Parts of the house director Anna Dziapshipa traces in her autobiographical roamings through the past look like straight out of a horror film: cobwebbed, dark, derelict. It is located in Abkhazia, the region officially off-limits to Georgians, protected by Russia and not recognised as an autonomous republic by the international community.

One half of Dziapshipa’s family comes from here, including a football player who once was a key player for Dinamo Tbilisi. The filmmaker edits footage of his sports activities into “Self-Portrait Along the Borderline,” but also shows the splendour of the former Soviet holiday paradise. It is a personal, associative approach in which Dziapshipa analyses and reflects on her own experiences as a child with both Georgian and Abkhazian family backgrounds. Discrimination plays a role, as do solemn and disturbing things. Time and again, spiders crawl through the frame, weaving their webs and thus connections.

When Karol Śliwka (1932–2018) opens his drawer, dozens of tools jump out: scissors, compasses, rulers, and knives. For Śliwka’s equally famous and elegant graphic designs are purely handmade. They are displayed on consumer goods and advertising posters, even became iconic symbols of the United Nations. His career was far from predestined: Having suffered a serious eye injury in a childhood accident and bound to take over his parents’ farm, Karol Śliwka’s turn to art could be seen as an act of rebellion. It has paid off, as proved not only by the numerous awards he won during his long career. Via home videos, “Signs of Mr. Plum” also gives us insights into his joyful marriage to an opera singer. Bartosz Mikołajczyk and Urszula Morga skilfully connect Karol Śliwka’s designs with contemporary history, capturing the mood of the 1960s and 1970s with a light hand and quick editing. Graphic design and biography merge into an accessible and highly amusing mixture.

Learning a foreign language is like creating another self. How can you speak it without losing your own sound, without dissolving completely in it – and still be heard and noticed? This film is a charming and intellectually fastidious attempt to navigate the complexities of language, identity and trauma.

To do this, the filmmaker resorts to her own biography. Because Russia invaded Ukraine when Daryna Mamaisur, who comes from Kyiv, was in Portugal for a Doc Nomads graduate course. Home and the search for it became the defining factors of this work, as well as the traumatic situation of only being able to “witness” the difficult situation from a distance. She, the Ukrainian in Portugal, learns Portuguese. She lets the new words for “war,” “explosion” and “attack” roll off her tongue. She compares them with the soft, intimate sound of her native language, with the sound of Kyiv. Friends send audio and visual recordings from Ukraine which, combined with animations, become a multilayered essay and finally a testimony – for the resilience of language and culture, no matter where they are spoken and lived, and not least for the power of the artistic documentary, which can make speech and sound possible.