Before the forest becomes like the moon, a wolf, as a ghost of bygone days, walks through the dying woods of Lusatia in Andreas Schnögls documentary-fairytale. Here the energy company, Vattenfall, is mining coal and decimating the indigenous forests of the region. The director searches for memories in these forests, finds childhood tales amongst the trees and develops a documentary poetry of decline. For there is one thing that the images of GRANDMOTHER AND THE WOLF make strikingly clear: man is destroying his own livelihood. Lusatia is indeed only one example out of many and, in this film, it becomes the setting for a universal parable. Matthias Leitner

They remain invisible while their letters are read aloud. Their words tell of their life in Germany but, to begin with, all that we see are the houses of their home countries in Eastern Europe. We hear from young women who travelled to Germany with dreams, were wooed by false promises and ended up being forced into prostitution. “I felt just one single pain - one that filled my whole body,” one of the women writes about the first time that she was raped. Meanwhile the screen remains black and EIN BRIEF AUS DEUTSCHLAND pulls us deeper with every minute into a sinister maelstrom. Sebastian Mez has succeeded in making a film that, with its consistent simplicity, shakes off any false effects. Matthias Leitner