A blue wooden house at the edge of the forest, lonely, but not peaceful and quiet. This is where Lydia lives, a transgender ornithologist who presents herself in high heels and a pearl necklace one day, in cargo pants and functional wear the next. Director Sasha Kulak calls her film a documentary fairy tale, and the borders between reality and fiction are blurred indeed, because Lydia loves play, staging, the uncanny – and David Lynch.

Lydia has watched “Twin Peaks” more than thirty times, its characters and plots have long since spilled over into Shcherbinka, a small town south of Moscow. She claims to find bodies in the underbrush and even Lynch’s “Red Room” has been replicated under the roof of her house. Now she’s facing a new challenge: the creation of Lara, a lifelike silicone doll whose voice also guides us through Kulak’s cinematic tale. Lydia works hard at realising her dreams, but she is equally passionate about studying birds and the so-called Nezhulyas, shy eyeless creatures that are exceedingly cuddly and have tantric potential. “A Hawk as Big as a Horse” becomes a vehicle of Lydia’s visions, using three-dimensional animation and various cinematic techniques to open a portal to a very specific fantasy.

Five young people from Ukraine talk about their lives after the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all of them fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the war, however, shattered their life plans. Representing “Generation Maidan”, they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. Theatre director Roza Sarkisian produces a Hamlet adaptation with them in which they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas on stage again.

For them Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is not just a historical text, but a current and existential dilemma that has no clear answer. The film follows the rehearsals where different biographies, self-images and political positions clash: A soldier meets his first LGBT person, the feminist quarrels with the fact that the war has undone hard-won emancipatory achievements. Frictions and differences are exposed, compromises are strenuously negotiated. Eventually the film’s focus widens and leaves the stage to introduce the five as individuals with their own inner struggles. The result is a many-layered, dense portrait of a torn and yet powerful Ukrainian generation who, due to the Russian invasion, find themselves at war again, only a few months after their production premiered.

The façade of the Paris cultural restaurant EP7 forms the presentation surface for an animated architectural collage. Staggered exterior views of buildings rotate. The game of deception of lines of sight, angles and geometries has an irritating effect. The spatial depths lure the eye into the supposed interior of the body behind the skin of the façade, which is at the same time the mirror of an urban architecture of restlessness.

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.

The yellow banana beckons from the fruit basket; it’s peeled in no time and about to disappear in the mouth. But stop! Before you can at last take the first bite, you have to share. The banana becomes smaller and smaller. The elephant, too, wants a piece of the sweet fruit. A piece for you, a piece for me … A little film about the joys of sharing.

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.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed human relationships. Archive material, 360° footage and artificially generated images are used to create a synaesthetic essay film about loneliness, insecurity and the increasing shift of our everyday life into the digital realm. Dystopic and anonymous stories merge in a collage of the disturbing social and political phenomena of our time.

A man in socks takes a shower and melts. A claw machine in which nothing can be grabbed is fed coins. A mermaid makes sculptures of feet. A woman packs a banana into a plastic bag, then into another and another and … Figures suffering from the absurd wander through a good dozen laconically drawn momentary miniatures, ceaselessly looking for what can’t be found: meaning. Katarzyna Miechowicz’s animated folly prickles, even existentially.

A voice speaking the Aztec language Nahuatl and a ritual song accompany the children’s games in the Mayan rain forest. They put their ears to the trees which seem to speak to each other and to the universe. They listen to an ancient love story that continues today. A myth of Mesoamerican culture is invoked. Animated sequences and extreme backlighting visualize the tree’s inner life. What images may emerge in the children’s mind’s eyes?

Blessed is the person whose home is his kingdom of heaven. They do not have to choose between staying and leaving. The filmmaker left with Katya, Olya, Misha and Finn when his home country Russia covered the whole of Ukraine with terror. They found a piece of heaven on the Turkish island of Heybeliada, where they were soon joined by the painter Yu, who comes from China but studied art in Russia. “China and Russia are very big countries,” an insert explains, “yet here we are, sharing a room in Turkey.” “Heaven and Home” is a snapshot of a temporary exile, a clever and melancholy reflection on origins, community and parting.

The Turkish flag flies from one of the hills on the island. If you climb a mountain you raise your country’s flag to say: This is where I come from. At the Chess World Championship 1990, the Russians Karpov and Kasparov played against each other, one of them under the Soviet flag, the other under a new one representing a democratic Russia. Today, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is waged under this flag. At a pro-war motorcade in Berlin both flags fly in harmony, the Soviet and the Russian one. And Kasparov is once more presenting a flag for a future Russia from which the bloody red has now been erased.

A home in the middle of the day, only the electrical appliances are whirring. The camera gaze glides through the rooms and floors which are unfolded and seamlessly joined by the editing. Small oddities proliferate in the bourgeois habitat: an unanswered doorbell, an open freezer emitting light. Normality, perhaps unintentionally, whispers something uncanny.

Institutionalised children in Mestlin, Mecklenburg: With no off commentary to provide context, the young people talk about their worries and problems, about violence and alcohol abuse in their families – a forthrightness inacceptable to the DEFA management. When the rough cut is presented for approval, the production is stopped. The film can only be shown after the fall of the Wall.

Gisberta Salce, called Gis by her friends and family, was a Brazilian trans woman who was tortured for days and at last brutally murdered by 14 young men in Portugal in 2006. This 360° film keeps her memory alive and illuminates the horrific scale of this hate crime, uncovering systemic transphobia and advocating for justice and change.

Three children and their families have fled from crisis areas and found a new home in Germany. What are their wishes for the future, their dreams? The conversations with the three were turned into animated children’s drawings. We see a schoolkid’s life from their perspective.

An eerily beautiful bedtime story with lots of loose ends. Featuring: a princess and her toy mouse, a mother who advises the girl to always be suspicious of strangers, and a bizarre grandfather who secretly munches dogfood. It’s possible that the sleepy child is taking in only a quarter of this absurd and morbid tale, but that’s probably a good thing.

A creative and skilful montage as well as dramatically spot-on sound and music effects are combined in a snappy plot to offer a mordant commentary on the constitutionally enshrined equality of men and women in the GDR. The film was awarded a medal at the 1982 congress of UNICA, the Union Internationale du Cinéma, in Aachen.