A ship scrapyard in western Cuba. The observing camera follows Raudel and his colleagues who work in what seems like a hermetically sealed microcosm. A homing pigeon strays into the place; the workers contemplate it silently as they smoke. Sometimes they talk about their dreams. Shots are focussed in turns on their bodies and their surroundings. Rhythmic, artfully crafted and authentically produced sounds accompany precise and lucid images, without aestheticizing the harshness of their work.

Tszzzzidd – skin and adhesive tape separate slowly, almost lasciviously. From a sober physical point of view, forces between molecular bonds are being overcome. Yoriko Mizushiri composes brief, highly sensual variations on pain and pleasure based on this phenomenon. Restrained, calm and scalpel-sharp, she creates two-dimensional drawn animations in subdued colours, accompanied by cool electronic sounds that explode in one’s head only to scatter into the anxious but curious body.

How can we visualise the past without perceiving it too much as a historical fact? This film uses a clever combination of archival material and oral history to bring memories of a transgenerative trauma and the associated pain to the surface. What seems to be the past becomes visible in countless points of contact with the present. It’s a simple, touching treatment of the incomprehensible consequences of a historical crime.

A voice speaking the Aztec language Nahuatl and a ritual song accompany the children’s games in the Mayan rain forest. They put their ears to the trees which seem to speak to each other and to the universe. They listen to an ancient love story that continues today. A myth of Mesoamerican culture is invoked. Animated sequences and extreme backlighting visualize the tree’s inner life. What images may emerge in the children’s mind’s eyes?

There is a house hanging from heavy ropes, firmly anchored to the rocks. Up there in the cliffs, far above the town below, a father lives with his son in the cold. In his 2D frame-by-frame animation, director João Gonzalez uses few colours, which makes the harsh shadows and extreme camera angles of his drawings all the more atmospheric. He has realised a metaphorical tale that can do without dialogue, relying on sound and images alone.

Click, click, she virtually recreates a cluttered, narrow kitchen on her computer. Lady Di smiles with creased photo edges from the refrigerator, a half-opened chocolate bar lies on the table. The technical-looking, detailed digital reconstruction runs like a fingertip along remembered images, tracing their nicks. The images feed off a blurred video in which the grandparents and their kitchen-cum-living-room live on – a nostalgic place in the distant Ukraine of childhood.

In rural northern Colombia, where the railway has long been discontinued, people help themselves with a fleet of “Motorrodillos” – motorcycle-driven miniature trains. Every day, Dolly and her colleagues take school kids, goods and travellers on rugged routes from village to village. If you meet oncoming traffic on the way, you get off the rails. If you find holes in the rails, you mend them yourself. The affectionate portrait of a self-organised transport system.

Four creatures wobble like marionettes in the black void. An alien power tries to subdue them, police voices strike like truncheons. Bent, with bulging or thread-thin limbs, their skin turned inside out – human anatomy has mutated. But these vulnerable bodies start to fight back … “Scum Mutation” takes us into the battle zone without protection, into an indelible energy field of radical feminist protest – and becomes a resounding beacon of reconquest.

In search of the cat Leo a boy roams through sunny fields. Drifting without a care and digging up treasures in the mysterious darkness of the barn are the last throes of childhood before it ends. The crayon colours of this summer are overlaid with the whispering and rustling of shelter – and a premonition. Mara Cerri and Magda Guidi sharpen our senses for the impressions of a confusing age.

Coupledom has its own dynamics. Her professional obligations do not tick by the clock, his cooking and love are extraordinary, but, alas, precisely timed. This all too familiar incompatibility is condensed into murky, acrid roast fumes and ends civilized, but bloody. Špela Čadež gradually slows down the pace, creating a space for the absurd goings-on to penetrate deeper and deeper. Black humour, “well done”.

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 …

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.

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.