Program 2022

Even before the war, life was hard for the children in this halfway house in Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. An endless longing for security and normality contest with drunk mothers, violent fathers and desperate poverty. Kolya, Eva and Sascha find refuge for a few short months in a worn-down orphanage near the front line.

The remote island of St. Helena is best known for being where Napoleon spent his final years in exile and was ultimately buried. His grave is beautifully maintained and serves as the island's biggest tourist attraction. To encourage tourism, the island decides to build its first commercial airport.

Every day, twelve-year-old Houlaye walks many kilometers – not to school, but to fetch water. She lives in the small village of Tatis in northern Niger and is one of about 2.2 billion people worldwide without direct access to drinking water. She often has to stop her little brothers from using the precious water to wash.

Aya is growing up in a hut by the sea. She likes to sleep in the sand, she is in love, she picks coconuts and looks after her little brother. When her mother asks her where she would like to live if she could choose freely, Aya answers: here, on Layou Island. But the water level is rising and the island off the Ivory Coast is sinking metre by metre into the sea.

‘A few tweets and messages on the internet, what can you do?’ But is that whole truth? More than 40,000 sexist insults, rape and death threats, a montage of a decapitated woman’s head, footage of a rape and house burglaries – there is no way that this kind of hatred simply stays online.

Marjorie Dannenfelser has just started her studies and thinks she is pregnant. She wants to have an abortion immediately. But she turns out to be wrong. Years later, Marjorie has changed sides – becoming one of the most influential voices of anti-abortion activism in the United States.

Melati is 18 years old and has been fighting against plastic pollution in Indonesia since she was a child. On a journey around the world, she meets seven young activists. Like her, they are all fighting for a better future and not only achieving incredible things: they are also completely reinventing their lives and the lives of many others.

Patricio is living through an unimaginable nightmare. He lost his daughter when she and her husband joined the IS in Syria, before they were both killed in combat in 2019.

Up in the mists of the mountains of North Vietnam, Di, 14, is caught between two worlds: the traditional life of the Hmong, a culture where women marry young —the tradition of teenage "bride-kidnapping" is still practiced —and the wide world she sees everyday on her smartphone and that she dreams of becoming part of.