The Baía de Guanabara is not just any bay: the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro has sprawled around it. Its waste water threatens the rich ecosystem, planes roar along the approach corridors above. These filmic explorations on the margins of the megacity portray various environments that are all connected to the bay in a specific way. The people here are micro-wage earners making a modest living.

At night the lights of the city and the promises of capitalism shine in the distance. To the people living at the periphery, they seem out of reach. In eight chapters this documentary essay meditates on their habitats along the bay, following the repetitive and physically exhausting activities of humans and farm animals. Unusual perspectives, careful camera work and a poignant sound design elevate these observations to a commentary on the crisis in Brazil. Murilo Salles, who won a Silver Dove in Leipzig in 1978 for his debut “These Are the Weapons”, sheds light on the close link between geographical space and social inequality.

In Siculiana, a small Sicilian town full of flaking facades, religiosity is lived out as a matter of course. And of course the figure of Jesus Christ worshipped here is black, and always has been. However, some people cannot get used to their dark-skinned neighbours in the refugee camp. The camera accompanies locals and stranded people along their paths, which often lead to the church, but not necessarily together, and draws a kind of map of the city in black-on-black contrasts.

It’s become quiet in Siculiana, a local says. He’s not referring to the loud demonstrations against the Villa Sikania, now converted into a refugee reception camp. And certainly not to the colourful flurry of activity that grips the city every year as the faithful prepare for the feast of the Finding of the Cross. That’s when they hang up the “Benvenuti” sign. But who exactly is welcomed here? The pomp and circumstance of the festivities are at the centre of this filmic portrait of a community in which the alleged common ground is disintegrating into voice and skin tones: between the black people from abroad and the black man on the cross who – according to an elderly lady – was forced to “darken” himself in order to incorporate human sins. Between an aging city stylised to the point of becoming scenery and God’s newly arrived children who promise a future and who could bring new life into the alleys.

Dwindling membership, a crumbling club house, penniless coffers: The “Bradford Movie Makers” have seen better days. The active club members, most of them fairly advanced in years, sit there, basking in blissful memories and not mincing their words when they pick at the others’ film ideas over multiple cups of tea. Cineastes have met here every Monday since 1932 and can be proud of a ninety-year history including countless amateur films of all genres.

The “club”, as insiders call it, is a typical British working class film club: watching films together on a regular basis and spending every free minute on elaborate shoots including stunt riders and green screens. But the old veterans are beginning to get frail, the occasional death must be mourned. And then the pandemic comes on top of all this, darkening the only bright spot of the week. But it also brings unexpected surprises … Kim Hopkins manages the feat, despite a number of tragic-sad occasions, of avoiding the tear-jerker trap and gives us equally astonishing and funny insights into this pastime that’s far more than just a hobby. This quiet, funny and touching portrait of a band of film buffs – male and female – pays tribute to the need we all have to spend time together.

In this cinematic conjuring, Ante Zlatko Stolica remembers childhood fears triggered by a deaf woman in his grandmother’s village. The ghost of Janja, an allusion to the Slavic fairy tale character of Baba Yaga, haunts his dreams, lurks in dark places and joins forces with other horror characters. Still lifes, horror films and a gloomy soundscape evoke the unease that still disturbs the director, even after Janja’s death.

Between coming and going time feels leaden – a half-life in the light and dark contrasts of a linocut. The narrating voice’s mother cares for seniors in their homes for five euros an hour. At their bedsides the ticking clock counts down the working day, caught between the frightening sounds of the heavy breathing that comes with impending death and the roar of promises made by television. The dying are mother’s livelihood.

Tree sitting is an important part of climate activism. The “occupation” of Dannenröder Forst in 2019 was meant to prevent its clearance for a highway. The people holding out in the airy heights of their tree houses were dependent on support and supplies from the ground. This help came from locals who would never have dreamed of being part of a resistance movement before. David Klammer’s film shows how brand-new alliances are formed in the face of environmental and climate destruction while realising how powerless words are. These alliances could last – even if the trees, like those in the “Danni”, fall victim to the chainsaws in the end.

