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Drawing on the lore of the Zephid cult, this short film interprets the arrival and birth of the Last Traveller, an invasive, dark entity that uses planets as hosts and breeding grounds to give birth to its matter of chaos. The born swarm intelligence takes over the surface of the planets, plunging all previous life into destruction and chaos. The Traveller and its Matter of Chaos are the beginning of an unstoppable cycle that will take over the entire universe in billions of years.

Filmmaker Bernhard Drax presents a feature-length love letter to the 20-year-old virtual world of 'Second Life.' Blending machinima, in-world footage, and user interviews, the film explores how creativity, commerce, and identity emerge in user-built spaces. From gardening entrepreneurs to musicians earning tips, avatars build meaningful lives powered by a digital community. Through scenes of skill-sharing, economic exchange, and social connection, the film offers both a celebration and a thoughtful reflection on the culture shaped within this enduring participatory metaverse.

Arzt plays a game of chess against death.

This Japanese urban legend is quite different from typical German fairy-tales. In addition to classic themes like betrayal and revenge, the legend of the “slit-mouthed woman” also includes supernatural elements.

The end of a war is never an end. A mother's private diary takes us on a poetic journey through the lives of the many children who have fled the ISIS war and whom the world has forgotten.

In the modern world we are surrounded by machines. Caring for the machines we forget the most complex one: our human body.

In a void, we are immersed in a narrative about the pursuit of nostalgia. But can memories withstand this quest?

Stefan Koch, a man from the city of Bonn, discovers in the drawer of his deceased mother a letter from his grandfather to his father and some official documents attesting to the death of his grandfather in the Second World War, in Moldova, a few miles north the village of Speia. Following this discovery, Stefan decides to leave, in search for his grandfather’s grave. Initially, he has great difficulty in his searches, because of language barriers. Later, he meets some freehearted and generous people who make him understand that there are actually no boundaries between the East and the West.

The documentary is dedicated to the Strugatsky brothers, iconic Soviet writers who are still incredibly popular and relevant in Russia. There were queues for Strugatsky's books in the USSR, magazines with their stories were resold on the black market. The brothers were not dissidents: they began their writing career as convinced communists; the world of the future they described is the world of a communist utopia. It is all the more surprising that their entire creative biography is a fierce struggle against censorship. Which they lost.

Lamine and his family recently moved to a farm in Senegal. There’s always a lot to do, but the afternoons are too hot. So it’s off to the beach with his new friend.

A pair of socks lose sight of each other during the spin cycle of the washing machine. Being suddenly alone gives rise to new encounters and puts the socks’ friendship to a tough test.

Mariella lives in Berlin with her family of seven. Her father was trained in kung fu martial arts at the Chinese Shaolin monastery. Today he runs the Berlin-Schöneberg kung fu school and prepares her and her sisters for the next tournament. This has been part of Mariella’s life for many years. But the nervousness before each competition never really gets better.

The hackney carriage, once the fastest means of transportation for aristocrats and commoners, is now a cliché-ridden Viennese cultural asset, a popular tourist attraction and an object of hate for animal rights activists. Like the beggars, the hackney carriages are "children of the street". Their stand is their village square. They know the locals, they are hated or loved. The rhythm of the horses determines their pace and they are dependent on tourism. Ulli Gladik and her team portray five horse-drawn carriage drivers: we are with them in the stables, see them on their tours, experience them at their stables in St. Stephen's Cathedral, handling their horses and in discussions with animal rights activists. A film about passion, cliché and tradition, the relationship between animals, humans and the big city and a Viennese cultural asset threatened with extinction.

With albums such as "Bis ans Ende der Welt" and their unmistakable sailor sound, the band Santiano regularly achieves top positions in the charts and inspires an audience of millions. The documentary "Santiano - Keiner geht verloren" presents the successful shanty rock band from Schleswig-Holstein in all its facets. It looks back on the last ten years since the band was founded and sheds light on the musicians' careers - their triumphs and strokes of fate.

Kicked out on his 21st birthday and troubled by his inner demons, Melvin thinks of ending things. But right on the edge of a cliff he finds ‘The Last Bar’, a quirky place of misfits that came for all the same reasons. Sparked by talks and confrontation, his inner journey continues and he has to stand up for himself. At break of dawn, his thoughts of ending his life vanished and he decides to stay a little longer.

Between dusk and dawn, ‘in the shadows of time’, a series of women, who all perform night-time labour, take us on a tour of sites linked by history, economics and events shaping the post-industrial landscape of the Ruhr region in Germany. Known for its coal mining history, the region has long been dominated by stories of male achievements. Hence the work aims to celebrate the everyday contributions of a group of cross-generational local women, amongst them a tram-driver, a factory-worker, a baker, a pole dancer, a nurse and a world-champion wrestler.

Fifteen years after the first crypto-currency appeared on the scene, what role do these virtual assets play in the financial system? In El Salvador, where bitcoin is an official currency, and in the United States and Europe, experts reveal what's at stake in this controversial sector.

An astonishing “half abstract night-walk fantasy” based on drawings by the great Miles Davis backed by his interpretation of the Tina Turner classic.

