The stereotypical idea of pregnancy is a challenge for persons who do not define themselves as female only. This auto-theoretical essay explores the future of the family and non-binary reproduction scenarios in which all bodies can become pregnant. We travel into the womb of a posthuman and follow speculations about the de-feminisation of childbearing.

A new father takes his wife and daughter on a journey to his mother’s birthplace in Scotland. It is 1976 – the year in which NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 space probes land on the surface of Mars. They send images of an only vaguely explored area from a great distance, enabling a first look into the history of an alien planet. Like the NASA scientists, the small family are hoping that their journey will give them insights into the past, an understanding of the present situation and perhaps even the chance to anticipate the future.

Texts from the father’s travel diary, photos and video recordings are interwoven with visual and sound material from the NASA archives to form a multilayered narrative that navigates several decades of family history, cosmological questions and philosophical reflections. A filmic multiverse unfolds before us whose elementary particles oscillate between times and worlds, between reality and fiction.

The documentary video for the installation version of the short film “1976: Search for Life” takes us to Mars. There – between huge boulders and in the red light of our sibling planet – we find a small television set. With headphones and in an intimate atmosphere, Tess Martin shares a very personal memory of an important historical event with us.

Narrated by the incarnate ghost of a deceased real hair donor. In the post-war era, the export of real hair wigs contributed to Asia’s economic development, with Hong Kong as a major hub. In its heyday in the 1960s, “Asian real hair” was popular with wealthy U.S. women, but then the USA imposed an embargo on the product, now classified as “communist hair”. This is where the intricate and innovatively realised story begins: Starting with complex economical and sociopolitical contexts, it weaves a thread that runs through various historical and dreamlike staged levels.

Hong Kong was and is a space of in-between-ness – between East and West, between communism and capitalism. Perhaps that is why there are so many spooks in the city, one protagonist speculates. Just like the well-travelled ghost, an eternally wandering entity and contemporary witness of an imperial and colonialist past.

In the midst of a blue-violet tinted mountain range are the remains of a lonely pavilion. Accompanied by the music of Max Cooper, this setting becomes the stage of a dance performance – in which our hands play the leading roles. Intuitively we let the rhythm take them over, move them playfully, form graceful gestures. At this hypnotic place everything is possible for the dancers.

The rising sun reveals a gruesome crime. In the orange-red dawn, between the dunes and the rippling sea, a young woman is strangled to death. The victim’s neck is marked by the deep imprints of her murderer’s hands. The mother’s moving dirge – based on a poem by Percy Shelley – accompanies us as her daughter Ginevra is laid out and resurrects.

A device that can create the illusion of movement can be built by coupling the speed of a rotating disc to the recording frame rate of a camera. This so-called phonotrope is a contemporary version of the phenakistiscope. In her how-to video, Tess Martin explains how this technique works and how it was used in her film “Orbit.”

We meet an artificial intelligence designed to ease our transition into the digital. Life in the analogue world is no longer possible, not even necessary. The VR experience guides us through a speculative scenario that illuminates the relationship between humans, machines and nature in posthumanism. Texts, images and sounds were created by means of AI and algorithms.

A group of old men in an abandoned asbestos mining town on the edge of the Kalahari Desert resist evacuation. They have no place to go because they were once notorious as soldiers of the infamous South African Battalion 32, also known as “The Terrible Ones”. Both perpetrators and victims of history, they become actors in the biblical story of Judas Iscariot in Boris Gerrets’ equally disturbing and fascinating cinematic legacy.

The spectacle under a blazing sun confronts the men, who live in abject poverty, with their unresolved past. Many of them had been forcibly recruited by the FNLA and UNITA resistance movements in the Angolan War of Independence against Portugal. After the communist MPLA took power, they found themselves as mercenaries fighting alongside white South Africans against their own people and finally defending the Apartheid regime in the colonial struggle in Namibia and the South African townships. On the fringes of the surreal film location between the decaying buildings of the old mining town, they speak for the first time about their life stories, talk about betrayal, guilt and remorse. Having been steamrolled by global politics, turned into undesirables, exiles, forgotten, suppressed and broken men, they finally become visible again as human beings in front of the camera.

