The steel and glass jungle of contemporary London, scaffolded and climbing skywards at breakneck speed. With signs of supposed growth at every turn, a disorientating feeling of falling but never landing pervades. Despite the vast distance between the bottom and the top – the haves and have nots – a softness and a hope for reclamation of the cityscape glimmers at the edges of the 16mm frame.

When 36-year-old Amaru (one of the directors of the film) was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour, he and his wife (co-director Mila Araoz) embarked on a trip from the UK to Bolivia. Together they created an intervention of love and play that would help him and his family face the far greater journey that lay ahead of him.

My mother, Carol Frieda Herman P. Hirsch, Chaya bas Moshe ve Yehudit, died on June 23, 2022, at home, the way she wanted her last weeks to be. Self-determined, surrounded by majestic trees outside the windows, with birds chirping in the background. With her books in shelves nearby. Even when she lacked the energy to read, she was glad to have those books near her. And she enjoyed the smells of good food, her music and other simple things as long as it was possible. The choice to use film material that was way past its sell-by date corresponds with how, as one approaches the end of one’s life, things fall apart, gradually. A tribute.

Daily life unfolds in a gated community of Manila amidst birdsong, effigies of the Holy Family, lush greenery and the intricacies of class. Rafael Manuel's (co-director alongside Tatjana Fanny) intimate gaze on his own childhood home oscillates between personal and political, offering a tender yet piercing view into social and familial structures in the Philippines.

When you see Carlijn Kingma’s impressive artwork The Waterworks of Money, that efficiently illustrates the way the financial sector runs through everyday life, it’s hard to imagine how one would even begin creating something so highly detailed and intricate. But patience seems to be the keyword of this documentary portrait that follows Kingma from the inception of The Waterworks of Money to its display at the Biennale in Venice. Filmmaker Ariane Greep shows a master at work, slowly but surely refining her work into the masterpiece it became.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, photographer and filmmaker Carel van Hees (2KM2 - het heden van de stad, IFFR 2006) is forced to turn his apartment in Rotterdam's RVS flats into his own little world. The apartment, originally built as a home for working single women, is also known as the Hunkerbunker (the bunker of yearning), now its residents' lives are confined to their units. On the tenth floor van Hees meets Gerarda van Nimwegen, a 106-year-old woman who hasn’t left her apartment for the past five years. During her long life she has survived many crises, including the Spanish flu, the poverty of the interbellum and the bombing of Rotterdam – all this without losing her sense of humour. Berichten uit de Hunkerbunker is a loving tribute to a remarkable resident whose life has come to a halt in the apartment she’s lived in since the age of 44.

Ans Hoornweg died in 2022 at the age of 80. Hers was an extraordinary story. Extraordinary for others, that is, as contact with extraterrestrials was nothing special for Ans: she appeared on TV several times as a medium who could communicate with aliens. In Ans en het universum, for one last time, she recalls her out-of-body experiences and her visits to other planets. Ans also discusses her media appearances and how people would call her crazy, but still, Ans did not have one shred of doubt: aliens are everywhere and we’re slowly transitioning to an era where current gender norms are no longer applicable. Filmmakers Noëlle Ingeveldt and Juriaan van Berkel work together as Berkveldt to produce a sincere testimonial of a woman with a remarkable life story, filmed amongst the many dolls Ans made in the same likeness of her alien friends.

In 1972, the arrival of migrant workers led to riots in the Rotterdam neighbourhood of Afrikaanderwijk. An explosion of violence ensued, accompanied by a hailstorm of stones and Molotov cocktails. As the current generation recount testimonials, the events are reconstructed and imbued with present-day significance. This effect is amplified through the use of a split screen showing past and present at the same time. In (Re)membering the riots in Afrikaanderwijk in 1972 or guest, host, ghos-ti, visual artist Cihad Caner explores the things we remember and the things we forget and how memories and perspectives are bound to time and place – different for each individual.

