The Baía de Guanabara is not just any bay: the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro has sprawled around it. Its waste water threatens the rich ecosystem, planes roar along the approach corridors above. These filmic explorations on the margins of the megacity portray various environments that are all connected to the bay in a specific way. The people here are micro-wage earners making a modest living.

At night the lights of the city and the promises of capitalism shine in the distance. To the people living at the periphery, they seem out of reach. In eight chapters this documentary essay meditates on their habitats along the bay, following the repetitive and physically exhausting activities of humans and farm animals. Unusual perspectives, careful camera work and a poignant sound design elevate these observations to a commentary on the crisis in Brazil. Murilo Salles, who won a Silver Dove in Leipzig in 1978 for his debut “These Are the Weapons”, sheds light on the close link between geographical space and social inequality.

Porto Maurizio, where the director, who lives in France today, grew up, is located on the Ligurian coast. The village is the starting point for a cinematic journey into the past that spans a surprisingly wide arc to a time when Muslim pirates, the corsairs, haunted the Mediterranean and took Europeans as slaves. To this end, the film light-handedly draws from the rich fund of film history and its iconography.

Adventure films from the 1940s and historical murals depict the naval battles of the early 19th century in powerful images. The director ingeniously combines such visual finds with analogue new recordings of a journey with two friends. Their seemingly loosely told anecdotes and chance encounters combine to form a coherent whole, forming a geopolitical system of coordinates around the Mediterranean that deals with eurocentrism, colonial history and religiously motivated conflicts between Christian and Islamic countries. The subjects couldn’t be more topical.

A blue wooden house at the edge of the forest, lonely, but not peaceful and quiet. This is where Lydia lives, a transgender ornithologist who presents herself in high heels and a pearl necklace one day, in cargo pants and functional wear the next. Director Sasha Kulak calls her film a documentary fairy tale, and the borders between reality and fiction are blurred indeed, because Lydia loves play, staging, the uncanny – and David Lynch.

Lydia has watched “Twin Peaks” more than thirty times, its characters and plots have long since spilled over into Shcherbinka, a small town south of Moscow. She claims to find bodies in the underbrush and even Lynch’s “Red Room” has been replicated under the roof of her house. Now she’s facing a new challenge: the creation of Lara, a lifelike silicone doll whose voice also guides us through Kulak’s cinematic tale. Lydia works hard at realising her dreams, but she is equally passionate about studying birds and the so-called Nezhulyas, shy eyeless creatures that are exceedingly cuddly and have tantric potential. “A Hawk as Big as a Horse” becomes a vehicle of Lydia’s visions, using three-dimensional animation and various cinematic techniques to open a portal to a very specific fantasy.

Over many years, the director’s father filmed his family life almost obsessively. His daughter’s birth, his son’s first steps, and always Valérie, the young mother. An impressive fund of material which their now grown-up daughter Faustine appropriates to tell quite a different story: that of a woman who sees her role as a mother and its demands take away her freedom step by step.

In the here and now, the director observes her parents in the big empty house in the country: her hyperactive father who is constantly tinkering with something, and her chain-smoking mother who sits at the kitchen table and whose sharp mind can only be surmised from her eyes. What happened? What happened to the energetic and independent young make-up artist? The one who admires witches and wants to take a trip around the world. The one who could easily earn her own living but still gives up her job. “The gaze is important”, the now 60-year-old Valérie tells her daughter once while applying make-up. Yes, the gaze is important. And with her film, director Faustine Cros counters the gaze directed at her mother over all those years with a new narrative.

A patient camera glides over the everyday objects: still lives on the wall, flowers in the vase, a swaying drop light. The sun enters the cosy home where Noëlla sits smoking at her laptop, playing Solitaire. The situation is hopeless. She’s going to lose against the computer once again. All the while her son-in-law, Pierre, is organising everything she needs, pragmatic and friendly: breakfast, the (last) doctor’s visit – and then the transfer.

Because Noëlla intends to die, and she is determined. Pierre conscientiously manages the paperwork and invites her loved ones to say goodbye. They bring photos and chat with the protagonist who is about to depart this life and who waves one last time before the doctor administers the deadly dose. Bye bye, that’s it. Dying can be so unexcited. This slowed-down, minute study of time very gradually acquires a completely different meaning from what one assumed at first. How one would love to see the onetakes from the beginning again. Félix Lamarche’s unpretentious observation evolves into a metaphor of life. Noëlla’s insistent head-on gaze from the screen into the viewers’ eyes will always be unforgettable.

In rural Ethiopia the staff of a health centre are fighting maternal mortality. They tirelessly appeal to women to give birth in the clinic. But reservations are strong, and so are the practical obstacles. How are heavily pregnant women supposed to arrive in time when the ambulance comes hours later or not at all? Against medical advice, Hulu Ager decides to give birth at home, assisted by a traditional midwife.

With palpable familiarity, the film crew captures moments of intimate communion between Hulu Ager, the midwives and other women. On the margins of the central conflict, the many challenges they face in a patriarchal society emerge. The debates are most lively under the hood dryer at the hairdresser’s: She doesn’t enjoy sex because of her circumcision, the medical professional Welela reports. “Sometimes you have to prepare yourself for sex,” another customer advises. Sometimes it helps to get drunk. But the perky hairdresser is sure: Bad sex is grounds for divorce. The women share their desires and woes with each other, experience solidarity and gather courage for small and great acts of departure and resistance. Men are relegated to the role of extras, if at all.

Theo Montoya draws on casting outtakes, melancholy observations of daily life and decadent party impressions from his friends to create a morbid and yet tender portrait of a young, queer generation in Colombia. In a country marked by violence and repression they can hardly imagine their future, but maintain a close, almost loving relationship with death.

This was meant to be a fiction film: a ghost story in which the dead no longer find cemetery space and consequently coexist with the living, including having sexual relationships – which the state rigorously forbids and persecutes. A clandestine nocturnal subculture emerges where erotic desires for which daylight means annihilation can be acted out. A week after Montoya found his leading actor for the project, the latter died of a heroin overdose. More deaths among his friends follow. They are the ghosts haunting the film that was ultimately made. It retains its dystopian character, but the dangers it portrays are quite real: For these young people, they are part of everyday life in Medellín, which is still deep in the shadow of Pablo Escobar and where the search for pleasure and human warmth takes one through labyrinthine abysses.