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.

An abstract, extremely reduced miniature that manages to express and capture all the more with minimal means. Only a few hand-drawn monochrome strokes, forming and transforming to the rough beat of electronic sound fragments, create a vast space. It is filled with image and sound signals, with successful and failed attempts at communication.

Two mice discover a big wheel of cheese. Paradise, no less! But how to get in? One mouse has made it, its little brother is outside on his own and must watch out for the hungry cat. Inside the cheese wheel, the mouse lives like a king, eating its way through the yellow treat. But every bite brings it closer to the collapse of its house …

A drunken drive through the night with a badger at the wheel. The car radio is a crooning, rhythmic companion and rhythm generator to the reeling road, the will-o’-the-wisp headlights of oncoming cars. The beginning becomes the end of a bizarre journey that turns our heads not by speed but by narrative sophistication in visually magnificent concentration.

In the “White Horse” café, waitress and guests apathetically go through their routines. Meanwhile, the reality surrounding them seems to destabilise more and more: between white noise and the sound of tuning forks, between daydreams of galloping knights and ever-growing mountains of drizzling packet sugar. Ivana Bošniak Volda and Thomas Johnson Volda pile up layers of these images and sounds, until they crack – and clear the way to breathe.

It’s lonely out in space and only the sun can warm you. In his imaginative 2D animation, Darko Masnec makes lines come alive and breathes life into abstract geometrical figures, as if Paul Klee and the Shadoks were celebrating a colourful banquet of metamorphoses. Stylised forms sprout luminescent organic compounds that tell a touching love story in outer space.