Anonymous high-rise apartment blocks, bustling schoolyards and sterile waiting rooms – these are the confined spaces of our everyday lives, the harsh topography of our cities and countries, in which joy and fear, longing and hope unfold – often unnoticed in the moment itself. But the films in the GSA competition look closely and dare to take a close-up view of these microcosms. They find the bigger picture in the smaller frame, the universal in the personal.

Life is a schoolyard: a symbol of our society. This is where opposites meet, social dynamics are played out, boundaries are explored. Friendships develop, conflicts flare up, grown men suddenly find themselves engaged in childish power struggles. The other one always started it. But it’s no longer about envy of the other’s lunch or unfair swaps for trading cards – it’s about the bigger picture. (1:10)

The high-rise block looms like an insurmountable wall – gargantuan, but life is hidden behind every window, behind every door. A woman desperately tries to escape her grey existence, but it’s as if the concrete won’t let her go. Her suicide attempts fail time and time again. Then she discovers like-minded people: a group of fatalists who challenge fate. „I want to play!“ she shouts, liberated – RULETISTA begins, a game with high stakes.

Like a splash of colour, the two non-terrestrial beings sit in the waiting room of an abortion clinic in the middle of Germany. Wrapped up warmly in hand-knitted full-body outfits, they are nevertheless unprepared for the coldness of German bureaucracy. The sterile and narrow-minded expressions and procedures of the operation reach an unexpected level of brutality and absurdity, which strikes with full force in this vulnerable moment. (SHUT UP AND SUFFER)

46 films show us a modern cinematic landscape in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Movies that show the diversity of human stories in all their contradictions – quiet and loud, bizarre and genuine, familiar and yet surprisingly new.