Various family biographies explore ways and tools for connecting with one another and understanding bonds. Forms of communication are found to bring people closer together, whether through language, movement, touch, or signs. Cultural idiosyncrasies and intergenerational trauma can lead to bonds that run deeper than they appear in everyday life. Mothers in particular are at the center of the films. They search for signals, approaches, and channels to express their love and connection or to process loneliness and loss. (Linn Löffler)
She sends him voice messages into the distance – calls into the silence. It’s everyday chatter, trying to be cheerful, a little exaggerated, and while never directly denouncing his absence, there is always a quiet reproach.
Blurred, dreamy winter landscapes pass by, images of her rise up in them, shadowy, indistinct, and dissolve again in the snow. Longing, loneliness, connection, and love warm the landscape. Messages from the mother to the missing child.
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Premiere:
German Premiere
- Director: Marc-Olivier Huard
Can you escape a fear that is not your own? I’M BREATHING ALL THE TIME is an autobiographical documentary about mental illness and an ambivalent mother-daughter relationship. Director Rosa Gocht has suffered from severe anxiety and panic attacks since early childhood. On family holiday at the Baltic Sea, she tries to understand her condition and to find its roots through conversations with her mother, her little brother and her grandmother. Gradually, a family past unfolds where closeness and interdependence are intertwined, and anxiety runs through multiple generations of women. (Rosa Gocht)
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Premiere:
World Premiere
Nominated:
Goldener Key
Dance connects! Several generations dance for themselves and yet together. Each movement reveals its own attitude toward space, time, and internal and external barriers. The bodies and their gestures resonate with the sound and open up new approaches to silent acts of resistance, vitality, and becoming. A loving film miniature on 16mm, hand-developed, marked by traces and scratches from the analog process, revealing the fragility of the moment.
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Premiere:
World Premiere
Three women come together. Memories of their family’s migration from India to the USA are evoked through photos and images, raising questions about identity, language, and integration, as well as the cultural imprint of being Sinti. What is home for them today? The film weaves together amorphous dreams, memories, sounds, and fragments of the subconscious to make tangible the waves of dissonance that have been passed down through generations. An experimental collaborative work about identity, migration, and intergenerational femininity.
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Nominated:
Goldener Key
- Director: Alisha Tejpal, Mireya Martinez, Anoushka Mirchandani
Her son has disappeared, vanished into the urban jungle. He has always been a free spirit and has chosen a life on the streets. Only his graffiti tags prove to his mother that he is still alive. She begins to search for them all over the city, documenting them and thus reassuring herself of his existence. And she interprets them as a sign for herself. She finally responds to his graffiti with her own tags on concrete walls, electricity boxes, and dusty windows. An unusual connection develops, giving her a sense of liberation and relief.
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Premiere:
German Premiere