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?”

A quote by the Soviet futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky about Lenin frames the plot of this film: A dead man who is “more alive than the living” today. On a tour through the Union of Soviet Republics, the film team meet friends “in the full sense of the word” without mentioning their names: encounters with people in the Soviet Union in 1970.

A green lawn like an unused carpet, encircled by a neat forest edge, in the background the steaming cooling towers of a coal power station – impressionistic camera images from Lusatia. They summarise in one pan how a used-up utilitarian landscape is trying to recultivate itself. Can ancient identity and language be re-discovered amid this strange artificiality? The director travelled through this region in search of her origins. She was born here, in Lusatia. This is her home and that of the smallest of all Slavic peoples: the Sorbs.

She thinks about the assimilation of this cultural and linguistic community with the indigenous people, about its history of oppression in the various German systems, about a region caught up in structural change and the identity-shaping power of words – even if one has to learn them anew first. She meets a German Anna who becomes a Sorbian Hanka. She encounters people dedicated to preserving the traditions. The younger folks especially see their Sorbian-ness as a commitment to a community spirit, if not – like the artist, Hella – as an alternative way of life. Accompanied by old and new Sorbian sounds, along the filmmaker’s offscreen reflections, the many-voiced portrait of a nation within the nation emerges who reclaims its culture out of the local museums back into its everyday life.

Oh dear, the nightingale has no feathers! The other birds are laughing at her because she can’t fly. Her singing, however, lulls the little bear to sleep. Even the squirrels stop fighting and listen. When autumn comes and the nightingale catches a cold, she feels much too sick to sing. The other animals will have to come up with something …

Long walks through almost deserted cityscapes which even in the late 1970s still bear the distinct scars of the Second World War: a Belgian filmmaker encounters West Berlin. She tries to re-adjust in this terrain saturated with European history and films this transformation in the first person singular. The images of twilight captured on grainy 16mm footage make Berlin look like a city that lies deep in the East, even though it sees itself as a Western city. But Annik Leroy mistrusts the mirror images: they don’t help if you want to see things more clearly.

Why this film document about a street in East Berlin is the way it is, why it conveys an almost touching, basically unformed honesty and perplexity, is due to the specific institution it was made for. The State Film Documentation was founded to provide the GDR with uncensored testimonies of its own reality. Three long-time residents look, through notoriously draughty windows, at the notoriously chilly German-Jewish history: Herr Miegel, former pub owner, Frau Kramp, former cinema employee, Mischket Liebermann, writer and GDR cultural politician. They have been neighbours in their district forever. They will probably remain strangers to each other forever.

Bertha loves to draw. She needs help in her daily life for she has a rare disease that impairs her vision. But Bertha refuses to be discouraged. She has organised an exhibition together with a well-known painter. The proceeds will go to research into her disease, the so-called Wolfram syndrome. Can Bertha tame the wild wolves in her life?

14-year-old Mali’s head is full of dancing. She is a b-girl and lives for breaking. She has just moved into a big city to live with her older sister – and to go to a new school where dancing is one of the main subjects. But can Mali handle the other dance styles? And will her body be able to stand the strain?

Because his single mother criticised the state, Alex was sent to a special children’s home at the age of eleven, in order to shape him – like almost 500,000 children in the GDR – into a “socialist personality”. He escaped and ended up as a punishment at the Torgau Closed Juvenile Detention Centre, more prison than social institution. His life was now dominated by military drill and violence … Reduced rotoscope images follow Alex’s memories and show how the trauma affects him even today.

On 29 April 1959, Hessian Broadcasting transmitted an alarming survey of the Federal German school system. The first of three parts of the report “Focus on Our Youth” investigates the question of what has stuck in the minds of higher form students about Hitler’s and Ulbricht’s Germanies. Hesse under Polish administration? Hitler sold badges to come to power? At least they are about right concerning the number of murdered Jews – that is, the third who could think of anything to say about this at all. One television critic rightly pointed out that this represented the sum total of all parental table talk. But were these parents watching television on 29 April 1959?