Landscape painting with creative pixel glitches. José Miguel Biscaya explores a nature scene with the camera and rediscovers it through manipulated MPEG algorithms and deliberate encoding errors. Familiar natural phenomena liquefy into surprising shapes and colours straight from the hidden recesses of perception.

Ines Seifert

How long must Christians still wait for the Second Coming? How will the prophecy be fulfilled and by whom? For example by Koen Carlier. At least that’s what the Flemish activist firmly believes. After all, the bible supplies precise instructions: Bring the Jews back home and the Messiah will come. So for more than 20 years he has been working in Ukraine on behalf of the Dutch branch of “Christians for Israel” in order to enlighten all the Jews still living there about their right (their duty, actually) to emigrate to Israel. But his life is a rather unglamorous one which resembles that of a commercial traveller. On his tours through underdeveloped regions he meets hospitable but also sceptical people. Some plead high blood pressure; others would rather emigrate to Germany. Carlier keeps preaching with gentle severity and unshakeable enthusiasm: Nobody will be left behind in the Diaspora, whether they like it or not.

Maidan and the outbreak of the Ukrainian conflict constitute a final change in his eyes. All signs and symbols point to Armageddon. This is where the film, too, radically changes direction: from the portrait of a confused family man to a psycho trip, working its way into the dangerous thinking of Christian religious fundamentalism, full visual power ahead.

Lars Meyer

Since 2007, the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus has been conducting excavations in the Kyrenia Mountains with the hopes of returning the remains of Greek and Turkish Cypriots to their respective families. Skeletons are exhumed; mass graves are uncovered with the help of surviving anonymous witnesses. These individuals have been missing since the tragedies of 1963/64 and 1974.

With staggering camerawork and a poised pace, “Colony” unearths Cyprus’s unsettling memory of conflict. Exploring the issues of trauma, remembrance and reconciliation, the film delves into the intricate relationship between geography and human psychology.

Özge Calafato

Ten-year-old Anne Fee lives in the “Thomas-Haus” with her parents and a group of disabled persons. For a party she founds a band with Bob, the poet, and Olivier, who wants to be an actor. They sing about dreams and whether they can come true.

In 2002 the Dutch journalists Teun van de Keuken, Maurice Dekkers and Roland Duong came across a short newspaper item about child slavery in the cocoa harvest. Shocked at the casualness with which such news were reported, they decided to address the issue. Their research revealed fairly quickly that there’s child labour in every chocolate product – with or without a Fairtrade seal – and that big corporations like Nestlé neither wish to deny it nor do anything about it. In order to get more attention, Teun van de Keuken hit upon the idea of suing himself, as a consumer of chocolate, for complicity in child slavery. The case really made it to court and three years later a verdict was passed. In the meantime, however, the journalists took matters into their own hands and became confectionery producers who launched the world’s first 100% slave-free chocolate – Tony’s Chocolonely – on the market.

Benthe Forrers equally moving and entertaining film is captivating through the sheer volume of archive material, compiled over more than a decade, documenting the research, trial and founding of the company down to the smallest detail. And the good news last: yes, we can change things if we want to. And yes, it’s tough. But that’s for later. You have to start somewhere, after all.

Lina Dinkla

In a Guardian blog running in 2012/13 statements and self-assessments of managers working in the global finance industry were collected and published under the title “Voices of Finance”. Clara van Gools converts ten of these voices into brilliant performances: in extremely stylised choreographies the voices from this social milieu join in a grand dance around the Golden Calf, performed in the real environment of the international financial centre of London.

Ralph Eue