A distant idyll featuring well-behaved children at play: a prettily illustrated and well-labelled world. An unsuspecting rabbit scampers there which may be cute but can also be tortured and slaughtered. And when a goblin who can turn insects into flashing diamonds springs from the dead body, one would have to be a stupid child indeed not to smell a business opportunity. Good children! Bad children!

Socio-geographic explorations on the periphery of Addis Ababa, run through by a variety of borders and rifts – between agrarian and urban spatial practices, between economic and linguistic floes, between perspective and dilemma. A polyphonic audiovisual narrative of people who are forced to experience the impetuous urbanisation of African societies the hard way, recorded as a case study that expands into a complex allegory.

Addis Ababa (Finfinnee in the language of the rural Oromo people) is a rapidly growing East African metropolis. “Rift Finfinnee” evolves from the concrete observation of main and side effects of urbanisation in four extremely different settlements, located within sight of each other on the eastern outskirts of the Ethiopian capital, to an expansive composition about the dynamics of an urban turbo modernisation. The Great Rift Valley currently still (!) constitutes a both natural and symbolic barrier to limit the further tentacle-like expansion of the megacity into agricultural territory – across this and other rifts. This interim report on the situation at the rifts probes the field of tension created by unstable pasts, unreliable futures and a contested present.

Fluctuation at the Vienna football club RSV is high. Coach Robin, who once hosted parties at the Prater sauna, sees his club as a political project, too: Players from various birth nations come together in his “dirty rotten bunch”. Athletic highlights are quite often followed by relegation, discipline and excess are cheek by jowl at RSV. Director Jasmin Baumgartner has followed Robin and his team over several years.

“My players are like my kids”, Robin says. And kids can be exhausting. They are caught with joints by the police on their way to the Slovenian training camp or prefer to go to the casino instead of completing their training units. But even president Robin isn’t averse to parties. On the sidelines of the amateur league it can get boozy and often rough: Opposing fans insult and discriminate against black athletes in particular. A behaviour for which Robin has no patience at all. He sees it this way: “If we integrate the super sweet Muslim fraction in our club, with our Serbian nationalists, uneducated Austrians and our Muslim-hating Congolese players, then we’ll not only be promoted to the fourth division. We’ll even stop the rise of the right-wing nationalists.”

Romanas, his parents Aivaras and Diana and their little dog live in a cramped place in the Lithuanian harbour town of Klaipėda. Linas Mikuta takes an unprejudiced look at a loving family structure where dreams are interpreted, worries are shared and news negotiated over cigarettes and cake, while at the same time the narrative of a timeless childhood summer full of headstands by the side of the road, somersaults on the beach and afternoons in box houses unfolds.

With his friends Romanas roams through ruins, neighbourhoods and along the coast. The eight-year-old conquers his own worlds, lives in his own time. The result is a portrait of a wealth of relationships and resilience at a precarious place that’s completely of the moment. Everyday rituals, care and community are captured in humorous, warm tableaus and light-drenched exterior shots. This film knows about the great love in small things. It knows about pop songs that hit you right in the heart, about tears you are not left alone with, and that playing with the waves between the green sea and the white sand means all the world.

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.