“We no longer stand before a choice between peace and war, but between peace and annihilation (Brecht 1947)”, one of the posters in the Berlin Alexanderplatz underground station reads. In autumn 1981, the Berlin Art Academy had organised a poster competition on the subject of “Peace for the World”. The camera, and along with it the viewers, become waiters and observers.

Lothar König is an original. The long-term youth pastor from Jena doesn’t fit into any system. In the GDR he was under state surveillance, after reunification he was one of the most tireless warning voices against the growing right-wing radicalism. To this day, he takes to the barricades against the extreme right, often on the frontline. Nevertheless, this film portrait by his son Tilman is not an homage but a critical tribute to an outspoken character forced by retirement to re-invent himself.

Pastor König is not only regarded as one of the figureheads of the left-wing scene that organises punk concerts, rallies and football tournaments with young refugees. He also has a reputation as a fairly challenging personality. Tilman König shows his father only marginally in his role as a church official. Most of all, he introduces a man who can be courageous and determined, but also stubborn and unfair. His film is enjoyably interested above all in the here and now of this man, the things that Lothar still has to come to terms with. How will he manage the transition to retirement after a restless life between community work and political activism? How can the old rhetorical warhorse hold his own among people who really agree with him but seem to move away from him in thought, speech and action? The border-crosser is entering unknown terrain.

What was unsuccessful 400 years earlier in the German Peasants’ Wars is achieved in 1945 by the unbreakable bond with the Soviet Union: Under adverse conditions, workers and peasants build a socialist state. In 1970, when this film was made, the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) asserts its claim to leadership grounded in the past – it moves forward on the “Way from the I to the We”.

A collage in black and white, positive and negative, with dancing lyrics, skipping thoughts and ambling sounds. Inspired by the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, this experimental homage celebrates three poets and their passion for sound recording devices: Thomas Pynchon (thought recorder), William S. Burroughs (tape recorder) and Rainer Maria Rilke (phonograph).

Designed as a travelogue about Israel, Herbert Viktor emphasizes similarities to the FRG of the economic miracle years in his film: clean, neat, busy, enterprising. Haifa, for example, is described as having evolved from a “meeting place for Arabic caravans and robber bands” to the most modern port of the Levant. Viktor also pays tribute to the welcoming culture for the persecuted of the world, but omits to elucidate on the fates that lie behind them. The film, spiced up by staged intermezzi to become a statement of sympathy, was released in Federal German cinemas in 1959 under the patronage of Willy Brandt. It was not allowed on Israeli screens before 1962, when the death sentence against Adolf Eichmann had been upheld by the court of appeal.

SOS – help! A clear and simple visual language to disturbing sounds. The distinguished Lithuanian film and theatre director Vladislovas Algimantas Blinstrubas condenses the violent, centuries-long history of the Baltic in timeless metaphors. The naked, vulnerable human being is at the centre of this filmic exploration. The space opens up to pain and grief.

An app that assigns a sound and a connected graphic element to every letter of the computer keyboard forms the basis of this live improvisation by CFM. The game of patterns and breaks uses different sound-form combinations from Jono Brandel’s kit to create rhythms, loops and music as well as a video to accompany them.

A purely acoustic collage whose sounds seem by nature indefinable and yet somehow organic. They mesmerise us, occasionally make us shiver at some unknown thing. Gravity seems to be suspended. This piece needs no images, because they will intuitively materialise before our inner eye like thousands of hallucinations.

In this indie game we embark on a journey into the vast expanse of the void. If you like, you can contemplate, rest, observe yourself. If you feel like moving, you can navigate the white space step by step – or just take a break … But not for too long! Or you will miss the chance to uncover hidden secrets and find your own path in the middle of nowhere.

Insects aren’t cute and often not beautiful, but very exciting, Pepe thinks. His favourite animals are dragonflies, which can control their four wings individually and take off faster than a jet plane. But where do you still find these flying wonders? Pepe knows that many insects are dying out in Germany because they are robbed of their habitats. He wants to change that!

Corine Shawi’s father spends four years in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities in Beirut because of sudden paralysis – a time in which the state of emergency becomes routine and filming becomes a strategy: in search of the right balance of closeness and distance, in search of one’s own position in the structure. Shawi sets herself the task of documenting, putting herself in the picture, keeping the family together and at the same time recording movements and changes.

Family life shifts to the sickrooms. The radio plays, the mother smokes countless cigarettes on the balcony, her eyes and fingers graze figures of saints, she attends Holy Mass in the various facilities and shares her worries about an adult son with her husband and daughter. They argue, laugh and sometimes dance around the sickbed. Between the family capsule and drifting through the city – Beirut, night, cemeteries, sensualities –, the filmmaker inserts interview sequences with her siblings, staged on the backseat of a moving car. Attempts to cope and to draw borders, loneliness in company. Brief moments when wishes and projections of mobility are experimentally translated into virtual space – a gauging of possibilities. A touching description of a status quo and a testimony to resignation and renewal.

Magic mobile on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? A young woman slips into a second skin. She goes out, drinks bubble tea with her friends. Selfies are made. The mood is cheerful. But once back home, she and her outward skin melt into each other; a self dissolves. Her own reflection becomes a chimera. A surreal body horror animation about beauty ideals and the compulsion to fit in.

Petra looks back on an eventful day: Together with other kids she went on a paperchase, solved a few small tasks and coordinated with her assigned partner. There were some adventures, but also a classroom situation set up in a meadow where one’s knowledge of the local flora was tested. In the end, they all boarded sailing boats and glided off into an atmospheric evening. A protocol in letters, accurately drawn up at the Potsdam Pioneer House, serves as the framework for one of the first completed films of the newly founded German Academy of Film Art in Babelsberg.

Echoes, filters and rhythmic montage turn sound fragments into an audio piece about a seemingly wilful music box. Philippe Arthuys – a film composer for luminaries like Rivette and Godard and a filmmaker himself – varies the tempo from stuttering to quietly breathing, making sound particles emerge suddenly from the depths of space and disappear again. A cinematic mini-drama for the ears.

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.

Peter Mettler sets out to look for northern lights with photographer Andreas Züst and a small film crew. In order to be able to capture this miracle of nature on film in the first place, the team has built a special camera that has to withstand the extreme climate conditions. On location, they patiently surrender to the state of waiting. They are in the border region between the geographical north and the populated south. The formal structure of the film, on the other hand, shifts between trance-like essay and analytical research trip. And the filmmaker is left with the fundamental question of whether the experience of this spectacular natural phenomenon can be filmed at all.