A country that could be anywhere, not precisely localized and yet everywhere. It’s a beautiful summer’s day when the life of siblings Kyona and Adriel changes forever. Their village is raided, destroyed and set on fire. The whole family is forced to flee and experiences many real and surreal situations on their tracks across a whole continent to finally arrive, perhaps, at a more peaceful place.

At the start of the film, Kyona leafs through a sketchbook, takes stock of her life and talks about the end of her childhood. It is only later that the siblings even realize that they are refugees, that like many others they are making their way to the border for a variety of reasons: natural disasters, the consequences of climate change, war, persecution. The two children come across dangerous and helpful people, are separated and find each other again. This feature-length animation, realized in oil on glass, relies on the rapid interplay between fantasy and reality, taking us, on the one hand, into a fictitious, non-real world. But on the other hand, the places, names, situations remind us of familiar things. They show fleeing, exile, setting out as a universal experience.

The teacher introduces the new classmate. Nobody pays attention. But yikes, the boy has an elephant’s head! The whispering starts immediately, pictures are scribbled, nobody wants to sit next to the new kid. Only one of the pupils seems fascinated by the elephant boy. They play together in the schoolyard and discover things they have in common. Will the others’ mockery separate them again?

Photographs are dusted, records cleaned, insects removed from books and everything is digitized for eternity. The matter-of-fact shots of fastidious archival work, though, are combined with the voice of a young woman who reports on the collapse of civilization, the fragile artefacts of which she secures as the last human being left in the “Congress”. In the field of tension between image and sound a space for our imagination opens up.

The riots that were to spread across the whole of France in 2005 began in Clichy-sous-Bois outside the gates of Paris: young men on the barricades, burning suburbs. The division of society became painfully tangible. What has happened since then? This complex, finely woven documentary look at the Banlieue shows how consciously young people today deal with discrimination. The age of machismo seems over – at the school theatre workshop or while playing soccer. Women rule the world …

András and his daughter Zsófia enjoy a relaxed Sunday in their stately city mansion, just before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. But soon the silence in the house is disturbed by an escaped pig, closely followed by an unexpected visit: András’ brother, his large family and lots of luggage barge in through the front door. Running children and garrulous relatives bring noise and bedlam to all floors. Art objects are handled without permission, furniture is moved, objects fall to the ground. The visitors have brought chaos. Zsófia’s father and the maid try in vain to restore calm and order. Though András and his brother get closer to each other, the old house is not up to the changed circumstances. A leaking water pipe heralds a finale that at least makes them all stand still together.

The archived testimonies of “Breaking the Silence”, an association of military veterans, are to be turned into a compilation of “service incidents” in the Israeli-occupied territories. But Avi Mograbi confesses: “My films tend to get complicated, even when my intention is to make a very simple film.” His reaction to a complex doom is artistically and intellectually commensurate: complex. Once again he uses a built-in commentary function in which he himself, white-bearded, explains the tricky situation to his audience: not as a special “Israel-Palestine” case, but as the bitter standard application of the globally familiar aporetic model of “military occupation”.

The NGO “Breaking the Silence” – BtS for short – consists of veteran Israeli soldiers who, by collecting personal accounts of their memories, want to raise awareness of everyday military life and the treatment of the population in the Occupied Territories. Director Silvina Landsmann’s film allows us a look behind the scenes of a contested group with a controversial approach in the midst of a conflict that’s been smouldering for more than 70 years.

What makes a good soldier? The ability to execute orders without scruples, or the consideration of higher moral goals when dealing with the enemy? For many members of BtS, the latter was only possible after active military service. In their work, they engage with operations and acts that in retrospect seem wrong to them. They address the Israeli population and foreign media with videos, lectures and city tours. The streets of Hebron are the site of frequent clashes between BtS, Israeli settlers and the army. On the political level, too, the organisation is harshly criticized. They are accused of fabricating stories, damaging Israel’s reputation and playing into the hands of anti-Semites. Landsmann observes with a cinematic, sober eye how the group struggles internally and externally to find its voice.

