Is he crazy or a genius? An impoverished compulsive hoarder or a millionaire? Many legends surround octogenarian Adolf Haeberli, who lives in a cramped and dilapidated house in the luxury spa town of St. Moritz. For some residents his home is an eyesore, while for others it’s a creative place of resistance. Haeberli himself thinks he was born under a lucky star. In this humorous but never exposing portrait of a lateral thinker, every voice is heard.

A felicitous and at the same time almost unbearable cinematic experimental set-up that uses documentary means to show what the Belarusian reality behind the news items looks like. Based on eyewitness accounts, Pavel Mozhar re-stages Lukashenko’s perfidious and oppression-based power system. Violence in the shape of detailed reconstructions may seem abstract at first glance but drills itself into our consciousness all the more persistently in the course of the film.

Just hold your breath. Perhaps this helps as much against the pain of parting as the stinging nettles of one’s childhood. Sheila died of hay dust in her lungs and it seems as if the family farm died with the horse, too. After its sale, the laconic narrator pays digital visits via 3D online maps. But even the most detailed view says nothing about the grave of the three-legged farm cat. Using animation and image manipulation, he reclaims the remembered place.

Ayala Shoshana Guy tries to grasp the ephemeral: She interweaves her grandfather Jancsi’s story, remembered only in fragments, who left Vienna with his brother Bandi to escape the Nazi regime, with her own inner images, thus questioning them in a way. A ship to Palestine turns into an all-inclusive cruise liner, the vague becomes concrete only to fade away again. Cautious and bold in equal measure, the granddaughter enters shadowy terrain.

What does it mean to make an animated film accessible to people with impaired vision? Can audio description convey what’s happening on the screen and what is, especially in animated film, often entirely a product of the imagination? Anne Isensee (Golden Dove for “Megatrick” in 2017) tackles these complex questions with a light touch, humour and verbal wit. She pulls off the feat of producing a concentrated cinematic investigation into the multi-layered quality of (all) perception.

Men are felling trees in the rain forest, barefoot, using chainsaws to cut through the huge trunks. They live in nature, off nature and against nature. Illegal wood selling seems to be their only chance to feed their families. At the same time, they are destroying – tree by tree – their own livelihood. This quiet observation ends with the arduous transport of the wood out of the forest. Anyone who thinks ahead knows that it will end up in our apartments, too, as a mahogany table or Bangkirai floor.

Lukas Marxt’s fourth film about the Salton Sea in Southern California focuses on 1944/45, when about 150 dummies, replicas of the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were dropped there for ballistic tests. “Marine Target” measures the remains of the wooden target platforms from up close and high above. The disconcerting soundtrack to this fascinating filmic study is provided by a swelling adaptation of the Nigerian hit “Atomic Bomb” by William Onyeabor.

A person swims for their life in the open sea. A European merchant vessel starts its engines and sails away from them. The pilot of a civilian aerial reconnaissance plane admonishes the captain and appeals to his conscience. The Libyan coast guard and the swimming person reach the decks of the European merchant vessel at the same time. Outcome unknown. The world turns in circles. This is not a film about the alleged refugee problem but one about the problem called Europe.

Why do we see certain colours even when they aren’t there? Chinese director Tang Han meticulously analyses the 100 Yuan bill, which carries a portrait of Mao Zedong, and finds that – despite official representations and general perception – the note is pink rather than red. In a serious tone and colourful, merry images she also casually upsets any number of other entrenched notions about digitalization, globalization, capitalism and gender.

What’s the parallel between a Leipzig allotment club and the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Greece? Alert to historical lines of connection, outstanding archive material and enchanting images of the austere Cretan landscape, the complex links between silkworm breeding here and German war crimes there are laid bare. The focus is less on settling questions of guilt than on depicting the inner dynamics of war, resistance and forgetting.