SECTION: U18 Youth Film Competition

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Exuberant emotions and time and again a great longing for freedom. The seven films in this year's U18 Youth Film Competition impressively display the various facets of growing up in the digital age.

In a journey the encompasses algorithms that rule the world and hidden longings to threatening social media communities and the difficulties of maintaining real relationships in a world of likes, to a timeless, tranquil family drama, we travel from the festival's home region to the Macedonian mountains and Russian high-rise apartment complexes, across the Turkish Aegean Sea to the futuristic worlds of fantasy. As in previous years, a German-Polish-Czech student jury will again vote on the Best Film of this film series.

The competition was curated by Joshua Jádi.
The U18 YOUTH FILM COMPETITION is supported by the Industrie- und Handelskammer Cottbus.

Trübe Wolken

Christian Schäfer
Germany / 2021 / 103 min

Paul (Jonas Holdenrieder) lives together with his little brother Silas (Aurel Klug) and their parents on an inconspicuous housing estate in a grey provincial town, somewhere in Germany. Both lonesome and aimlessly he wanders through a wooded no man's ...

Sisterhood

Sestra

Dina Duma
Northern Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro / 2021 / 90 min

Generation Z: music, drunkenness and jealousy, Instagram posts and first sex. With first love comes a test for the friendship of two inseparable teenage girls in this captivating yet sombre portrait of a generation lost amongst the competition for ...

Love Tasting

Ostatni komers

Dawid Nickel
Poland / 2020 / 84 min

Smoking grass, sex, bodybuilding and boredom in this, a visually intoxicating coming-of-age drama set in a small Polish town. Olivia is pregnant. Monika is frustrated since her boyfriend Kuba prefers to hang out with her brother Tomek. When Tomek ...

Leave The Group

Vyyti Iz Gruppy

Mariya Tumova
Russia / 2021 / 100 min

A gripping action thriller, drawing on Russian hip-hop culture and the country's graffiti street art scene, about a teenager going through the trials and tribulations of adolescence. In search of his place in the world Gosha joins a social network to ...

Youth Topia

Dennis Stormer and Marisa Meier
Switzerland, Germany / 2021 / 85 min

The algorithm calculates who you are and what you are allowed to do in this trendy, experimental coming-of-age film captured in rose-coloured tones. A group of high-tech hippies prefer to check their likes rather than grow up. That is until Vanya is ...

Two Ships

Martanské lode

Jan Foukal
Czech Republic, Norway / 2021 / 77 min

A romance under pressure: Eliška and Martin get together and soon can no longer live without each other. Then, however, a problem creeps into the relationship that slowly threatens to dominate everything in this bitter love story set against the ...

Geranium

Sardunya

Çağil Bocut
Turkey, Germany / 2021 / 81 min

Torn from the midst of life. Shortly before graduation 19-year-old Defne has to go home; her father has suffered a stroke. The family is wealthy yet emotionally cold. Previously suppressed secrets emerge from the dark corners of the spacious house. ...