A virtuoso filmic reflection on automatisms in art and an encounter with Margaret Raspé on a Greek island, where the artist and filmmaker spends part of the year. Considered to be a pioneer of feminist German film, “I know where I am” is how she sums up her feeling on the island. Orientation in space, control and letting go are all central categories in her artistic practice.

In 1923, the Dutch erected a radio station on Puntang Mountain on Java deploying indigenous forced labourers. 2,000 metres of wire between two mountain ridges were meant to transmit news from what was then the Dutch East Indies across the 12,000 kilometres to Europe. A speculative and poetic examination of the remains of Radio Malabar – in the earth, in the mountain, in dreams of geoengineering, in local history.

Her “artificial assistant” is what Claudia Larcher calls the AI that digitally analysed her analogue “Baumeister” series of collages and generated this film from them. Creator or servant spirit, the machine makes architectural sketches waft biomorphically and enlivens (i.e. animates) rigid shapes. The Japanese Metabolists who called for the fluid renewal of their buildings, the organic growth, deformation and decay of architecture, would have liked “The Artist in the Machine”.

With reference to Władysław Starewicz’s animation film experiments with insects, the Chilean artist duo León and Cociña develop a fictitious counter-narrative to the history of the stop motion technique – and a vision of a Chile liberated from autocrats. A pigtailed girl in puppet form confidently handles the remains of the authoritarian power tradition, in the shape of morbidly staged body parts of two symbolic representatives of the oligarchy and Pinochet’s dictatorship – Diego Portales and Jaime Guzmán.

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.

A young woman asks a hyena to take her place at a dinner and dance given in her honour. The plan requires skill and some violence, too. The posh company is portrayed in bold calligraphic brush-strokes, the vibrant animation is supplied by the heroine’s temperament. This mischievous farce confronts a class frozen in tradition and etiquette with a scavenging animal that gleefully celebrates anarchy.

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 …

A stuttering boy transforms an Iranian kitchen into a fantastic cosmos. The father’s body becomes a refrigerator, the mother's belly a washing machine whose spin cycle gives birth to a screaming baby. Even birds on tiles and detergents have a surprising life of their own. This exuberant animation, dotted with real-life elements – fried eggs, broken plates, chess pieces – develops a subtle wit, ironizing ingrained family patterns.

Nazario, founder of the Spanish underground comics movement and pioneer of the gay graphic novel, looks back on his eventful life, his flamboyant and explicit works. 16mm films, photos, illustrations and paintings document the spirit of departure of a counter culture, but also recount Nazario’s great love for Alejandro with whom he was together until the latter’s death. Profession and passion merge in this artist.

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.

This hand-drawn animated documentary provides subtle insights into the patriarchal structures of South Korean society and discusses the roles assigned to women there. Challenged as a restaurant owner and single parent, the director’s mother was helped by the characteristics of her animal zodiac sign: fierce as a tiger, she earned respect. But to her daughter she insisted that she tell nobody about her father’s absence. That is only whispered about.

A young taxidermist is fascinated by crows, paying considerate attention to their dead bodies. Her work on the birds is simultaneously a careful study of anatomical connections and a kind of service toward the resurrection of this mythical creature from the realm between life and death. Through detailed, pulsating black-and-white images and a sparingly intense soundtrack, a charged atmosphere unfolds between craftsmanship, imagination and poetry.

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.