Organised groups or individual visitors with or without a guide. A beautiful and well-preserved palace in Berlin is frequented by tourists who visit its chambers, admire the paintings and walk around the meticulously well-tended garden, while thousands kilometres away there stands a dilapidated fortress. It is also visited by groups, which are patiently instructed by a guide as to why such a unique building was erected in Ghana. Moritz Siebert’s film is a remarkable documentary essay. On the example of the two eponymous buildings, the director has managed to capture the essence of colonialism.

After a deadly accident Noah gets haunted by a mysterious creature – the Drud.

A Wanderer drags a mysterious large bag through muddy forest soil. On his journey he is confronted by his past and his nightmares.

Lilli + Camille is about the loss of a loved one and the healing effect of the world of plants - a space in which memory and vitality exist at the same time.

Experimental short film

You need momentum to escape it all. Vonfelt packs the necessary energy into unstoppable pop beats and verbal images. On a backdrop of fleeting nocturnal city lights, Michelle Brand creates a refreshingly dynamic slipstream of fading forms and intense colours. You let yourself fall gently and with a smile into the rush of acceleration.

Along the railroad tracks in Halle-Trotha, where city and countryside merge, people live on the outskirts of the city. Far away from the urban center, they spend their everyday lives between factories and ruins, supermarkets and wild nature. While Wolfgang is stranded on the river with his boat and has found a new home here, Wilma and Eberhard Schneider have lived on the outskirts of the city since childhood. A few houses away, a Buddhist meditates in a converted factory building. Sometimes the smell of the dog food factory is in the air and the clattering of the horse-drawn carriage echoes through the streets. "Stadtrand" tells of a place that is rarely noticed and yet everyone knows it.

Inflation is hitting with full force: Even in rich industrialized countries, many people suddenly don’t even have enough money to feed themselves properly or pay their bills. "Inflation is a kind of power struggle," says economic historian Adam Tooze. "Who's going to be able to pay the rising prices, and who's going to be the loser?" Why is inflation now suddenly an issue again in Europe or the United States? What are central banks doing about it? Our film shows which mechanisms have contributed to the return of inflation and how people from different social milieus react to it - in Germany, France, Turkey and the US.

People are dependent on the circumstances under which they live (e.g., they can flourish simply through a change in circumstances).

Mongolia is one of the ten most resource-rich countries in the world. Unbelievable riches are stored in the ground: coal, copper, zinc, rare earths and also gold. A lot of gold! The largest deposit in Mongolia was once explored by GDR geologists – and discovered a deposit of more than 40 tons of gold. But not a single gram of it has ever arrived in Germany. The film accompanies the geologist Frieder Hacker from Freiberg and his Mongolian wife Solongo. On the trail of this secret expedition, the two travel to Mongolia once again.

This montage film explores tensions between circulatory systems - religion, culture, economy, tradition vs. modernity, nature vs. industry - while visually expressing individual struggles and adaption. It serves as a philosophical and visual essay on finding meaning and balance in modern society.

Souly performs his debut album "Ich wünschte, es würd' mich kümmern" live and unplugged.

The motion comic tells two stories. One begins in Damascus and leads first to East Berlin – Isi moves from Syria to the GDR to study. There he falls in love with Sylvia. With her, he returns to his family. But that's not the end of their journey. The second story begins in Leipzig – in 1989, Conni takes to the streets to demand change in the GDR. After reunification, she moves to Mainz in the old federal states. She, too, has to settle into a new place, a new system. She realizes that home doesn't have to be just one place. Two stories, one question. What does "arriving" actually mean?

The short documentary film “Lenin Square. Elista” is dedicated to the history of the main square of the capital of Kalmykia. Over the past 50 years, the square has undergone several significant transformations, each one symbolizing a new turn in history.

SWR reporter Nadine Hadad dares to try it out for herself: she wants to travel from Munich to Sylt - the northernmost train station in Germany - in one day using the Deutschlandticket.

A contract killer decides to work from home – what could possibly go wrong?

A documentary essay balancing between irony over national stereotypes in general and a nostalgic flow of cultural associations from the director's memories: Russian nursery rhyming stories, the only Mordovian words she knows from her mother, school counting rhymes with German verbs, Tatar songs by her mother-in-law, quotes from some soviet poems, scenes from the opera "Eugene Onegin", the old anthem of Kazakhstan, which she memorizing for her district administration, and much more.

"We're not gonna make a short film about potatoes…" - "Just fry and stop me!", said the potato. So, we made a short film about potatoes.

At first glance, there doesn't seem to be a plot to summarize, since it's a succession of tableaux vivants and scenes, whose recurring elements are: teeth, strands (hair, threads), eyes, sleep, mirrors and shiny surfaces, transparency, ornate fragments, roses, insects, and mise en abyme. - Julie Gufler

“The woman is the man's servant”, she grew up with this sentence from her father, Lenia Friedrich's great-grandfather. How much has this way of thinking changed from today, where can you still discover parallels? Her hands testify to her hard work as a housewife, for which she certainly rarely received recognition. Of course, there was never any monetary reward for this, the father was the breadwinner of the family, although she did the reproductive work in silence. Especially the quiet work in the background, which makes it possible to maintain the entire society, Lenia Friedrich would like to put in the foreground.