avocado plantations. Smoke rising on the horizon. Then echoes of explosions. In the “Envelope”, just before the border with Gaza, Yo, Tom, Yan, Piak and Lee work in Israeli fields. Like many other migrant workers, they were recruited from Thailand. They work for below-market wages, often seven days a week, up to 17 hours a day, to support their distant families. They are being observed by a robot snake that crawls through the fields looking for Hamas tunnels beneath the farmland. Bullet casings among the weeds, makeshift shelters in front of the barracks – a psychogeography of fear and vulnerability. Sometimes, in brief moments of leisure, the light-hearted games and the community of young men provide a distraction. On 7 October 2023, the underworld opens up and interrupts the film, which then shifts to the families of the victims. On the banks of the Mekong, the mythical snake god Naga guards the threshold between the living and the dead. An intangible, floating and empathic narrative about precarious labour movements through a military-agrarian complex.

Jan Künemund

Why are we so fascinated by the ancient world even today? In 2023, the viral hashtag #RomanEmpire brought to light how many people are still captivated by ancient Rome – men above all. For Pinji, the director’s uncle, this fascination has long since become a life project. He lives in an old house in Bulgaria, looks after a collection of antique treasures and has been writing a book about antiquity for years. When his nephew comes to visit, uncle Pinji does not hesitate: With humorous implacability, he launches into a rhetorical "demolition" of the present age. Toddi listens closely and decides to join the fight. He implements himself and Pinji in a computer game, right into the middle of an antique battle. Now the present is battling the past – outcome uncertain.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

“Tire dié” begins with aerial shots of Santa Fe, Fernando Birri’s hometown. We hear a litany of statistical data that gradually and parodically turn into more and more trivial facts about the city. The camera approaches the town’s outskirts with their informal settlements, drops from its airy heights down to the eye-level of those who talk about their daily struggle for survival. Often it is the children who bring the necessary coins home. Every afternoon, they go begging along the nearby two-kilometre railway bridge. Running barefoot along the train that connects Santa Fe with Buenos Aires, they hold their hands up to the travellers at the windows, incessantly calling “tire dié” (throw a dime). The last third of the film, which marks the birth of the new Latin American cinema, is an equally breathtaking and harrowing montage of this daring endeavour.

Florian Wüst