Two men by themselves: Zdravko, a war veteran with a hearing impairment who lives as a fisherman in the wilderness, and Stefan, a director with Bosnian roots who has forgotten his mother tongue. The unlikely friendship develops against a both sparse and mysterious background. For while Stefan superimposes his thoughts in text form on the shots, Zdravko sends sounds into the depth with a wooden stick. They are meant to attract catfish that make their rounds in a lake. In the process, the two men summon each other, so to speak, bring to light what was buried, fraternize, overcome inner barriers.

“Imagine this camera is your mother”, a father tells his daughter. In the 1990s, scores of families from the Republic of Moldova began a ritualised mail exchange between the mothers, who had emigrated for economic reasons, and their relatives back home. The former sent money and goods; the latter sent videotapes. These amateur recordings are the material of this film. They testify to the painful gaps the absent persons left in the lives of those who stayed behind.

Migration is a big factor in post-socialist states buffeted by recession and inflation after the end of the Soviet Union – and in this case, also by the civil war over Transnistria. According to data from 2011/2012, about a third of Moldovan children had one parent abroad. In this small country between Romania and the Ukraine, too, a higher percentage of fathers choose work migration. Otilia Babara, however, is specifically interested in the consequences of long absent mothers, who work for nursing services in Italy, for example, to earn their family’s livelihood, and who express their love through care packages. The loss of connection to their mother – all of whom stay out of the frame –, which affects girls in particular, emerges in the cracks of the staged home videos, when wandering glances reveal that the children no longer believe in their return.

A macabre Italian children’s song tells the story of Mario, a soldier who returns from war and must learn that his girlfriend has left him for another man. Mario decides to kill her. The film picks up on the ambivalent mood of the song and reinforces its vibration in the space between blithe children’s game and brutal murder.

Vincent Monnikendam calls his archive film “a kinematographic image of the Dutch-Indies 1912 – c. 1933” in the subtitle, echoing the ponderous bureaucratic language of the Dutch authorities who at the time commissioned the footage he re-edited. He condensed some 280,000 metres of nitrate film, shot by professionals but left largely uncut, into a compilation about indigenous people and their immigrant rulers in the former colony. The originally silent footage begins to speak – not in an explanatory voiceover, but in the songs and stories of the colonized. The images are unchanged. But they have to be read in a new way.

Twenty years ago, filmmaker Wiam Al-Zabari fled Baghdad with his family in the middle of the night. His father, a dissident former ambassador, had already escaped from Iraq and was waiting for them in the Netherlands. Since then, no one in the family has ever spoken about the events. What exactly happened was always a taboo. Now that Wiam has become a father himself, he realises that his past life is catching up with him and that more and more questions are arising, the biggest being: Why did they have to flee in the first place? Wiam wants to finally find out. For the first time, he breaks the silence and begins to research the past in dialogues with his parents and siblings. Above all he wants to prevent passing on these traumatic experiences to his son.

In this filmic family therapy, he addresses Nour, his little son, directly. Wiam promised himself and the boy this film to clear up the long-suppressed themes in a way that will allow Nour to feel firm ground under his feet when he is grown up. In doing so, Wiam is unsparingly honest with himself and his relatives and chooses a number of unusual artistic tricks. For example, he inserts himself as a director from offscreen, critically analysing his own position in the fabric of speaking and silence: an attempted inside view from the outside.

A life dedicated to decay. Johannes Weigelt (1890–1948) was a palaeontologist, a dilettante photographer, a Nazi, all of it fervent. This essay is dedicated to the pioneer of taphonomy – sober and at the same time exciting in form. Three image fields are filled with changing content: black and white documents of fields of animal carcasses, a snapshot with Göring, text panels, artful photomontages. They all charge one another, containing a vibrantly shimmering biography fossilised in images.

As we watch individual details and their interplay as a whole, presented on rotating discs, we get a spark of insight into the interactions of flora and fauna on earth and the elemental power of our central star, the sun. Temporality, rhythm and the functioning of film are hinted at. A look at the origins of life and the moving image.