Porto Maurizio, where the director, who lives in France today, grew up, is located on the Ligurian coast. The village is the starting point for a cinematic journey into the past that spans a surprisingly wide arc to a time when Muslim pirates, the corsairs, haunted the Mediterranean and took Europeans as slaves. To this end, the film light-handedly draws from the rich fund of film history and its iconography.

Adventure films from the 1940s and historical murals depict the naval battles of the early 19th century in powerful images. The director ingeniously combines such visual finds with analogue new recordings of a journey with two friends. Their seemingly loosely told anecdotes and chance encounters combine to form a coherent whole, forming a geopolitical system of coordinates around the Mediterranean that deals with eurocentrism, colonial history and religiously motivated conflicts between Christian and Islamic countries. The subjects couldn’t be more topical.

Riots and protests at an Indian film school, told in letters written by student L to her lover K, in which she reflects on what’s happening around her. While government forces gradually push back the rebellion, L realizes that she will never receive an answer because K belongs to a higher caste. The anonymous lines are wistful echoes of a love tragedy in times of the resurgence of a nationalistic class society.

Director Payal Kapadia steeps the visual material, compiled from a variety of sources and testifying to long, draining nights of protest, but also to great determination and a youthful exuberance, almost consistently in grainy black and white. Even mobile phone or surveillance camera footage are thus aesthetically related to 16mm student films from past decades. But against this contrast the immediate, unfinished nature of what is shown becomes all the more apparent, referencing the complex dialogue between a fragile memory and a tumultuous present that goes on in the film. A present in which questions of artistic representation, but also of personal responsibility, must be renegotiated.

Patrick Bokanowski subjects his own early cine film footage to a magical optical transformation. In the glistening drizzle of electronic sounds and the deep rumbling of drone waves by Michèle Bokanowski, light eruptions, sweeping colours and shadowy apparitions unfold while the original footage shines through. A diary of awake dreaming observation.

A ship scrapyard in western Cuba. The observing camera follows Raudel and his colleagues who work in what seems like a hermetically sealed microcosm. A homing pigeon strays into the place; the workers contemplate it silently as they smoke. Sometimes they talk about their dreams. Shots are focussed in turns on their bodies and their surroundings. Rhythmic, artfully crafted and authentically produced sounds accompany precise and lucid images, without aestheticizing the harshness of their work.

Tszzzzidd – skin and adhesive tape separate slowly, almost lasciviously. From a sober physical point of view, forces between molecular bonds are being overcome. Yoriko Mizushiri composes brief, highly sensual variations on pain and pleasure based on this phenomenon. Restrained, calm and scalpel-sharp, she creates two-dimensional drawn animations in subdued colours, accompanied by cool electronic sounds that explode in one’s head only to scatter into the anxious but curious body.

In the mythology of the Kikuyu community the Mugumo, the Kenyan fig tree, represents transformation and rebirth. This multiplayer VR experience invites us to witness a sacred ritual: Dancing around the Mugumo can turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man. We follow Waicici, a genderless person, in the quest for the most honest version of themselves.

Everything seems neat at first in Randa Maroufi’s performative reconstruction. Cars form orderly queues; market women tie up their baggage. On the monotonous grey background, the scenes appear schematic, like a blueprint where suddenly everything becomes graphically condensed. Everyday life at the border between the Spanish exclave of Ceuta and Morocco, which is crossed illegally by all kinds of goods.

Lebanese filmmaker Dima El-Horr moved to Paris several years ago. Among the friends who stayed at home is the artist Sirvat Fazlian, whom she regularly visits in Beirut until the failed revolution of 2019, the COVID lockdown, the devastating port explosion and finally the dramatic economic crisis put a temporary end to their meetings. So the director decides to give her conversations with Siro a cinematic form.

Ever since the death of her husband, the well-known Armenian actor Berj Fazlian, Siro has lived alone in a flat filled with souvenirs and devoted most of her time to music and painting. In this film, footage from the years before 2019 blends with recorded phone calls between Siro and Dima and recent scenes from Paris, coming together in a densely woven portrait of life in exile. While snow falls in Paris, Siro talks about warm days on the Mediterranean coast and sings Armenian songs. She rails against the permanent crisis in Lebanon, but her nature is not affected. For one thing, Siro personifies the legendary Lebanese resilience. Yet for the filmmaker she represents that part of the heart that people in exile leave behind. So almost inevitably, “Conversations with Siro” becomes the director’s dialogue with herself.

Michèle Bokanowski’s sounds have been a distinct part of Patrick Bokanowski’s film images since 1972. The origin of her soundtracks often lies in noises that are quite unlike music. Thus, she uses the clacking of billiard balls to describe people working on a field in the distance. Between tape loops and electronic devices, the composer talks about her craft of shaping sonorous material.

