For Tomáš the mine is the centre of his life, along with soccer, his kids and the cosy after-work beer. The 44-year-old has worked as a miner for 21 years, until the mine was closed down for economic reasons. Tomáš then re-trains as a coder in the appropriately named educational programme “New Shift”. What he doesn’t know yet is that his new skills alone won’t get him out of the crisis. A film about a tug-of-war with fate and the employment market.

In the constant ups and downs of looking for a job Tomáš shows impressive stamina, despite critical voices around him. His hopeful attitude repeatedly gets him in the local news as a positive example of successful reintegration – long before success is even remotely on the horizon. Jindřich Andrš’ first feature-length film is an equally quiet and thrilling observation. He gently follows his loveable protagonist and manages to present the tricky job situation with dignity and empathy. What emerges clearly is that unemployment and lack of jobs have long ceased to be phenomena that only occur on the fringes of our societies. They are part of a normality that the majority of people must cope with.

Two different planets: men and women. What used to be one in paradise was divided by original sin. Ever since then, the sexes have been facing each other in conflict, all the while consumed with longing for a reunion. Expectations are high, the excitement is immense, the imagination is boundless. A day in the garden of carnal delights – from ecstasy to exhaustion and back.

The dachshund lady Dede has grown old and dies. We are aware that even the most beloved pet won’t live forever. But when it finally happens, it’s hard to take. The boy in this story has trouble dealing with his grief. In the end he discovers that Dede is dead, but not completely gone.

A country that could be anywhere, not precisely localized and yet everywhere. It’s a beautiful summer’s day when the life of siblings Kyona and Adriel changes forever. Their village is raided, destroyed and set on fire. The whole family is forced to flee and experiences many real and surreal situations on their tracks across a whole continent to finally arrive, perhaps, at a more peaceful place.

At the start of the film, Kyona leafs through a sketchbook, takes stock of her life and talks about the end of her childhood. It is only later that the siblings even realize that they are refugees, that like many others they are making their way to the border for a variety of reasons: natural disasters, the consequences of climate change, war, persecution. The two children come across dangerous and helpful people, are separated and find each other again. This feature-length animation, realized in oil on glass, relies on the rapid interplay between fantasy and reality, taking us, on the one hand, into a fictitious, non-real world. But on the other hand, the places, names, situations remind us of familiar things. They show fleeing, exile, setting out as a universal experience.

A summer day in the meadow. Two girls have fun playing ball, until the ball is thrown too hard. The ensuing anger and quarrel make them puff up until they fly up to the clouds like balloons. Once up there, they have no idea how to get back down again. Then they discover that their kitten is stuck in a tree. Who can rescue it?

Everything splashes in this poetic portrait sketch: the rain on the roof, the dog in the puddle, the grandchildren in the kiddie pool and the protagonist in the river Vltava. A middle-aged woman has lovingly converted a freighter into a house boat. The film captures her daily life in impressionistic, analogue aesthetics, from morning coffee in her bathrobe to the last cigarette on deck at dusk. She seems to have fulfilled a wish – a life by and in the river.

When the artist duo Karnapke and Johnson are separated by Covid-19 in the middle of a project, the result is a correspondence about the constant change we live in. The VR experience based on this is a walk-in meditation: about reality, about normality and about the signs that distinguish the rule from the exception, visualized in a space made of countless particles.

After a long time, a young woman once again holds letters in her hand that her father wrote her fifteen years ago when he was in prison. His words are full of love and affection: Never again were they to be that close, the daughter sums up today. What happened? This is what she tries to answer in a letter to him, writing down what couldn’t be said until now. The complex relationship between father and daughter in the form of a fragmentary animation.

Everything in Edgar’s life is well-ordered and always in the same place. And his favourite food is meat. A trip to the slaughterhouse takes his appetite away and he brings a calf home. The calf grows into a cow and, of course, turns his well-ordered life upside-down. His favourite cup and the television set break and Edgar realises that he needs to make more changes.

12-year-old Nikita and his family have been staying in an underground station in Kharkiv for weeks. The place promises protection from Russian attacks, but there is not much distraction down here. The glaring lights and provisionally furnished carriages create a surreal to dreary atmosphere, pets roam the aisles, an aging musician plays songs on his guitar.

Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík condense the first months of the war in Ukraine into an oppressive but not hopeless narrative, because the station is also a place of encounters. Niki soon meets Vika, who is his age and who coaxes the lethargic boy out of his shell. Together they roam the underworld, but while Vika is permitted to go to the surface at least once in a while, Niki’s radius of movement ends at the stairs on which sunlight falls occasionally. And yet an outside exists which the two directors make visible by Super 8 shots scattered in between. They show a damaged Kharkiv: destroyed vehicles, a charred bed, provisionally protected monuments. “Photophobia” is a hybrid, introspective film that manages to find something like tender romance in an unreal situation.

Suzie and her parents cycle out to their garden on the outskirts of town on the weekend. This is where Suzie feels at home! Digging, picking flowers, nibbling berries – gorgeous! One day a black dog crosses her path and she discovers a mysterious site. Who could be the owner? Suzie is a little scared, but dares to slip through the fence anyway.

A nostalgic trip into a past when buying a car constituted a lifetime’s work – especially for those Europeans who had a maximum of two handful of brands at their disposal. This cheerfully edited collection of auto biographies from socialist production evokes seemingly carefree times when the motorized vehicle was allowed to be simply a status symbol: free from ideological turf wars revolving around the climate crisis and mobility diets.

From Russia via Bulgaria and the Czech Republic to Germany and Norway, love stories between humans and Trabi, Moskvitch and Volga are captured on film. We meet protagonists who are fond of their beloved piece of tin, then or now, or have even amassed a considerable collection. There’s a couple who met and fell in love at a retro car exhibition and still drive the same model today. We meet a sexton who passes on his official car after 32 years of use. We make the acquaintance of a pin-up who always poses in front of vintage cars from the East. They all have a soft spot for these rickety rust buckets, because even though the products of the socialist car industry were usually slow, chunky, tedious to drive and to repair, they were all regarded as showpieces of a successful life. And there was one in almost every family: coveted, long longed-for, assiduously polished.

Two siblings are sitting peacefully at a table and drawing. There is a swimming hedgehog in the sister’s picture. The brother wonders whether this would work in real life. He goes into the garden, grabs a hedgehog and throws him into the pool to test this. Not funny at all, thinks the hedgehog. But before he scurries back to his pile of leaves, he comes up with a wet surprise …