She opens her arms wide: “I want to go home, do my dreaming.” Crossing from an unbearable reality to the world of magic sometimes takes only the snap of a finger, sometimes several press-ups. Gudrun Krebitz’s poetic combination of video and animation recommends pushing the gravestone aside and descending into one’s subconscious.

Covid-19 has made quarantine and self-isolation the everyday experience for many. This project, developed at the CPH:LAB, invites people to scan their most personal places and moments. The resulting VR experience is a walk-in archive and time capsule, the collective memory of a state of emergency which also preserves forgotten virtues like deceleration and the spirit of discovery.

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.

We’re travelling from luxury kitchen to luxury kitchen with Agnes, from Bergisch Gladbach via Barcelona to the Faroe Islands. The cook’s luggage always includes her backpack containing various knives, cleavers and tweezers. The camera watches over the inquisitive young woman’s shoulder as delicacies are being prepared. Our mouths water. At the same time, we get insights into the different ways of running a restaurant. It’s about team spirit and equality at the stove.

Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels” comes to mind, because this observational documentary is also like a novel of development. Agnes is ambitious, knows her craft. She wants to be her own boss one day. She soon finds her way around every new team, takes her place. It’s a sensuous pleasure to watch how the many hands interlock, how culinary creations are lovingly made, delicately plucked salad leaves arranged as decorations. At the same time, Agnes has to struggle against opposition. Her wages are low. A colleague asks her what business she, who has just finished her apprenticeship, has in a three-star restaurant. Agnes is moving in a male domain, in an environment that tends to pass the pressure down. But in the course of her journey, she also comes across collective forms of cooperation and new visions of cooking.

Daffy Duck is caught in an animation loop. Martin Arnold dissects the industrial animated film production with its extreme division of labour, where body parts of the characters are isolated on different cels and moved separately, in loops and outside their habitat, separated from the background. Daffy’s beak wiggles, his wing hands flutter in the black void. An artistic and psychological study.

“I don’t want to say it out loud, but my flat’s lower down,” the narrator remarks. The camera at first follows her legs climbing up the stairs of the hallway. That is all we see of her. Very soon, her gaze determines our perspective in this unsettling story. At first it all sounds like a mistake, but at some point, the tenant gets used to the fact that in some inexplicable way and completely unceremoniously she is pulled down from the fourth floor to the coal cellar, floor by floor. A decline that the neighbourhood lets happen in deafening silence.

The “falling” protagonist’s irritated soliloquy, sometimes resigned, often full of calculated optimism, is accompanied by charcoal drawings. Their clarity and architectural detail – down to the curlicued decorations of the upper-class mansion – gradually fade over the course of events. The spatial representation becomes more and more vague and is reduced to a few strokes, only to dissolve into soft areas of charcoal dust in the end. In this nightmarish story, reality no longer offers any support, only one’s own ego. Susi Jirkuff has adapted Ilse Aichinger’s eponymous, multilayered story, which was first published in the mid-1950s, with a remarkable urgency that demonstrates the topicality of Aichinger’s text and writing.

“Zaho Zay!”, it’s me. This is the daily salute of the prisoners in a crowded Madagascan prison whose guard looks for her lost father in each new prisoner. Her projections and fantasies let the mystical, murderous father figure roam the island in simultaneously dreamlike and nightmarish sequences, accompanied by a poetic voiceover. A hybrid narrative, speculating about the mysterious paths and profound traumas of its landscapes and all who walk in them.

A pair of dice, a quiet murderer and his victims, traces of history and magic realism. Rituals and riddles, revenge, remorse and imprisonment are unravelled and re-interlaced between the brutal reality of a detention centre, the fantasies of the fictionalised narrator and the vast natural spaces of an island – slowly and poetically. Crises, colonial violence and its continuities are suggested and condensed. The montage of documentary material and staged sequences references western and film noir and develops an intense visual and narrative pull. An almost lyrical text and the precisely framed images bear witness to an impossible quest that’s actually a haunting, referring to individual and collective traumas and the strange forces with which such shocks inscribe themselves into narratives and places.

Set theory, one of the cornerstones of mathematics, serves as a metaphor for “social structures as spatial arrangement”, as the first sequence of the film reveals. The visual playfulness first becomes an exploration of two- and three-dimensionality and then turns out to be a well-founded reflection of social power relations. The search for a supposedly correct “order of things” triggers the compulsive element in many viewers. Who’s (not) afraid of being different?