While the communist authorities decide the conditions for an official registration of the Solidarność movement inside, the masses demonstrate in front of the court outside. A contemporary document of the moment when the power of the people seemed to make a lasting cultural opening no longer just a promise but a possibility. At the time, “undesirable” at the Leipzig festival.

The sea on whose shore Weronika Szyma has set her film is a dense, pulsating blue. The beach and the family who are staying there, meanwhile, are limited to delicate black and white line drawings. Their minimalism makes the blue stand out all the more enchantingly: Sometimes represented as a horizontal strip that promises freedom but also fuels insecurity. Sometimes sloshing diagonally across the screen, swallowing up the image completely for a brief moment and marking a caesura. And there are quite a number of caesuras, because the seven film minutes span the story of several generations.

At one point the father disappears and the mother and her almost grown-up daughter are left to fend for themselves. They learn to comprehend the loss, support each other, turn gestures of distance into gestures of affection. Until the confidence grows to start all over again. The only thing that does not change here is the blue of the sea.

Everything goes downhill. For whom? Marian Cholerek leaves that to the audience. After all, there was no way he could tell his story about a joint action of alleged oppositional forces in 1979 unequivocally. His years of work on animated series for children and his penchant for erotically charged humour, however, are unmistakeable. A cheerfully subversive children’s film for adults.

Shortly before the fall of the Wall, tens of thousands of GDR citizens fled to the West, most of them via Hungary. Many ended up stranded in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. Refugees from the GDR were interviewed in Poland, speaking openly and emotionally of their fates. The footage was forgotten and only re-discovered 20 years later.

The inhabitants of a village witness an unusual event. The religious figures that surround them come alive and leave their accustomed places. The statues step down from shrines and niches, from altars and pedestals. They turn their backs on the village. Nobody knows where they are heading and why they are departing.

Most of the people are frozen in religious adoration, but some of them overpower a statue of the Virgin Mary and smash it on the ground. The fragments of the broken statue, however, live on, and are still heading away. A young girl – born boneless and unable to move without help – manages to make contact with one of the departing statues.

We are exposed to evaluations every day. The norm by which they are made is usually out of our hands. This VR experience creates a field of tension between arbitrariness and control, power and impotence, diversity and uniformity. A circle of 16 real objects marks the entrance to a virtual process of evaluation in which 16 giant grey statues examine us.

“No freedom without dwarves!” What form of oppositional logic can take hold when nothing is logical anymore? “The Orange Alternative” has answers. When living conditions in communism reach the threshold of the surreal, the protest movement that sprang from student circles decides to subvert the order of the regime by Dadaist artistic interventions.

Poznań, June 1956: For a long time, the “forgotten uprising” in which dozens of people lost their lives was a taboo in Poland. It was only in the mid-1980s, in a period of liberalisation, that Marek Drążewski could make this astonishingly frank review, in which he condenses the dramatic events using private photos, footage and memories of contemporary witnesses.

Imagine the last day of your life has dawned. What will stand up to review? What brings contentment? What brings regrets? “Vika!” is a film about the value of life and self-discovery, inspiring us to reflect on one’s chosen path and its forks and to stay true to oneself.

Vika, the 84-year-old main protagonist, a mother and grandmother several times over, looks back on a difficult childhood and many years of working in a “proper” job. When she retired, she seized the opportunity to reinvent herself. She became a DJ and star of the Warsaw nightclubs, who regularly drives her young audience wild. Super cool? Inappropriate for an elderly lady? Agnieszka Zwiefka’s portrait deconstructs the borders between the “acceptable” and “unacceptable” roles of a woman who refuses to acknowledge her age. Vika wants to live in the moment, with no ties to the past. Zwiefka combines elements of music and narrative documentary films and creates an enchanting, immediately accessible and utopian world. Dancing to Vika’s rhythms means freeing yourself from the limitations dictated by society, age and sometimes even one’s own children.

Ten years after the bloody suppression of the workers’ uprisings, the dead are commemorated in front of the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980. The memorial service conceived by Andrzej Wajda could only be documented after sustained pressure. The resulting montage, which links images of the event with emotional reports by contemporary witnesses, was never supposed to be.

Going under or a lonely island life – there is not exactly a surfeit of options in this Polish village by the sea. The community functions, but social intercourse is rough, alcohol present. Archaic-seeming rituals and social patterns are handed down from the old to the young men. Winter envelops the village in white silence which every now and then betrays its deceptive appearance in small things. At midnight on Christmas Eve the voices of the dead and tortured souls ring out. Anka lives in the middle of this. The young woman takes hits, gets up, struggles through with her love of Jesus.

“Zima” portrays a state of suspension with occasional rollercoaster rides and builds up to tremendous emotional power. Colours are rare in the black and white drawings of the winter landscape and the dark houses, but when they appear, they lend great intensity to the events. Scenes of daily routines and village life are associatively interwoven both on the sound and graphic level. They burst with excess and expressive design, transforming into mystical dream images.