What happens to your idea of home, if you can never return? The short program Home, interrupted circles around contemporary stories of distance, displacement, and exile, most of them drawn from the filmmakers’ biographies. These short films are personal, sometimes painfully so, and speak to the ambivalence of a world that is increasingly connected through digitals means, yet somehow more distant than ever. Our protagonists live far away from home, in exile, as expats and refugees from war, yet they try to make a connection to their former lives. Reaching out to their families after years of silence, sharing painful memories of their past life with new friends and making a return visit. Gently and vulnerably, these five short films question whether reconciliation is ever possible (Monument), highlight the precarious nature of care work (She Crossed) and the strain of exercising solidarity from afar (Chrysanthemum), show what it’s like to be loved but not seen in your queerness (Correct me if I’m wrong) and what it means to leave your family in a war zone (Fire Drill).
Films in the program:
Fire Drill
Germany, 2024, 22 min, Maximilian Villwock, English, Ukrainian
Monument
Germany 2024, 15 min, Maksim Avdeev, Russian
Chrysanthemum
Germany, 2025, 9 min, Jingyuan Luo, English
She Crossed
USA, 2025, 20 min, Daisy Ziyan Zhang, English
Correct me if I’m wrong
Germany, 2025, 23 min, Hao Zhou, Chinese
German 
English