For his monumental study of displacement, Nikolaus Geyrhalter has travelled across continents, mapping a new kind of landscape that has become detached from geographical or climatic conditions under palm trees, on mountains, at rivers, in the snow. Washed up, blown in, piled up, caught or left somewhere – where once the forces of nature were at work, garbage now dominates the shape of things. It has even brought forth a new social type: the relocator.

As in all his films, Nikolaus Geyrhalter operates the camera himself. It stands still, often for minutes, as if it couldn’t believe what presents itself: plastic webs seemingly grown together with the scrawny branches on embankments, decaying newspapers and cocoa powder packaging in the excavated soil of a potato field in Switzerland, beaches seamed at the waterline by a carpet of Styrofoam and plastic containers. In equally delicately composed images, the filmmaker focuses on the machines and people who work away at these garbage landscapes. They excavate and compact, collect and sort, sweep and rake, move one thing this way and the other that way with grapplers or hands. Well-formed and without comment, the inner workings of a self-sustaining system are revealed in which a process of alienation is underway that causes problem and solution to drift apart.

In 1974, the mathematician Penrose discovered pairs of tiles that form an infinite plane without repeating patterns. Inspired by this, Max Cooper uses a rhythm fragment of one instrument to compose a percussion ensemble without a single identical loop. Jessica In contributes animated tile ornaments without symmetries that are reminiscent of a mandala and visualise the idea of infinity.

Maxim lives in St. Petersburg with his mother and sister. Like many other kids, he just loves skating. There’s one difference, though: Maxim has lost both his legs in an accident and lives his everyday life on a skateboard, too. One day he would like to take part in the Paralympics. When his coach has a surprise for him, he is uncertain whether it can be done without legs.

The director makes an attempt to locate herself, because historical erosions in society and politics have led to an identity crisis for Cléo Cohen, a young Frenchwoman. Is she Arab? Jewish? She struggles for clarification, aided by her grandparents, who all emigrated from the Maghreb to France as Jews. The questioning is playful, but determined. Cléo awakens memories, confronts, muses in the bathtub.

Cléo wants to find out from her grandmother Flavie whether she’s “sedje”, able to marry. Flavie reacts evasively. Her sister would definitely be, Flavie thinks, and Cléo, too, knows roughly how to go about things. But she doesn’t seem entirely convinced. Cléo Cohen is in the middle of a process of discovery. Her grandparents play a role in this. While some came to France as Algerian Jews, others relocated from the neighbouring country of Tunisia, also as Jews. Cléo is confused. Denise’s native tongue, for example, is Arabic, she knows Arabic cuisine, but she’s not an Arab? Cléo talks to everyone, shoulders her way briskly but warmly into the past. She reads the writings of Albert Memmi, who grew up in Tunis as the son of Jewish parents under French colonial rule; she listens to Philippe Katerine’s song “Juifs arabes”. She travels to Tunisia.

The mocking transvestite, the raging dog, the prophetic clown and the little girl are united inside the desperate protagonist. The longing to break free rises forcefully – like a pistol pressed against his chest. In humorous metaphors, Hakhyun Kim takes a crisis of disorientation to extremes, while his extraordinary stylistics lend it poetic dignity.

As a happily married manager of a department store, everything in the protagonist’s life is peaceful and orderly. But on his customary walk through the park one Sunday, he is suddenly confused by a sign marked with just one word: “Park”. The disturbance is so great that his everyday routine is thrown into chaos. Freely adapted from a story by Arthur Schnitzler.

A woman and a black cat live together in the city. They seem a little lonely but make the best of it. The small miracles of life can be found in all kinds of everyday moments, and their loneliness is transformed into a cheerful melody. A buoyant piece in black and white which does get a little colour in the end.

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.

Sometimes it really takes only two minutes to see through life. In her minimalist animated film, Anne Isensee comes quickly and straightforwardly to the point. What the direct line sketches out as a concept of life looks alluring, too. It is a good thing that there are one or two kinks after all. Nonchalant, witty and profound – and awarded the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig in 2017.

Grandpa Günter is a retired circus elephant who takes his grandson Charlie on musical excursions. In this episode they are rudely woken because the usually quiet forest is suddenly full of noise. It’s Grandpa’s brother Karl-Heinz merrily setting up his forest cinema. Singing, Grandpa complains about the disturbance and explains what his brother is actually doing there.

After studying at the German Academy of Film Art Potsdam-Babelsberg, Karlheinz Mund made this documentary tour of Jewish cemeteries in Berlin. The gravestones preserve the names of famous and unknown people. They preserve their places of death, where no distinction was made between the famous and the unknown: Auschwitz, Mauthausen. When the West German Short Film Festival invited Mund’s film, the committees in charge enforced one distinction after all: The images of graves defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti taken from the West German press were allowed to remain, footage of the same content filmed in East Berlin had to be removed for the theatrical release in the GDR.

Cristobal, a young fisherman at work outside the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, shares his insights: Fishing is harder than working out. Also, he and the sea are connected by a progressing disease. At night he perceives what can only be grasped from the boat: the chemicals flowing into the water, the smell, the red lights of the steel mill. “Men of Salt” tells of a dilemma: What if you identify with an ecosystem that’s ceaselessly being abused?

The black circle becomes a round creature, becomes a worm, becomes a whale, becomes a swimmer, becomes a little deer. Coloured shapes playfully flow in and out of each other and transform. But before you can get dizzy, the little deer winks and runs away. A film that shows that everything is made up of many parts and that ultimately, we are all connected.

A colourful luminous river flows through the black void. Geometrical surfaces dance in small repeating loops around wondrous organic plants. The abstract lines, rectangles and semicircles briefly form animated figures. Tina Turner’s classic in the musical interpretation of Miles Davis and the animated visual world of Irina Rubina and Michelle Brand.

A feeling of fear spreads: In an apartment building, the stairs follow no logic, men get lost with a wardrobe, everyone is lonely. The surreal threat suddenly becomes real when security agents ring the doorbell: “Csengőfrász”, the symbol for the arbitrary arrest of citizens allegedly hostile to the state from the time of the Hungarian Uprising.

A fly rotates around a lightbulb, a spoon turns in a cup. Everything moves in circles here, including the life of the couple. He looks at his mobile phone, she does the sun salutation. Even her somersaults don’t make him look up. The minimalist black and white animation begins to vibrate. The monotony gets out of rhythm. She imagines him as a fly and chases him. Scenes of a marriage, reflected in the yellow eyes of a gecko.