Festival
Schedule
6:00 pm | Kinomuzuem
Double Screening: Battlefield + The Woman’s Greatest Value Is Her Silence
Battlefield: Moving between archival images and the present, the film revisits the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, uncovering a history of the female body as a space of resistance, control and emancipation.
The Woman’s Greatest Value Is Her Silence: The story of a young migrant woman from southern Italy who travels to Frankfurt in search of a better life, told through an extraordinary blend of documentary, fiction and re-enactment. With tenderness, irony and a keen awareness of women’s experience, the film transforms a seemingly private story into a powerful reflection on uprooting, dependency and the search for a place of one’s own.
8:30 pm | Kinomuzuem
Living between Germany and her home country of Iran, filmmaker Faezeh searches for where she belongs. Sustained by her intimate, long-distance bond with her two closest friends — one in exile and one unable to leave — the three women turn to cinema as a shared practice of survival, transforming distance into a place they can call home.
6:00 pm | Kinomuzeum
8:45 pm | Kinomuzeum
A film for anyone seeking answers to the questions: How do we confront discrimination? How can we build alliances beyond our own bubble? Through an interactive game exploring structures of power, the participants arrive at fascinating — and constructive — insights into discrimination, injustice, and empathy in an increasingly divided society.
4:00 pm | Kinomuzeum
A vibrant, genre-defying documentary travels across India, uncovering women’s invisible yet essential labour. Combining sharp wit, a rich musical score, and an analysis of the social structures that shape women’s lives, the film challenges conventional ideas about work, gender, and power.
6:30 pm | Kinomuzeum
7:00 pm | Kinoteka
A healing story that restores faith in the contemporary world. Made over eight years and built entirely on trust and friendship, the film follows Karla, a transgender teenager, as she comes of age in the magical town of Tepoztlán, Mexico.
8:30 pm | Kinomuzeum
In a groundbreaking personal journey, Inna Shevchenko meets extraordinary, inspiring women, some are fighting against religion, others defend religion, and surprisingly many, who started to reform religion. They all are united by one belief: Women are magnificent. No god – neither in heaven nor on earth – may deprive them of their rights or subordinate them to men.
4:00 pm | Kinomuzeum
6:00 pm | Atlantic Cinema
The film looks into places we rarely venture in our everyday lives: conversations about the body, ageing, health, and womanhood that have long been pushed to the margins. And it does so not to scare us about menopause, but to finally start talking about it openly — with curiosity, humour, and without shame.
6:00 pm | Elektronik Cinema
Double Screening: Clean With Me (After Dark) + I Often Think of Hawai
Clean With Me (After Dark): Dozens of women clean their homes in front of YouTube cameras, creating a seemingly perfect picture of everyday life, behind which loneliness, frustration and the burden of being the “ideal” homemaker gradually emerge.
I Often Think of Hawai: Sixteen-year-old Carmen lives with her mother and brother on the grey outskirts of West Berlin, dreaming of dance, love and escape from everyday life. In front of the camera, reality gives way to her imagination as Elfi Mikesch creates an ironic and sensual alternative world where fantasy becomes a way of transcending the limits of her own life.
6:00 pm | Kinomuzeum
The Woman Who Poked The Leopard
Imprisoned, tortured, bereaved, Ugandan dissident, poet and single mother Dr Stella Nyanzi navigates the toll her activism has on her young family.
8:30 pm | Kinomuzeum
6:00 pm | Kinoteka
After years of silence about the abortion she experienced as a teenager, Marta receives a hundred anonymous testimonies from women who have gone through similar experiences. Bringing these stories to the screen, along with six girls who give voice and face to these silenced stories, the film opens a shared space where what was silenced becomes collective.
8:45 pm | Kinoteka
Double Screening: Lili + The Ceiling
Lili: Asked to pose as a “China Girl” in a TV studio, Lili uncovers the hidden history of women whose white skin has been used as a technical standard for film colour for over a century. Through archival footage, found material and documentary recordings, the film exposes how this seemingly neutral cinematic practice reflects and reinforces a deeply rooted bias against colour and people of colour.
The Ceiling: A unique glimpse into fashion in 1962. Everything – the clothes, accessories and makeup… looks incredible. Everyone knows Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, but this early graduation film by the legendary Czech director remains largely undiscovered. It captures a chapter from Chytilová’s own biography, when she was taking her first steps as a model.
8:00 pm | Atlantic Cinema
Blending documentary, theatre, and fiction, “La petite mort” follows Ophelia—split in two during a surreal courtroom trial—as she revisits childhood archives and the fragile formation of identity in 2000s Poland.
9:00 pm | Kinoteka
Double Screening: Hotel Royal + Nightshift
Hotel Royal: A chambermaid in a seaside hotel observes the traces of strangers’ lives with meticulous detachment, until an unexpected disruption shatters her carefully controlled ritual and exposes the unsettling desires and loneliness hidden behind closed doors.
Nightshift: “Nightshift” takes us on a surreal journey through nocturnal London, seen through the eyes of a hotel receptionist whose dream comes to life through the city’s punk community. Among musicians, artists and eccentrics, the boundary between reality and fantasy gradually dissolves, creating an extraordinary portrait of London’s counterculture in the early 1980s.
4:00 pm | Kinoteka 2
Experiment in cinema – how it’s done in Europe
Opening debate of the special section “Punk, glitch, traces: Austrian experimental cinema”
9:00 pm | Złota Milonga Klub Tanga Argentyńskiego
Another edition of Tenderness is ahead of us – the performative evening accompanying HER Docs Film Festival – a celebration of feminist non-fiction cinema. Free entry!
6:45 pm | Kinoteka 2
Debate – Between Loss and Hope: Mental Health in the Face of the Climate Crisis
A debate after the screening of The Unfixing with the film director Nicole Betancourt.