The film opens with the wedding of Garik and Hasmik and ends with a decorated tree for their son’s first Christmas in the new house that his father built himself. Between these fixed points of middle-class family life, nothing is as heteronormative as this bracket and above all the political and religious mainstream in Armenia would lead one to expect.

Hasmik is a lawyer who fights for LGBTQIA+ rights, her husband appears in the media as drag performer Carabina, does sex work and makes his life in a queer-phobic environment the subject of an autobiographical theatre performance. The film, which evolved out of close friendship and is always one step behind the wild energy of Garik/Carabina, takes a precarious, raw, but also utopian-tinted look at current social struggles. The longing for normality, emancipation and responsibility find themselves exposed – sometimes powerless and unprotected – to violent defamation. TV images show the zeal behind the attempted construction of homosexual and trans persons as “Un-Armenian.” Meanwhile Carabina, in a moment of rest from plastering the house, trowel in hand, plays a song by Charles Aznavour, whose family came from Armenia – “What Makes a Man?”

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.

“Stay calm and level-headed!” Endless armoured convoys, radio stations broadcasting their potentially last announcements and the Slovak Communist Party meeting Czech party representatives. Shaky images and wailing sirens testify to the tension as Warsaw Pact troops march into Bratislava, too, to suppress the Prague Spring.

A rhythmic collage of sounds and filmed sequences accompanies the demolition of a house. People from a neighbourhood in East London report in interview fragments: The living conditions were not comfortable – ugh, those spiders! – but the families had a home that had grown over generations. Now the community protests against being squeezed out by a motorway network.

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.

The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 also resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe. Many were affected, including eight-year-old Anatoly Rizov. In “Boy, Bloodbrother of Death,” Maja Weiss draws an emotionally shattering portrait of the unfulfilled childhood of a boy caught between the apocalyptic scenario his Ukrainian hometown became and – utterly ironic – the no less threatening state of emergency in Slovenia. During the summer holidays, Anatoly is supposed to recover there from the frightening conditions at home. But in the fight for independence from Yugoslavia, the place of refuge becomes a crisis area, too.

Chernobyl, 25 years later. Maja Weiss meets the boy, Anatoli, as a young man. What has happened in the meantime – between the nuclear disaster and the prospect of another tragedy? Where have all the international relief funds disappeared, and where did the millions intended for the reconstruction of the decaying sarcophagus of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant seep away? Where is my life taking me? What legacy will I leave to my son? These are just some of the questions that Ukrainian Anatoly Rizov, now grown up and twenty years after the first documentary portrait about his fate shaken by crises and wars, tries to answer.

Tröglitz in 2015: The mayor organises a shelter for refugees. He and his family become homeless themselves, because many residents believe that strangers do not belong in their Middle German home. With an interview with the mayor on the soundtrack, the drawings and 3D animations make tangible how the immense hatred corrodes the fabric of the community and tears the people apart.

Siren-like singing and rhythmic light reflections segue into a lyrical text and sketched silhouettes of coastlines and waves. Delicate lines and soft shadings on superimposed transparent foils form many-layered networks of shapes and structures. What is offscreen creeps into the frame through reflections and blends in with the visual design of the film. Then and now meet and merge into a poetic narrative about a childhood in Stralsund, at a time when the city was still part of the GDR. A fenced-in, circumscribed childhood, framed by nocturnal floodlights, the bawling of drunk sailors and the crumbling plaster of facades and walls gone grey. The narrator manages to leave this oppressive fortress behind, but she can never escape completely. The memories that have settled like grey dust on her interior will stay with her forever.

In only ninety seconds Marcus Grysczok tells a touching personal story of loss and takes us to great emotional depths. Tune in: an electronically distorted outcry. The protagonist talks to himself and to someone who no longer lives in this world, but all the more in his heart. He looks for a way out of this state of powerlessness, assuming a stranger’s role, a free-roaming paper dog that runs between real shelves and across tables, races past people on black-and-white photographs and everyday objects, chases himself on a plate rim. The images convey a feeling of home – a home for memory and for life. Tune out? As soon as the dog stops, reality puts an end to this restless racket and brings the awareness of enduring loss. Poetic in language and design, the film formulates a moving but clear-eyed farewell to a brother.

The actor Hiam Abbass, who lives in France, is one of the greatest movie stars from the Middle East. She played leading roles in the award-winning films of Israeli director Eran Riklis, acted in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and recently in the U.S. hit series “Succession.” She served on the juries of the big Festivals in Cannes and Berlin, presented her own directing debut in Venice. But she is also a mother, daughter and sister in a large Palestinian family full of resourceful women. In this real role she steps in front of the camera in her daughter Lina Soualem’s work and travels back to her hometown of Deir Hanna in northern Israel – an Arab village in the Jewish state.

“Don’t open the gate to past sorrows,” the director quotes a kind of family dogma. It refers, among other things, to the family’s traumatic expulsion from Tiberias, the city on the Sea of Galilee, in the 1948 Palestine War. But with her confrontation of the family history, Soualem also opens gates to past joys and allegedly discarded identities. Between home videos, historical archive footage, photos and letters, Abbass is a touching and approachable screen presence as she returns to her roots. The long shadow of her origins also falls on a woman of the world.

The people, among them an astonishing number of workers, react with visible anger to the sudden lack of matches – and threaten to go to the barricades. The problem is solved, of course. But does it mean the population’s anger is placated? Puppet animation director Johannes Hempel created this satire based on a draft by Wolfgang Kohlhaase – at the same time as the uprising of 17 June 1953.