Beans is the moniker by which the 12-year-old protagonist of this story goes, as many find it difficult to pronounce her real name, Tekahentahkhwa. The young Mohawk girl is courteous and accommodating, even to a fault. This changes when development plans to expand a golf course into an indigenous burial ground turn into a large-scale

Pawned off to her aunt’s family, 13-year-old Guo is woken one sweltering summer night by a phone call from her mother. The woman has no regard for the fact that it is close to 5am for her daughter; she simply checks in whenever she happens to feel like parenting. When Guo needs her mum, she

Human Factors opens with a sinister tour through the empty Belgian vacation home of the German family who are about to arrive for a weekend stay. Their plans for a relaxed getaway are thwarted when Nina (Sabine Timoteo) suspects a break-in and the entire household is put on high alert. The events that unfold are

The Berlinale Generation entry Short Vacation tells the story of four young girls participating in the same photography club at school. Their summer assignment is to take pictures of “the end of the world” – with disposable cameras, not their cellphones. The term is so abstract to them, after some deliberation, they decide to travel

District Terminal in set a dystopian version of Tehran, where pollution, as well as an unnamed virus, have rendered life an unrewarding struggle to survive. At the centre of the story is unaspiring writer Peyman, who divides his time between buying cigarettes so he can dismantle them and smoke heroin, Skype-ing his wife in the

Sascha (Katharina Behrens) is a single mother who works at a brothel. Because of her son, she is tied to a community in Brandenburg, in which she does not feel at home nor at ease. When Maria (played by Adam Hoya, who was the subject of the 2019 documentary film Searching Eva) joins the establishment,

After a meet-cute and the promise to go out the following day, Lisa and Giorgi each go home thinking about the other, hopeful. However as they wake up the next morning, they both find themselves in new bodies. Not only do they look completely different, but they have also forgotten vital skills from their former

Dominik Graf’s German Berlinale Competition entry is based on the 1931 book Fabian by Erich Kästner, or more precisely the reconstructed, uncensored version of it, which was only released eight years ago as Going to the Dogs. It portrays the last days of the failing Weimar Republic, following the intellectuals Jakob Fabian (Tom Schilling) and Stephan

At the end of 2019, the most populous city of Central China, Wuhan, gains sad notoriety for being the first place to have an outbreak of the novel coronavirus. Especially to people who have never heard of the capital of Hubei Province, the name of the city will likely be forever remembered in conjunction with