In 2018, a user called AnathematicAnarchist published a suicide note in an online forum for incels – a subculture of heterosexual men whose self-pity, misogyny and fantasies of violence dominate the internet in many places and trigger offline actions in some. Did he really take his own life? Is America responsible for his death, as he claims in his text? A search for clues in the darkest corners of the net, an essay about pain and loneliness in the age of algorithms.

A door that has been closed for seventy years serves as a MacGuffin in Mila Turajlić’s double portrait of her mother and her mother country of Yugoslavia. That very door has divided the bourgeois family apartment ever since Tito’s communists assigned several rooms to proletarians in need of shelter. Srbijanka Turajlić never cared a fig for her neighbours. But when Serbian nationalists began to threaten the unity of her country, she turned into a fierce opponent of the Milošević regime. In a virtuoso montage of archive material and conversations with her mother, the filmmaker recaps the latter’s development while gaining a new perspective on the time of her own youth.

An abandoned amusement park offers a secret real-life retreat for young people in Casablanca. They escape their restrictive society digitally into the Internet to soak up international trends and amplify themselves. A camera floats through the tableaux vivants they have formed. Their eyes are frozen, the self-chosen poses seem undead.

At the end of the first Space Age wave, bird-like and bowler-hatted creatures enter the TV screen. The Shadoks and the Gibis live on distant two-dimensional planets. Jacques Rouxel’s absurdly funny, minimalist animated science fiction world of drawings is spiked with the electro-acoustic, cartoon-like, extra-terrestrial sounds of the composer Robert Cohen-Solal, well-versed in musique concrète.

After 62 years of marriage Aïcha Soualem is on her own again. Mabrouk, whom she has left, is nevertheless supplied by her daily with food and sugar cubes. Director Lina Soualem is interested in the relationship between her grandparents, who, as the last remaining Algerians in Thiers, France, look back on an eventful past. An empathic investigation all the way back to their native village of Laaouamer which leaves room for ambiguous emotions.

“Soualem” is the password which not only enables Lina Soualem to unlock the tiny, snow-covered village full of cousins in Algeria, which her grandparents left a long time ago. In a sense, “Soualem” is also the title of this gentle investigation of a granddaughter. And Laaouamer, that little place in Algeria, is only the final destination of a long journey which may be narrated via geographical coordinates but interweaves them closely with biographical and emotional ones. Aïcha and Mabrouk rarely talk about themselves. Instead, self-affixed wall badges speak: “The world’s best mom lives here” or “Welcome to the world’s best grandma’s”. To learn more about the couple, whose lives were shaped by French colonialism, Lina Soualem uses private photos and videos. Her investigation is full of love: persistent, but never prying.

How are we shaped by our DNA? The 360° film tells the story of fictional scientist Roderick Norman, who tries to extract dreams from an unidentified skeleton that are inscribed in the blueprint of this ruin of a body. This black and white collage of text, 3D images and traditional film footage questions our conventional understanding of gender and identity.

Following in the footsteps of the Hamburg film director Hans Schomburgk who travelled through the German colony of Togo from Lomé to the north with his companion and actress Meg Gehrts in 1913, Jürgen Ellinghaus screens the footage shot then at its locations in modern-day Togo. Schomburgk’s affirmative images show slave labour, humiliation and the arrogance of the colonial power. The material is contrasted by Gehrts’ romanticising diary entries and other colonial reports which often testify to a horrifying coldness.

The screenings of this material, which has never been shown in Togo before, prompt the audiences to reflect on tradition, stereotypes, the “white gaze.” In the villages, the colonial images conjure up memories of handed down stories. In the metropolis of Lomé, young film enthusiasts deplore that these images were kept from them until today and discuss in which contexts they should be screened. But “Togoland Projections” not only shows how much these painful documents and texts are needed in contemporary Togo, because they are part of the country’s history. The film also demonstrates that they are needed in Germany so we can take responsibility for our suppressed history and face our own racism – past and present.

While the transaction tax collectors seem to be dancing to jazz music, a pointedly staged text passage by Patrick Chamoiseau lets not only our visual and auditory but also our olfactory senses unfold: The third-largest Nigerian city can be experienced by smell. In this rhythmic portrait of life in Ibadan the urban cinematic poetry is by no means at odds with the profundity with which it captures themes like lack of perspective, globalisation and corruption.