Two women take the ferry to an island cemetery to tend to a gravesite. With the utmost care and perseverance, they remove moss and candle wax from the stone, wash and scrub every chink, trim flower arrangements and set up lights that flash in different colours at night.

It is a work of mourning under special circumstances, as Sara Jurinčić makes plain in an early shot: She edits two picture galleries next to each other, one of male, the other of female portraits. The men suddenly vanish from their photos and thus from the island. The faces of the women remain. And it is these portraits, motifs chosen by themselves for their gravestones, that dominate the film, give a face to its experimental explorations of female genealogy. Jurinčić wraps them in visual metaphors of extraordinary intricacy, sometimes literally as in the spectacular finale, when the portraits of the dead women are superimposed on the faces of the living women – with an eerie effect that is as disturbing as it is sublime.

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.

Over the course of a season, the film follows the many manual operations behind the façade of a “carefree” beach holiday. A seaside resort, artificially constructed on Italy’s Adriatic coast, is the setting of this stoically surrealist observation. In the hotels’ canteen kitchens, meals are prepared without pause; sun loungers and umbrellas are put up in endless rows on the beach, illuminated letters polished to perfection. The holiday production workers are busy around the clock, tirelessly working in the name of the ultimate diversion. The goal: The guests are to regenerate in the best possible way and waste no thought on the conditions behind the scenes.

Even if everything here seems to revolve around the best time of the year, there is an obvious contradiction at the centre of the film. We see people whose job it is to amuse those who in turn are trying to recover from their jobs. An absurd undertaking, sure. The images of a demonstration for better working conditions disturb the perfect machinery only briefly. Rather, the march of this nameless army of employees looks like a staged and well-controlled break from a never-ending cycle. For if they do not do it, dozens of others are already standing by to secure a meagre income in the giant business of tourism.

A dull underwater world filled with eerie creatures floods a bright white hospital corridor. This scenario sets the stage for a tale about an abused woman. After the rape, she finds herself not only confronted with the standardised examinations, her boyfriend’s horror and the alienation from herself: She has also lost her voice.

You need momentum to escape it all. Vonfelt packs the necessary energy into unstoppable pop beats and verbal images. On a backdrop of fleeting nocturnal city lights, Michelle Brand creates a refreshingly dynamic slipstream of fading forms and intense colours. You let yourself fall gently and with a smile into the rush of acceleration.