The account of a journey through an imaginary city, filmed along China’s new trade routes. Like the fictionalized Marco Polo from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, the traveller in this film talks of worlds that resemble familiar places but follow their own, sometimes seemingly incredible rules. The observations condense into a meditation about the nature of cities and the transformation of the concept of globalization.

The foreign visitor’s voice sounds muffled, as if it were coming out of the cave whose interior views open the film. Time and again, the eye returns there – but the fluorescent rock faces soon turn into the sparkle of distant galaxies, the narrow confines of the cave indistinguishable from the vastness of space. It is a symbol of the decoupling of sign and meaning, of “real” and “false”, of sensual impressions and their positive geographical allocation that pervades the film: Daft Punk perform in front of a Chinese shopping mall; the Eiffel Tower stands first in a housing estate, then, folded up to a fraction of its size, in view of Big Ben and Tower Bridge.

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.

A boy, a girl, a bird with a swan’s neck nestling in hands, a gently wooded peninsula of longing: Atsushi Wada’s almost speechless animation, mapped out in uniform and unicoloured chains of motifs and events, follows the dream and shame logic of a sexual awakening. There’s a sadness about the rounded and infantile figures, perhaps that of a first “little death”.

The mocking transvestite, the raging dog, the prophetic clown and the little girl are united inside the desperate protagonist. The longing to break free rises forcefully – like a pistol pressed against his chest. In humorous metaphors, Hakhyun Kim takes a crisis of disorientation to extremes, while his extraordinary stylistics lend it poetic dignity.

There’s probably no other citizen of Gelsenkirchen who has ever mastered Nō singing and playing the Shakuhachi flute as authentically as Uwe Walter. He has lived in the mountain village of Miyama north of Kyoto for three decades and emulates the local residents, whether they earn their living on the fields, breeding cattle or hunting. People tend their gardens, repair fences to keep away the macaques and grow their own rice. Uwe has become perfectly Japanese, at one with his environment.

However well-suited his Ruhr area wit makes him as a figure of identification, the camera keeps a respectful distance, more reserved than Uwe himself. Only at one point does it come touchingly close: When he is forced to say goodbye to an essential part of his past in the interest of the village community. But the real subject of this film is not the German with his greyish blonde curls but rather that very community, portrayed by Rainer Komers in bittersweet polyphony. It emerges in the children’s games, the adults’ pursuits and the old people’s tales, in the summer downpours of the rainy season, the white moon over the nocturnal village and the blood-red leaves of autumn.

A background study of a dying amusement culture, filmed in slovenly dressing rooms in front of badly polished make-up mirrors. – That’s how far editor Mary Stephen follows director Yoichiro Okutani’s montage interpretation of his own footage about the Japanese strippers called Odoriko. But Stephen’s editor’s cut begins fully dressed: a tastefully lit stage overture in costume, starting from which she rearranges or rather sheds the material, reintegrating image and sound sequences originally discarded by Okutani, for example the titular statement of an Odoriko explaining her choice of profession: “It was about being nude at heart.”

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?

Paper and colour pigments lead a life of their own. The material awakens and begins to talk, opening its mouth. The colours speak to each other, their substances add up to form a multi-layered tale about the strains of dialogue and interaction. The texture of the hand-painted individual frames is closely interwoven with a sonic tapestry of human sounds and minimalist electronic resonances.