A country that could be anywhere, not precisely localized and yet everywhere. It’s a beautiful summer’s day when the life of siblings Kyona and Adriel changes forever. Their village is raided, destroyed and set on fire. The whole family is forced to flee and experiences many real and surreal situations on their tracks across a whole continent to finally arrive, perhaps, at a more peaceful place.

At the start of the film, Kyona leafs through a sketchbook, takes stock of her life and talks about the end of her childhood. It is only later that the siblings even realize that they are refugees, that like many others they are making their way to the border for a variety of reasons: natural disasters, the consequences of climate change, war, persecution. The two children come across dangerous and helpful people, are separated and find each other again. This feature-length animation, realized in oil on glass, relies on the rapid interplay between fantasy and reality, taking us, on the one hand, into a fictitious, non-real world. But on the other hand, the places, names, situations remind us of familiar things. They show fleeing, exile, setting out as a universal experience.

Dark percussive sounds call forth anthropomorphic creatures. They come to life in short dance etudes. Optically manipulated, they stretch into gaunt shapes, unfold in a thousand layers like exotic animals, dissolve into abstract paintings. They are pure creatures of light: fleeting, immaterial. The rhythmic sound motif colours their movements with sometimes pithy, sometimes breathy variations.

For many years, Amin was unable to speak about the experience of his flight. It is only now that he finds the courage to open up to his schoolmate, filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen. From earliest childhood Amin’s life was marked by political unrest in his native country of Afghanistan and soon by growing up without a permanent home. His painful memories are visualized in haunting animations, interwoven with documentary footage.

It’s a well-known fact that flight does not lead from point A to point B and then simply ends. Amin’s story, though, shows how rocky and tortuous it can really be, leading from Afghanistan via Russia, Estonia and a few other stations to Denmark. Only when his life is on a safe track with an upcoming wedding and a good career does he find the strength to talk about what he had to go through to be where he is today. In an almost psychoanalytical setting, the protagonist – lying down – talks about his past. The narrative moves in a spiral between then and now, allowing for frequent respites between the traumatic impressions that the poignant animation makes almost physically tangible. It’s no coincidence that “Flee” has already won multiple awards and is considered an “instant classic” even now.

In Belgium and France, the documentary series “Strip-Tease” is real cult viewing. The creators of the TV production have now used more than twenty-year-old material to make a crime documentary in dirty black and white. The Brussels CID are investigating a murder case: A casual prostitute was killed in her flat. The discovery of a few French fries enables them to track down the perpetrator. True Crime.

The dead woman’s name was Kalima Sissou. Very quickly, the investigation focuses on her former boyfriend Alain, and so, in authentic, raw images, we watch Inspector Lemoine and his colleagues at work: at the crime scene, interrogating witnesses and, naturally, cross-examining the main suspect. Despite the serious character of the events, Jean Libon and Yves Hinant’s offbeat mixture of dark thriller and absurd reality comedy does not lack (black) humour. Shot in a simple cinéma-vérité style, the film does not embellish on what it shows. The creative and conceptual model is, of course, the series “Strip-Tease”, co-developed by Libon in 1985 and widely known for the unconventional, blunt and politically incorrect manner in which it tackled even delicate subjects. “For a Fistful of Fries” continues in this vein and takes us very close to the often incredibly profane action.

Life without a car has become unthinkable in the country. This also goes for the sleepy village of Claviers in Provence, where Claire Simon went to school and her daughter experienced her first love with the baker’s son. Pensioners and tourists dominate the place today, and the bakery has long since given up. But the heart of the village continues to beat: in the garage. This is where the day-to-day dramas take place, where the weal and woe of its citizens are decided.

Christophe Scalia’s empire is one of men who accept women only as bystanders. Nevertheless, the mechanic and his apprentice, Romaric Rousselle, are quite willing to allow Claire Simon to watch their every move as they handle shock absorbers, spark plugs and brake pads, to listen to their every bantering conversation. They are completely absorbed in their role, turning into superheroes responsible not just for the proper functioning of all the two- and four-wheel vehicles that are so important in the country, but also of the entire village. This is where local politics and family planning, generational conflicts and the economy are discussed, occasionally accompanied by music from Coppola’s “The Godfather” which Christophe has set as his mobile phone ringtone. To make everyday life look more exciting than any fiction through patient observation, that is the miracle of Claire Simon’s documentary work.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed human relationships. Archive material, 360° footage and artificially generated images are used to create a synaesthetic essay film about loneliness, insecurity and the increasing shift of our everyday life into the digital realm. Dystopic and anonymous stories merge in a collage of the disturbing social and political phenomena of our time.

A voice speaking the Aztec language Nahuatl and a ritual song accompany the children’s games in the Mayan rain forest. They put their ears to the trees which seem to speak to each other and to the universe. They listen to an ancient love story that continues today. A myth of Mesoamerican culture is invoked. Animated sequences and extreme backlighting visualize the tree’s inner life. What images may emerge in the children’s mind’s eyes?