"I have a friend who calls hope obscene." The young Syrian Yara arrives in northern England with her family in 2016. Poverty and resentment now reign in the place where they once worked together in the coal mines and staged strikes against social cuts. Much to the displeasure of the long-established regulars, the local pub "The Old Oak" becomes a centre for the fugitives. Landlord TJ, himself on the brink of ruin, is given the almost hopeless role of mediator and conciliator until he comes up with a brilliant idea.

Ken Loach
Director Ken Loach has been making films for more than 50 years and has created around 100 hours of cinema, but not for a second does the principle of hope slip into obscenity. The belief in a more just and united community dominates the 27 feature films and four documentaries by the Englishman, who was born in Nuneaton in 1936. With "The Old Oak", he has now probably put his finger in the wounds of our society for the last time. At least that's what the 87-year-old Loach announced at the premiere of the film in Cannes.

"On a scale of 1 to 10 for Sonderline, you're a 9," says Hirayama's young colleague. The legally taciturn Hirayama can't and doesn't like to disagree. From the outside, his life as a devoted toilet cleaner, avid reader and passionate photographer of floral shadow plays with a penchant for American rock classics probably seems really strange.
Wim Wenders' "Perfect Days" is a flawless character study. So light, so original, so funny and sad at the same time that Koji Yakusho was rightly awarded the acting prize in Cannes.

Wim Wenders
For him, cities are not just locations. Wim Wenders, who was born in Düsseldorf in 1945 and grew up in Oberhausen, turns cities into characters in his documentary films, e.g. Tokyo in "Tokyo-Ga" in 1985 and Havana in "Buena Vista Social Club" in 1999. In some of his feature films, the locations even provide the title: "The Sky Over Berlin" (1987), "Lisbon Story" (1994), "Palermon Shooting" (2008). Without Tokyo and its world-famous public toilet blocks, "Perfect Days" would not have been possible.

If you missed it at the cinema in October, you can catch up on it via streaming in December. At least that's the promise of Apple TV+, the streaming portal that co-produced Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour epic "Killers of the Flower Moon". The film already made waves at its premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival, partly because Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro appeared together in front of the camera for the first time in a feature-length film by Scorsese. Above all, however, audiences and the press were moved by the unusual and unfortunately true story of the mysterious murders of members of the Osage tribe after large oil deposits were discovered on their reservation.

After billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, subsequently cutting staff and reorganising algorithms and calling the whole thing "X", the exodus of users was only a matter of time. At least the first million old Twitter hands have found a new home at Bluesky. The fact that Bluesky resembles Twitter on the outside is due to the fact that both microblogging services are based on ideas from software developer Jack Dorsey. However, to gain access to the platform affectionately known as "heaven" by ex-Twitterers, an invitation code is currently still required.