A red-haired girl with unruly braids makes her way through her small village on a white horse. With her monkey on her shoulder and her heart on her sleeve, the world holds its breath. Pippi Longstocking became an open rebellion against boredom, rules, and order. But behind the girl was a young woman who had long remained invisible.

Astrid Lindgren, long before her great success, kept wartime diaries between 1939 and 1945, hidden in a wardrobe for seventy years. They are the testimony of a woman who observed the horrors of the world. Wilfried Hauke’s documentary opens this intimate archive. Between fear, humor, and self-doubt, a portrait emerges of a woman who finds strength through writing, using it to understand herself and the world. The voices of her daughter, granddaughter, and great-grandson briefly bring her memories back to life.

We see Astrid in Stockholm, navigating everyday life and the constant hum of the world crisis. Her observations of the war, her concern for her family, and the political news weigh on her life and that of her child. Yet despite the relentless situation, she never lost her humor or her ability to breathe life even into the deepest darkness, whether through Pippi Longstocking, Emil of Lönneberga, or Ronja the Robber’s Daughter.

Every sentence Astrid Lindgren wrote is an act of resistance against fear, indifference, and the tyrannies of everyday life. You can feel the unstoppable force of a woman who shaped stories from despair to understand the world a little better and to remind us how important it is to be ahead of one’s time.

Life stops turning. The past and the future are out of reach. And the two people who seemed made for each other are pulled in opposite directions, without ever really moving. Frozen, locked in place. In the midst of a horror brought on by the plague.

Hamnet lingers in this state. The world has fallen out of joint, and everything shifts slowly. Almost imperceptibly, like a landscape you look at every day and only notice after weeks that it has changed. Days lose their edges, nature loses its touch, and closeness feels distant, like a quiet crack running through everything you had built. Loved ones stand side by side and yet drift apart without taking a single step.

Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, the film explores the personal unraveling of Shakespeare and his wife, leading up to that singular moment when everything collapses and feels irreparable. Until it becomes clear that love does not simply end. It changes.

Vahid once endured the machinery of a regime that left marks no time could erase. A seemingly insignificant incident in the present opens a door to what was never truly over.

Consumed by the memories of torture in prison, it is precisely a squeaking sound that will sooner or later bring Vahid release. The squeak of his tormentor’s prosthesis. The sound that confronts him with a choice: to become part of the problem or to allow mercy.

In It Was Just an Accident by Jafar Panahi, the question is one of morality. Can an individual confront the inhumanity of a totalitarian regime with the same rigidity, or is the preservation of (shared) humanity perhaps the stronger response?

Born from a simple accident, a story unfolds that is initially defined by anger. An inward-consuming anger that offers its bearer only a brief sense of comfort. A feeling one can escape into, one that understands, that always stays on the same side. Until that anger crosses from the psychological into the physical, risking the complete destruction of lives built with care. An anger that turns into revenge.

Guillermo del Toro’s creatures often function as vessels for human longing, loneliness, and otherness. Frankenstein follows the same emotional path. It is a story about not belonging and about the dehumanization of a being capable of feeling. Feelings, no different from those of any other character in the film. And yet the creature is never allowed to truly become part of their world. It remains an “it.” Because without a name, there can be no humanity.

This process of dehumanization does not begin with society. It begins with the creator himself. Victor Frankenstein, the obsessive scientist, who thinks only of the moment of creation, never of what comes after. The first heartbeat is not followed by care, but by shock. Not by responsibility, but by abandonment. For the viewer, this absence of empathy becomes a source of frustration.

Built from the “best” body parts of fallen soldiers and executed criminals, Victor creates something that stands in complete opposition to nature. A human being assembled by hand. To his own surprise, one who feels, who carries empathy, desire, and the ability to form genuine human connection.