The stereotypical idea of pregnancy is a challenge for persons who do not define themselves as female only. This auto-theoretical essay explores the future of the family and non-binary reproduction scenarios in which all bodies can become pregnant. We travel into the womb of a posthuman and follow speculations about the de-feminisation of childbearing.

“Imagine this camera is your mother”, a father tells his daughter. In the 1990s, scores of families from the Republic of Moldova began a ritualised mail exchange between the mothers, who had emigrated for economic reasons, and their relatives back home. The former sent money and goods; the latter sent videotapes. These amateur recordings are the material of this film. They testify to the painful gaps the absent persons left in the lives of those who stayed behind.

Migration is a big factor in post-socialist states buffeted by recession and inflation after the end of the Soviet Union – and in this case, also by the civil war over Transnistria. According to data from 2011/2012, about a third of Moldovan children had one parent abroad. In this small country between Romania and the Ukraine, too, a higher percentage of fathers choose work migration. Otilia Babara, however, is specifically interested in the consequences of long absent mothers, who work for nursing services in Italy, for example, to earn their family’s livelihood, and who express their love through care packages. The loss of connection to their mother – all of whom stay out of the frame –, which affects girls in particular, emerges in the cracks of the staged home videos, when wandering glances reveal that the children no longer believe in their return.

A life dedicated to decay. Johannes Weigelt (1890–1948) was a palaeontologist, a dilettante photographer, a Nazi, all of it fervent. This essay is dedicated to the pioneer of taphonomy – sober and at the same time exciting in form. Three image fields are filled with changing content: black and white documents of fields of animal carcasses, a snapshot with Göring, text panels, artful photomontages. They all charge one another, containing a vibrantly shimmering biography fossilised in images.

The tumultuous 1960s in China as a collage of archival images, clay figures and interviews. Lei Lei lets his father and his grandfather talk, about bicycles and bank clerks, about life in the countryside, re-education and class enemies. Their memories generate a multicoloured surreal world that is an enchanting fantasy of the time before and during the Cultural Revolution.

In his second feature-length film, artist and animation filmmaker Lei Lei once more takes up experiences of family members and uncovers a piece of national history via private stories. For more than six years, he collected family photos, postcards, propaganda images and old films. On this backdrop he forms and moves his characters made of gum-like pastel modelling clay, whose colourful, almost childlike appearance supports the impression that this is where a grandson imagines the anecdotal memoirs of his ancestors. But this imaginative animation is anything but naïve: It takes the time to accommodate the detours and pauses in the narrative and takes us – by means of a restrained soundscape, too – deep into a universe where one can lose oneself.

The carelessness of Western consumer society follows the absurd conviction that humans can live independently of nature. The earth’s resources are being used up without asking how they can be replenished. This VR parable tells of a past in harmony with what sustains, surrounds and nourishes us. We find not only devastation and destruction, but also hope.

The semi-autobiographical account of a European plantation manager on Sumatra during Dutch colonial rule becomes a starting point for reflections on the structure of the plantation itself. An essay about local tobacco and rubber cultivation, the construction of skin colour as a social category and the "tropic fever” which rises slowly but inexorably, edited from archive material dating from 1890 to 1930.

Very few films have made use of the extensive material shot by the colonists in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Those who took up the task, like “Mother Dao” or recently “They Call Me Babu”, did so from a Dutch perspective. “Tropic Fever” is the first feature-length film from Indonesia that appropriates that stock, using photos, documentary silent film footage, home movies and feature films as well as development plans from the archives of the former colonial power, along with the report of a Hungarian who managed a plantation on Sumatra in the 1920s. Mahardika Yudha, Robin Hartanto Honggare and Perdana Roswaldy impressively demonstrate how forests and swamps turned into rigidly organised agricultural areas and how the plantation and its structure became the foundation of the colonial project as such. Suddenly the assumption that “tropic fever” arises from the heat seems doubtful.

“Sex does strange things to people!” This sentence reverberates from her childhood. What did her mother mean? What fears did she pass on to Emma? The budding filmmaker sets up the camera in her mother’s apartment, invites mum’s friends, creates an open atmosphere. Coby opens up more and more, talks about a repressed topic. At the same time, she gets to show a wholly different side of herself, performing song and dance numbers in front of her daughter’s lens.