6000 mensonges comes to the spectator as lightning in a clear sky. What starts as a recollection of prenatal images we are used to seeing suddenly becomes a dive into an unknown territory, in which the border between reality and fiction is no longer relevant. The result is a striking, haunting and powerful testimony of a devastating experience that is lived by many in silence, told in the most contemporary possible way.

After A Bright Summer Diary (IFFR 2020) and Ningdu (IFFR 2022) we once again welcome Lei Lei to Rotterdam with this compelling tribute to bygone images and memories. As always, the mundane comes alive through a conscientious montage of gorgeous compositions. A two-part quest for what has been lost through time, Break no.1 & Break no.2 fires the imagination.

Through observing the landscape and models of cohabitation between living and non-living entities, Croatian experimental filmmaker Ana Hušman, examines the ways in which memories are built and narratives formed. And also how they disappear and fragment. A caring cinematic homage to female members of Hušman's family, as well as to Lika, a neglected, sparsely populated region from where they originate.

Milazim, Fatmir and Liridon are veteran manual labourers who experienced accidents in their workplaces in Kosovo, Europe's youngest country. In this poetic experimental documentary tribute to a now almost extinct class of people, Ilir Hasanaj gives voice to gentle, sincere and dignified, but almost invisible individuals, who fell prey to harsh and primitive capitalistic machinery and policy in the Balkans.

Bergmanesque ghosts appear at the bedside of Edward Weki, a 75-year-old Sudanese man suffering from the final stage of Parkinson’s: Alma, the nurse of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, and a female version of Death from his The Seventh Seal help the old man recover lost memories of his life on the island of Farö.

In the film, Klopfenstein portrays a metaphorical renovation of the burned-down church of his past in and with cinema. As tools, he merely has his computer and files of his own films, as well as masses of faces long gone and places razed from memory. One drifts deliciously with Klopfenstein through a super-edit of his own oeuvre, removed from established modes of this type of filmmaking and instead functioning in an intimate and poignant expression, where fleeting gestures can unleash avalanches of unexpected memories.

GW Pabst: film director, patriarch, "the Great Unknown". The giant of German-language cinema, at last told privately and artistically in all his in all his contradictoriness. Silent films interweave with real stories in a journey from the 1920s to today. A film about dream and trauma, about an enormous artistic, film-historical and personal heritage and about the change in the image of male pose and female power...

While he was alive, Amos Guttman remained a red flag for the notoriously conservative Israeli film establishment. A Romanian migrant, he, never truly found his place in his new home. He was gay and made the nation's first movies on the subject. He was an artist who wanted to make films not for the masses but for the few. Conversely, he wanted to make movies that connected with the rest of the world and not only Israel – works that maybe Derek Jarman or Pedro Almodóvar could watch by chance and feel understood.

A full century after publication, The Waste Land considers T. S. Eliot's namesake poem alongside our present, assuredly asserting that the words continue to resonate and to fuel our imagination. Filmmaker Chris Teerink offers no analysis of the poem, but instead seeks parallels. With a soundtrack by Dutch singer-songewriter Blaudzun, and using photographs and stills instead of moving images, he creates a slideshow that mirrors the fragmentary core of Eliot's language.

A child is drawn to the stillness of nature beyond a city. A teenager, rising from sleep in a thicket, makes their way back to a trailer: to warmth, a caretaker, a dog. But the thudding on hard concrete from the highway above is no comfort. A tree envelopes a fence with its growth – grasses sprout through cracked and decaying industry. The individual is searching, pushing forward through landscapes and time. Adulthood leads into the forest.

Song of All Ends gently leads us into the daily life of a family living in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, sixteen months after the dreadful port explosion. With slow determination the atmosphere builds through intriguing, as-yet unconnected, images in stark black-and-white – the face of a young girl, a teddy bear, rags flapping in the breeze, roofs strewn with rubble and tarpaulins. Water streams everywhere and skeletal buildings are set against a grey sky littered with clouds.