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Climb a transmission tower, crawl through the underground escape route of a kindergarten lunchroom, occupy a house in East Berlin: there are many ways to cross borders. In year twenty after the fall of the wall, young filmmakers take a look at boundary crossings in 1939, 1989 and today. A little film screening. By Verena Hütter

Noa is waiting for the rain. The girl hopes that it will change everything. It will be good for the plants and animals in Kfar Saba, a little town in Israel, and it will bring her family back together. Yet, before the first drops, the Berlin wall falls. It is November 1989 and Noa’s family watches the events on the television screen. In fact, the occurrence in far-away German does change the lives of Noa and her family in Israel.

Filmmaker Ester Amrami, who tells the story of Noa and her family in HaYoreh – First Rain, is one of the award winners of the Third International Short Film Competition that the foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future and the Goethe-Institut announced last year. Young filmmakers from eleven countries – Belarus, Germany, Estonia, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and the USA report about “Crossing Boundaries” both minor and major, political and familial.

From 335 synopses submitted, a jury chose 33 to be realized as short films. Nineteen of the films won prizes; nine of them first prize.
The young filmmakers were asked to deal with two different, world-shaking boundary crossings of the past from their perspective in 2009. The first was the beginning of the Second World War in 1939; a violent crossing of boundaries. The second occurred in 1989, when the year of change peacefully cleared away the borders of the Cold War, thus making it a symbol of boundless freedom.

In HaYoreh – First Rain by Ester Amrami, a student at the Potsdam Film Academy, the long summer of 1989 ends for Noa with the longed for reconciliation of her parents, who together watch the fall of the wall on television – a border crossing with a happy ending.

How many boundaries can be crossed in a very small space?

Many of the films submitted do not limit themselves to what happened in the past, but sound out borders made in the immediate present. For example, Israeli filmmaker Hilla Lavie focuses on the year 2009 in her film Friedrichshain, in which she tells about the hip Berlin district in the eastern part of the city. Hilla Lavie takes the dramatic changes in Germany since the Second World War off the great political world stage and places them in this small city quarter. In her story of an occupied house, today’s and former squatters have their say. They report about their fight against the vacating of their house, about the neo-Nazis next door, about protests and violent clashes with the Berlin police force.

Some of the young filmmakers discovered quite unusual ways of crossing boundaries – both real and fictional. In the Polish short film The Conductor by Justyna Calinska and Beata Calinska, music is the means for crossing boundaries, in Forget-Me-Not by Latvian director Inga Zinovjeva it is the climbing of a transmission tower. In the animated short Escape by Estonian director Kristjan Holm, a boy in kindergarten uses a trick to free himself from a clearly hopeless situation at the very last moment. Forced to stay seated until he finishes his breakfast porridge, he feels like a prisoner until in his greatest distress, he eats and eats and eats, nibbling himself to freedom like a rock worm.

Seventy years after the beginning of the Second World War and 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the organizers of the competition had a declared objective: to encourage debate about the dangers inherent in crossing boundaries as well as the chances offered those who dare to do so, as in Noa’s case.