BLOCK 4. Limit Situations

Insight into the filmmaker's stay in hospital, where she repeatedly experiences absurd, funny moments between pain, homesickness and disgust of her own body. Meanwhile, she tries to come to terms with the hospital's own procedures and hierarchies. An emotional trip through the long underground corridors of the hospital with lots of small talk and tubes.

An artist with writer's block is sitting in an artist's residence in northern Germany. Outside, construction workers renovate a vacation home; inside, nothing happens until the landline phone rings. A supposed Microsoft employee wants access to her supposedly broken computer. Instead, she starts to talk – about heartbreak, emptiness and the failure to work. Without realizing it, she becomes a scambaiter. Film tells of an unexpectedly genuine, almost tender conversation between two strangers worlds apart and of how easily one becomes part of the structures one claims to critique.

The film is being presented as part of the project "Cinema as a Laboratory V," co-financed by the Polish-German Cooperation Foundation.

Twenty-five years after his abduction during the Kosovo War, painter Skender Muja recounts an extraordinary story of survival. During the war’s final months, Muja and many Albanian citizens from Mitrovica were captured while attempting to flee Kosovo. Detained in a school repurposed as a detention camp, they faced confinement, fear, and an uncertain fate. Narrated by Muja, I Believe the Portrait Saved Me explores resilience and the profound impact of art in even the most oppressive circumstances.

After managing to scrape together money to pay for an abortion after her Polish exchange student boyfriend gets her pregnant, the director decides to celebrate with a party. In attendance are her geriatric ska musician neighbor, semi-retired gang affiliates, her dirty gay roommate, and ever present bedbugs.

While making a film about the Israel-Palestine conflict, an Iranian filmmaker is suddenly thrust into war himself when Israel attacks Iran. Forced to flee Tehran with his family, he finds fragile shelter in a suburban home. Over twelve tense days, what began as a political essay transforms into a personal diary of survival and exile. Through fragments of news, images, and reflection, he confronts questions of freedom, identity, and belonging. When the war ends, he returns to a city both familiar and altered, his film forever changed by the collision of art, politics, and lived experience.