Today, you don’t really need to go to the cinema anymore: these “rollercoaster rides of emotions” that we were so excited about a few years ago because we thought we only encountered them in the cinema are now something we see on the news every day. And on our doorstep, and that, admittedly, even back then. The cinema helps us to digest them. Watching people go against the grain, crossing cultural, social and even territorial boundaries – sometimes by force, sometimes by choice.

The protagonists in the films in this year’s Cinedays programme expend a great deal of passion, courage and also anger to overcome their boundaries – sometimes in the heat of the moment, sometimes calculated; sometimes completely crazy, sometimes meticulously prepared, sometimes because there’s no other way, sometimes on their own choice – and something always comes in between. Protagonists between rich and poor, religious and secular, war and peace, memory and present, body and soul, heaven and earth, question and answer, ambition and resignation, insight and confession. In films that themselves transgress boundaries, namely those of their genres. The incredible hybris of the characters we accompany here on their exploratory journeys through the pitfalls of society is reflected between animation and essay, genre thriller and arthouse. The human being remains at the centre, and so we rediscover ourselves again and again, in times that we might wish were different, but in films that get pretty much to the point. Without easy answers, but, like life itself, entertaining and thought-provoking to the max.

Have a good screening!