We’re travelling from luxury kitchen to luxury kitchen with Agnes, from Bergisch Gladbach via Barcelona to the Faroe Islands. The cook’s luggage always includes her backpack containing various knives, cleavers and tweezers. The camera watches over the inquisitive young woman’s shoulder as delicacies are being prepared. Our mouths water. At the same time, we get insights into the different ways of running a restaurant. It’s about team spirit and equality at the stove.

Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels” comes to mind, because this observational documentary is also like a novel of development. Agnes is ambitious, knows her craft. She wants to be her own boss one day. She soon finds her way around every new team, takes her place. It’s a sensuous pleasure to watch how the many hands interlock, how culinary creations are lovingly made, delicately plucked salad leaves arranged as decorations. At the same time, Agnes has to struggle against opposition. Her wages are low. A colleague asks her what business she, who has just finished her apprenticeship, has in a three-star restaurant. Agnes is moving in a male domain, in an environment that tends to pass the pressure down. But in the course of her journey, she also comes across collective forms of cooperation and new visions of cooking.

Daffy Duck is caught in an animation loop. Martin Arnold dissects the industrial animated film production with its extreme division of labour, where body parts of the characters are isolated on different cels and moved separately, in loops and outside their habitat, separated from the background. Daffy’s beak wiggles, his wing hands flutter in the black void. An artistic and psychological study.

Luciana’s office is a place of miracles. This is where strangers confide in her, share their most profound desires and concerns. And Luciana? She circles her huge magnifying glass over the pages of old books to soon find the perfect coordinates for a spiritual new beginning. In his new film, Peter Kerekes becomes nothing less than a witness to psychomagical acts. The Neapolitan astrologer is not only able to calculate the perfect birthday spot for those who seek advice – in her blunt way, she aims right at the centre of personal dramas. A pair of identical twins, for example, argue whether one of the sisters should fulfil the other’s longing for a child, while an unhappy mother yearns to rekindle her relationship.
Luciana sends the twins to Beirut, the mother to Alaska. Kerekes accompanies them on their journeys of salvation, even if Alaska turns into an air conditioner and a few buckets of ice cubes for reasons of practicality. He always brings out the comic potential of a story while pointing out complicated conflicts with astonishing poignancy: possessive mother figures and absent fathers, loneliness in a relationship and the fear of change. “Wishing on a Star” is a charming consultation that boldly confronts the big questions in life.

“I don’t want to say it out loud, but my flat’s lower down,” the narrator remarks. The camera at first follows her legs climbing up the stairs of the hallway. That is all we see of her. Very soon, her gaze determines our perspective in this unsettling story. At first it all sounds like a mistake, but at some point, the tenant gets used to the fact that in some inexplicable way and completely unceremoniously she is pulled down from the fourth floor to the coal cellar, floor by floor. A decline that the neighbourhood lets happen in deafening silence.

The “falling” protagonist’s irritated soliloquy, sometimes resigned, often full of calculated optimism, is accompanied by charcoal drawings. Their clarity and architectural detail – down to the curlicued decorations of the upper-class mansion – gradually fade over the course of events. The spatial representation becomes more and more vague and is reduced to a few strokes, only to dissolve into soft areas of charcoal dust in the end. In this nightmarish story, reality no longer offers any support, only one’s own ego. Susi Jirkuff has adapted Ilse Aichinger’s eponymous, multilayered story, which was first published in the mid-1950s, with a remarkable urgency that demonstrates the topicality of Aichinger’s text and writing.