A beach reminds us of Fati’s recent past. She came to Italy by sea, without papers, pregnant for the fifth time. Longing for her children, she returned to Ghana six months later – without her husband. The people around her can’t understand this decision. “You’ve created a mess,” a friend says. “How do I tell people?” a sister asks. But Fati wants to provide for her family, even though she still has to liberate three of her children from the custody of her in-laws.

Numerous recent documentaries have been dedicated to the experiences of people who arrive in the EU and get caught in the degrading conditions of asylum politics, but this work by Ghanaian director Fatimah Dadzie offers a change of perspective. In Fati’s hometown, Europe is considered a paradise – and what fool would voluntarily run away from there? The decision has lost the returnee all prestige. Her social exclusion is shown here by relatives as talking heads, directly in front of the camera. But when the film overlays everyday images of care work or street hawking with Fati’s voiceover, it gives a voice to its steadfast protagonist.

“Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean – so get yourself a little loving in between.” This advice of the African-American civil rights activist and jazz poet Langston Hughes precedes Jyoti Mistry’s found footage storm of images and runs like a guiding line through the archive material, a panopticon of revelries: parties, boxing matches, visits to the beach and above all, time and again, testimonies of lived queer sexuality. Sometimes clandestine, sometimes quite public.

Mistry mirrors the uninhibitedness of her sources in the way she arranges them – not neatly staggered but boldly mixed. The associative editing often virtually leaps into the images, linking them with purple colour explosions and three-dimensional animations of shoals of fish. On the soundtrack, a spoken word performance joins multi-channel dubbed noises and countless variations of the jazz standard “Diga Diga Doo.” This is how the film wrests its testimonies from the past and returns them to their inherent liveliness and transgressive explosive power.

Manuela lives in Cameroon and was four years old when her parents went abroad to work. She’s eleven now and preparing for her first graduation. She is growing up with her grandparents and, despite leading a good life, had to struggle with grief for a long time. Now she has learned how to cope with absence and how to be together despite the long distance.

In 2017, the “Reclaim the City” initiative occupied an empty hospital in the Woodstock district of Cape Town. Their symbolic protest against the housing shortage became a new home for hundreds of people: the “Cissie Gool House”. The work conveys intimate insights into an unusual housing project that combats criminalisation by politics and the public.

The opening scene shows the anger: It’s about rape. The observing documentary by Aïssata Ouarma is more composed, though, focused on dealing with the trauma and the attempts to come to terms with it through art. The heavily pregnant Mariam attends a theatre education workshop. The camera follows her and her empathetic trainer in moments of mental and physical exertion designed to free her soul – and that of her unborn child – for good.

On a hot June day, the two friends Ádel and Berci are lying on a meadow, looking at the clouds. It’s the summer holidays and they are talking about everything that crosses their minds. Berci has a lot of imagination and is looking forward to the next school year. Ádel, on the other hand, is more anxious and worries. The clouds drift past, as fleeting as the summer.