It begins like a classic “girl meets boy” story: Faith, a charismatic accordion player from Great Britain, travels to Serbia to learn about Roma folk music. She meets the violinist Branko, who is instantly smitten. They quickly marry and form a band. But with musical success their love dwindles. A turbulent story of expectations, disappointments and the dream of happiness.

Faith enters into Branko’s life in an almost disturbingly casual way. She doesn’t seem to be bothered by the new country, the sceptical family and the cultural differences. Branko on the other hand adores his new wife and boldly enters a new world. They are a big hit as a duo – travelling around the world and playing bigger and bigger venues. But while Faith feels as happy as a lark, Branko seems like an uprooted tree. Instead of dealing with their differences they keep moving on rapidly, until one ruthless step follows the next. Catherine Harte has produced a captivating and very intimate portrait of this contradictory couple. Relentlessly close and yet compassionate, the film develops an impressive pull you don’t want to resist.

Images of blurred landscapes fade into each other. Apparent rock formations reveal themselves only at second glance as collages of human body parts. Browsing further through the family album uncovers something that is rather rarely found in such private pictorial chronicles: the backs of people’s heads. Grandparents, aunts and friends do not, as usual, look out of the album and the then at the viewer in the now but into the mysterious depths of a neon-lighted corridor. Its architectural elements form a filmic labyrinth behind whose closed doors animated collages of arms and hands perform everyday gestures in a ghost-like pantomime.

Moïa Jobin-Paré opens found private photo albums. The connections and stories between the pictures remain as abstract as that which the photographs show is concrete. Poetic spaces of interpretation open up. The Canadian artist offers a special reading. She scrapes individual elements or patterns off the analogue photographs and animates these “painterly” edits in a space of washed-out sounds. Scratches and white dots spread mushroom-like on the physically dissolving images.

Since 1999, the Far East Film Festival, the biggest festival of popular Asian films in Europe, has been held annually in the Italian city of Udine. Špela Čadež was commissioned to design the trailer for its 11th edition in 2009 and delivered a crisp and short, wonderfully incisive puppet animation about the love of noodles – with or without cheese – that unites cultures and continent.

Lovro steps into the bathtub. A drop falls from the faucet and makes waves – into the past, back to the day he went fishing with his grandfather for the first time. Thoughts, sounds, bath utensils swirl memory and reality together … With this animated melancholia, Leon Vidmar, a student of Špela Čadež, continues in the vein of his teacher’s works in terms of craft and atmosphere.

“After I die, show your film at my funeral!” Zuogui, the director’s grandfather, is 86 years old and has been blind since childhood. Becoming a fortune teller was a way out of poverty for him. People are still coming to him for advice, including his son Donggu, a developer: “Dad, how is my fortune next year?” In his portrait of generations about his father and grandfather, Wei Deng depicts tradition and change, violence and alienation in Chinese society.

Pale greys and dim lights create an atmosphere that seems to correspond to the dark memories of famine, dead siblings and the violently enforced one-child policy. The camera stays close to the grandfather as he feels his way along the walls of his flat. Orienting himself in his own environment has become harder since Donggu had the old house torn down and a new one built. Zuogui has little use for the modern China that claims to stand for economic boom and prosperity. Only when another of his son’s developments, which the fortune teller had warned against, threatens to fail does affection between the two seem possible again.

A beach reminds us of Fati’s recent past. She came to Italy by sea, without papers, pregnant for the fifth time. Longing for her children, she returned to Ghana six months later – without her husband. The people around her can’t understand this decision. “You’ve created a mess,” a friend says. “How do I tell people?” a sister asks. But Fati wants to provide for her family, even though she still has to liberate three of her children from the custody of her in-laws.

Numerous recent documentaries have been dedicated to the experiences of people who arrive in the EU and get caught in the degrading conditions of asylum politics, but this work by Ghanaian director Fatimah Dadzie offers a change of perspective. In Fati’s hometown, Europe is considered a paradise – and what fool would voluntarily run away from there? The decision has lost the returnee all prestige. Her social exclusion is shown here by relatives as talking heads, directly in front of the camera. But when the film overlays everyday images of care work or street hawking with Fati’s voiceover, it gives a voice to its steadfast protagonist.

Take: three generations of women in Covid lockdown in New York, enough white wine, vodka and time to talk about the really important issues. Dana Reilly makes the best of the pandemic restrictions and films what happens when her mother Janet and 90-year-old grandmother Sylvia decide to move in together. The result is a funny and at the same time lovingly raw tribute to two strong personalities, their not uncomplicated closeness and completely different worlds.

Not a single cloud ever seems to drift across this sky, the sun never ceases to send its powerful rays down. Here, in southern California, where the San Andreas Fault has created an unmistakable topography and invisible water currents run under the barren soil, date palms thrive best: feet in water, head on fire. Terra Long has looked around, traced the history of the plants which originally came to North America from the Middle East, and visited the parades and festivities dedicated to the sugary fruit. Layer by layer, she constructs her very own perspective on the landscape and the people, translates her haptic impressions into magnificent 16mm shots and designs a complex soundtrack.

Long manages to join the past and present and produce a concise, quasi sensual extract. The laborious manual pollination of the date palms plays a role in it, as do the collapsed ecosystem of the Salton Sea, archived dresses of Arabian Nights beauty queens and interviews that testify only to what is now historical; as do elderly white couples floating in their pools and walking across the lawns of golf courses. “Feet in Water, Head on Fire” is a document of simultaneity that captivates from the first minute to the last.

An old man and his granddaughter are sitting in a quiet square in the middle of the city. Suddenly he has a heart attack, falls to the ground – and time freezes. This could be the famous second where you see your life flash before your inner eye. But in which direction is it moving? Forward into the past, backward into the future or sideways into the now?

The siblings Fien and Jip are on summer holidays. They sit laughing in a pedal boat, sunbathe giggling on a meadow, and talk about a great unknown: love. For Jip is extremely busy sending his crush many hearts via smartphone. But who can provide information about this exciting feeling? Fien thinks: “Love is like ice cream with chocolate sprinkles on top.”

A garishly coloured and driving video for a 1992 single by the Italian rapper Frankie hi-nrg mc. It’s about how the Mafia and Camorra poison politics, business and everyday life. This incandescent complaint from a “civil war” turns into an appeal: immunize yourself against the seductions of a deathly lifestyle! Fight da faida: Fight the apparent inevitability of blood vengeance!

The Whitney brothers are pioneers of abstract animation. In 1943/1944, they experimented in five film exercises with modernist form and a device of their own that wrote directly on the soundtrack of the film by means of an impact pendulum. The resulting analogue electronic bleeps and bits are accompanied by moving stencils in constantly alternating coloured backlight whose shadows change their geometrical shape.

A naked body liquifies and becomes weightless. What’s left is its skin envelope which expands endlessly, longing for the tiniest touch. The increasingly shapeless figure vibrates in colours, fragments flashing, until the video track fails. The sensual piece by FKA twigs asks in slow motion what lust feels like. Jesse Kanda answers with enchanting computer-generated images.

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.

Ratté develops the pictorial concept of the floral still life into a new kind of illusionary space. The fragmented floral sculptures, created by 3D scans, design a speculative future in which extinct plants are preserved in a weightless archive. The representation gains a dimension but does not become more than a surface mould with no informative value about the living core.