Five young people from Ukraine talk about their lives after the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all of them fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the war, however, shattered their life plans. Representing “Generation Maidan”, they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. Theatre director Roza Sarkisian produces a Hamlet adaptation with them in which they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas on stage again.

For them Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is not just a historical text, but a current and existential dilemma that has no clear answer. The film follows the rehearsals where different biographies, self-images and political positions clash: A soldier meets his first LGBT person, the feminist quarrels with the fact that the war has undone hard-won emancipatory achievements. Frictions and differences are exposed, compromises are strenuously negotiated. Eventually the film’s focus widens and leaves the stage to introduce the five as individuals with their own inner struggles. The result is a many-layered, dense portrait of a torn and yet powerful Ukrainian generation who, due to the Russian invasion, find themselves at war again, only a few months after their production premiered.

Is he crazy or a genius? An impoverished compulsive hoarder or a millionaire? Many legends surround octogenarian Adolf Haeberli, who lives in a cramped and dilapidated house in the luxury spa town of St. Moritz. For some residents his home is an eyesore, while for others it’s a creative place of resistance. Haeberli himself thinks he was born under a lucky star. In this humorous but never exposing portrait of a lateral thinker, every voice is heard.

The yellow banana beckons from the fruit basket; it’s peeled in no time and about to disappear in the mouth. But stop! Before you can at last take the first bite, you have to share. The banana becomes smaller and smaller. The elephant, too, wants a piece of the sweet fruit. A piece for you, a piece for me … A little film about the joys of sharing.

A felicitous and at the same time almost unbearable cinematic experimental set-up that uses documentary means to show what the Belarusian reality behind the news items looks like. Based on eyewitness accounts, Pavel Mozhar re-stages Lukashenko’s perfidious and oppression-based power system. Violence in the shape of detailed reconstructions may seem abstract at first glance but drills itself into our consciousness all the more persistently in the course of the film.

Three children and their families have fled from crisis areas and found a new home in Germany. What are their wishes for the future, their dreams? The conversations with the three were turned into animated children’s drawings. We see a schoolkid’s life from their perspective.

Sheila died of hay dust in the lungs, and the family-owned farm somehow died along with the horse. After it was sold, the narrator visits it digitally on 3D online maps. But even the most detailed view reveals nothing about the grave of the three-legged farm cat. Using animation and image processing, he reclaims the remembered place of his childhood and youth.

Just hold your breath. Perhaps this helps as much against the pain of parting as the stinging nettles of one’s childhood. Sheila died of hay dust in her lungs and it seems as if the family farm died with the horse, too. After its sale, the laconic narrator pays digital visits via 3D online maps. But even the most detailed view says nothing about the grave of the three-legged farm cat. Using animation and image manipulation, he reclaims the remembered place.

At home in the uncanny: Startled, a woman turns on the light, hesitates, listens and goes to the door, full of dark forebodings … In this montage of similar scenes from Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, the various actresses merge into a meta-protagonist who experiences the same horror over and over again: She is trapped in her home and in her classic movie role.

Rose and Rolf in the still-young FRG. He, 13 years her senior, was in the Second World War. She, who wants to have many children, accepts his proposal and leaves school. Rose watches Super 8 home movies from the fifties, sixties and seventies with her granddaughter Annika Mayer, the director of “Home Sweet Home”: her two boys in short leather pants, a home with a manicured front garden, dad coming home from work, mom cooking soup with sausage links. Rose does not recognise herself in these ideal images of the German economic miracle. This pretty young woman is a stranger to her.

Annika begins to ask questions. Together with her grandmother, she starts to look for traces of domestic violence in the latter’s marriage, which is invisible in the films. But Rose’s open narratives gradually make her experiences tangible. What biographical abysses may lurk behind Rolf’s proud smile? Judiciously deployed slow motion effects dissect the apparent domestic happiness. Atonal and hyperrealistic sounds lie under the distorted soundtrack. The birds sing all too happily, the idyll suddenly seems deceptive.

Everyone in Leipzig is familiar with the Hotel Astoria, which has stood vacant since 1996. This film takes a look back to the time when the hotel was the hotspot of the trade fair city, where professionals, politicians and guests from all over the world were entertained with the greatest possible GDR pomp. But the Stasi also came and went in the hotel. The story of an exciting chapter in the city’s history is told with archive material, staff reports, and the distinctive animations by Falk Schuster.

The term hysteresis soberly describes a processual behaviour where the previous history affects the result as much as new changes. Robert Seidel enters analogue drawings, performance footage of the queer dancer Tsuki and pluck sounds and drones by Oval into a feedback system that reorganises time and movement in a multicoloured and sensual organic tableau.

Hammer and compass in Mozambique. We see a GDR flag waved at a rally in Maputo, carried by “Madgermanes”, contract workers who once toiled in eastern Germany. Some of them founded families there, like Eulidio. His daughter Sarah grows up with her mother in Berlin. The relationship with her “second home” is slow in growing, partly thanks to Luana, Sarah’s baby, whose father Eduardo is also from Mozambique.

Eulidio still remembers the Lubmin nuclear power plant. Today he fries chips in Springs, South Africa. Meanwhile, Sarah only knew her father from a photo for the longest time: rather cool-looking, wearing a cap. She met him for the first time when she was eleven and felt how comfortable she was surrounded by people whose skin is as dark as hers. As an adult woman she decides to spend some time in Mozambique – and meets Eduardo. On the flight back she’s pregnant. This documentary observation by Brenda Akele Jorde deals with Sarah’s attempt to weave together and spin out threads that were torn by the fall of communism. And it shows the challenges this brings: While Sarah is confronted with racism in Germany, in Africa she’s regarded as a German. While once her father Eulidio was expelled after the fall of the Berlin Wall, now it’s Eduardo who sees his daughter only sporadically.