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.

Over many years, the director’s father filmed his family life almost obsessively. His daughter’s birth, his son’s first steps, and always Valérie, the young mother. An impressive fund of material which their now grown-up daughter Faustine appropriates to tell quite a different story: that of a woman who sees her role as a mother and its demands take away her freedom step by step.

In the here and now, the director observes her parents in the big empty house in the country: her hyperactive father who is constantly tinkering with something, and her chain-smoking mother who sits at the kitchen table and whose sharp mind can only be surmised from her eyes. What happened? What happened to the energetic and independent young make-up artist? The one who admires witches and wants to take a trip around the world. The one who could easily earn her own living but still gives up her job. “The gaze is important”, the now 60-year-old Valérie tells her daughter once while applying make-up. Yes, the gaze is important. And with her film, director Faustine Cros counters the gaze directed at her mother over all those years with a new narrative.

In the middle of a deserted city of concrete and fog, text fragments float over a sea of flowers. This is the story of a woman who refused to leave her home after a disaster. The game of tension and ignorance, suggestion and concreteness leaves room for projections: We are confronted with our own fears before the plot is resolved.

Theo Montoya draws on casting outtakes, melancholy observations of daily life and decadent party impressions from his friends to create a morbid and yet tender portrait of a young, queer generation in Colombia. In a country marked by violence and repression they can hardly imagine their future, but maintain a close, almost loving relationship with death.

This was meant to be a fiction film: a ghost story in which the dead no longer find cemetery space and consequently coexist with the living, including having sexual relationships – which the state rigorously forbids and persecutes. A clandestine nocturnal subculture emerges where erotic desires for which daylight means annihilation can be acted out. A week after Montoya found his leading actor for the project, the latter died of a heroin overdose. More deaths among his friends follow. They are the ghosts haunting the film that was ultimately made. It retains its dystopian character, but the dangers it portrays are quite real: For these young people, they are part of everyday life in Medellín, which is still deep in the shadow of Pablo Escobar and where the search for pleasure and human warmth takes one through labyrinthine abysses.

A boy, a girl, a bird with a swan’s neck nestling in hands, a gently wooded peninsula of longing: Atsushi Wada’s almost speechless animation, mapped out in uniform and unicoloured chains of motifs and events, follows the dream and shame logic of a sexual awakening. There’s a sadness about the rounded and infantile figures, perhaps that of a first “little death”.

What do the Algerian war of liberation and Yugoslavia have in common? Stevan Labudović. In 1959, Tito himself sent his favourite cinematographer to Algeria. The resistance against the French colonial rule needed the eyes of the world, and the experienced partisan Labudović helped open them: His images gave the lie to the propaganda of the occupiers and their Western allies. This is a portrait of the man, the mission and the age – as film, ideological and personal history.

For three years, until the Democratic Republic of Algeria was proclaimed, Labudović put himself and his camera at the service of the people fighting for independence. Mila Turajlić found the newsreel footage shot at the time in the Filmske Novosti archive in Belgrade, got in touch with the aged pensioner and followed his trail. From a wealth of archive material, diary entries by and interviews with Labudović, with contemporary witnesses from Yugoslavia, Algeria and New York, where the young Maghreb state, like many other former colonies, struggled for admission to the United Nations, she distils the promising origins of an alliance that stood at the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was to oppose the dichotomy of the superpowers. Thus the bow to her compatriot also gains global political topicality.

In the midst of the Moroccan desert, characterised by rocks, scrubs and immeasurable expanse, two men are looking for celestial bodies. Pacing out this weathered ground is a downright gargantuan task. Both have great hopes tied to the meteorite fragments: While one of them is looking for knowledge, the other longs for a better life. Adnane Baraka’s impressive directing debut traces existential questions in powerful images.

The barren landscapes of south-eastern Morocco are known for frequent meteorite impacts. Mohamed, a nomad who lives with his family in a tent in the desert, decides to start searching. Like the other men who scour the terrain with him he hopes to find a valuable rock from space that would mean his escape from poverty. On the other side of the country, scientist Abderrahmane analyses meteorites for enclaves of long-dead celestial bodies. To reach the origin of our life, we have to look at the stars.

Franzy is an extraterrestrial cook who lives alone and also feels a little lonely. She loves to season her dishes with a special pink ingredient that makes everything taste extra delicious. But when the spice tin is empty, Franzy must go in search of new supplies. She reaches a planet full of hungry creatures delighted with her culinary skills.

Omid and his family came to France from Iran a while ago. He is often made to feel that he doesn’t really belong. Even his daughter keeps correcting his French. When he’s attacked, the knife pierces his heart. No, he doesn’t have a heart, as it turns out in the hospital … An animated black comedy about what one leaves behind in one’s home country.

There is a house hanging from heavy ropes, firmly anchored to the rocks. Up there in the cliffs, far above the town below, a father lives with his son in the cold. In his 2D frame-by-frame animation, director João Gonzalez uses few colours, which makes the harsh shadows and extreme camera angles of his drawings all the more atmospheric. He has realised a metaphorical tale that can do without dialogue, relying on sound and images alone.

With childlike ease, entertaining and touching, this colourful animation shows the transition of a woman who was born in the “wrong body”. With her family’s support and understanding, Ivan becomes Lada – a happy, content person. Based on a true individual story, this film is also a parable on the ingenuity of the transgender community who sometimes have to take unusual paths to establish a life worth living in an ignorant environment.

“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.

Dance is primarily physical. Smell, warmth, touch – “Meat Joy” presents their essence, set to a collage of ambiguous pop songs. Carolee Schneemann lets us experience from up close the unrestrained celebration of a physical, lubricious, erotic performance improvisation, using framing, montage and a visual aesthetic reminiscent of painting to dissolve the body shapes.

In rural northern Colombia, where the railway has long been discontinued, people help themselves with a fleet of “Motorrodillos” – motorcycle-driven miniature trains. Every day, Dolly and her colleagues take school kids, goods and travellers on rugged routes from village to village. If you meet oncoming traffic on the way, you get off the rails. If you find holes in the rails, you mend them yourself. The affectionate portrait of a self-organised transport system.

Hunger and hardship ruled the Piemontese mountain village of Ughettera at the beginning of the 20th century. The meek peasants complained neither about the parasitic priests nor the tough seasonal winter work in neighbouring France – not even when the Italian state called them to arms and sent them first to Libya, then into the World War. Only when the Fascists arrive did the Ughetto family trade its home for new deprivations and new hopes across the border.

With this imaginatively directed puppet animation, Alain Ughetto has created a warm-hearted memorial to his Italian grandparents Cesira and Luigi. With subtle humour, tenderness and empathy he tells of generations who lived in poverty, but also of happiness and love, fortunes and misfortunes. “You don’t come from a country, you come from your childhood”, Cesira teaches him. The director finds himself in this family chronicle, recognises his predilection for working with his hands. Soon the film becomes a reflection on telling stories with what these hands shaped. They are frequently present in the frame – piling charcoal into a mountain, making forests from broccoli or simply getting handed a cup of damn strong espresso by Cesira.

The peace of the superpowers is based on “mutual assured destruction”. States can annihilate each other completely with their arsenals. On 13 January 2018, 1.4 million people on Hawaii got a taste of this: A false missile alert text message brought their lives to a standstill that lasted 38 minutes, panic broke out and the nuclear threat suddenly became real.