A background study of a dying amusement culture, filmed in slovenly dressing rooms in front of badly polished make-up mirrors. – Director Yoichiro Okutani follows the Odoriko, the Japanese strippers, through their daily routine between dressing and undressing, between pragmatic approaches to life and eroticism made fit for the stage. Okutani’s cut begins naked: A nude woman descends a staircase, filmed not to advantage but with the brutal ordinariness of routine. One production year and five minutes lie between this – Okutani’s – director’s cut and Mary Stephen’s editor’s cut “Nude at Heart”. But how much more?

Avi Mograbi met his grandfather in a dream. The setting: Damascus, 1920. Would the two have spoken Arabic or Hebrew at this impossible encounter? It’s amazing that they were able to communicate at all! For Mograbi barely speaks Arabic, and his grandfather only learned Ivrit later. Another impossible conversation begins in his friend Ali Al-Azhari’s flat: between Avi, the Jew, and Ali, the Palestinian. Their lively, affectionate exchange about ancestors, vocabularies and dreams is supposed to prepare for a film that ends up not being made. But since the footage has already been shot, why not use it to tackle a new Israeli-Palestine reality?

The most valuable thing Yadan carries with him on his flight is a hard drive. It contains almost 13,000 videos recorded in 2011 and 2012 by him and other insurgents in Daraa, the “cradle” of the Syrian revolution. Eight years later, Yadan and two of his fellow travellers meet in a theatre in Paris to (re)confront the material. In the dialogue between the men and the images, a piece of the country’s history begins to take shape.

When peaceful protest turns into brutal war, a small group of civilians become the voice of Daraa. They film where there is no official coverage: at first in order to help the revolution into actual existence by their media representation, later to bear witness in an urgent plea for help to the international community. Against the human rights crimes of the government troops, against shelling and bombs – the camera is their weapon. The cinematic set-up becomes the starting point for a reflection about the meaning of images, then and now, and at the same time triggers a conversion of personal into collective memories. The protagonists’ reactions reveal how painful this process is: “Is the collection of the story worth all the violence that memory brings back?” is asked from offscreen. The film gives a decisive answer.

By adopting the French language, Belarusian writer Aliona Gloukhova has found a way to write about her vanished father. Director Elitza Gueorguieva follows this process, which culminates in the publication of a book. At the same time, the lives of two women cross paths who ended up in Western Europe partly to gain distance from their home countries, Belarus and Bulgaria.

Using the coordinate system of a foreign language to express what would feel dramatic or pathetic otherwise: Aliona Gloukhova chose this method to write down the story of her father, a quiet dissident and Chernobyl expert who suddenly disappeared in the mid-1990s. The memories of him are sketchy, and perhaps even what masquerades as memory isn’t real. Aliona immerses herself in fiction and the French vocabulary that gives her the freedom to formulate her own version of what happened. Elitza Gueorguieva follows this cautious approach to the biographical-linguistic complex, which also appeals to her own memories. Because on the streets of Minsk, which she walks with Aliona, she immediately feels the familiar childhood fear. It overwhelms her like biting into a madeleine she had better not tasted.