At first there’s nothing but clouds. A cock crows, sheep bells ring, a herd of cows begins to move. The sounds seem to come from another age. When the morning mist clears, we recognize the outlines of an abandoned village. Decayed huts, broken fences, crooked roofs. The film looks like an oil painting, a still life painted in sometimes delicate, sometimes broad brushstrokes, bathed in different lights with the shifting times of day and changing its mood.

A ship scrapyard in western Cuba. The observing camera follows Raudel and his colleagues who work in what seems like a hermetically sealed microcosm. A homing pigeon strays into the place; the workers contemplate it silently as they smoke. Sometimes they talk about their dreams. Shots are focussed in turns on their bodies and their surroundings. Rhythmic, artfully crafted and authentically produced sounds accompany precise and lucid images, without aestheticizing the harshness of their work.

The hairdressing salon “Saïda” is a space where people speak openly, laugh and argue. The subject rarely is hair. In the run-up to the presidential elections in Tunisia the shop turns into a political arena where the women – young or old, conservative or with a modern outlook – indulge in discussions about the pros and cons of the candidates. Their clever and witty statements reflect a young democracy with all its rifts and fault lines.

Testimony versus “prosthetic memory”: The director dubs the sound recordings of her grandmother, collected over a period of ten years, in which the old lady recaps her encounter with a tornado as a child, in front of a green screen. While the details of her memories change through repeated narration over time, the found footage from feature and disaster films, weather reports and landscape images suggests a mediatised participation in the events.

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 young Swiss woman searches for her Armenian roots. Various lovingly animated drawers of the simultaneously accumulating family archive open. This very personal examination of collective traumas of post-migrant communities finds images and words for racism and the difficulties of talking about feelings with male family members. Its leitmotif is a wardrobe roaming through night-blue landscapes which – despite the cracks – holds everything and everyone together.

Between coming and going time feels leaden – a half-life in the light and dark contrasts of a linocut. The narrating voice’s mother cares for seniors in their homes for five euros an hour. At their bedsides the ticking clock counts down the working day, caught between the frightening sounds of the heavy breathing that comes with impending death and the roar of promises made by television. The dying are mother’s livelihood.

A marvellously wild stop motion animadoc trip to unknown worlds, in which 18-year-old astronaut Fatu sets himself a challenge that’s as nerve-racking to him as a lunar expedition. He wants to go shopping at the supermarket – for the first time as he sees himself: in full glam make-up. How will his family with their Kosovar roots react to these new coordinates? Will his self-perception and the others’ perception clash? Set course for star date LGBTQAI+.

Spitting ponies, a cursed TV reporter and a hairy giant who is lovingly combed by his brunette girlfriend while she develops inexplicable fears about her own foot. This will later literally be shot off – the foot, not the boyfriend! A faceless man is also there – acting in alliance with the ponies. This colourful, ominous animated thriller made in analogue cut-out technique addresses states of anxiety, masochistic fights and media criticism. Perhaps.

How can we visualise the past without perceiving it too much as a historical fact? This film uses a clever combination of archival material and oral history to bring memories of a transgenerative trauma and the associated pain to the surface. What seems to be the past becomes visible in countless points of contact with the present. It’s a simple, touching treatment of the incomprehensible consequences of a historical crime.

Driven by the barking of the voracious rented apartment, an aged ballet dancer makes his way through a permanently rain-drenched wasteland to his monotonous job. The protagonist makes graceful movements to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and seems briefly fulfilled. But the audience? Pearls before cows! Priit Tender’s caustic, surreal stop motion animation is a free association inspired by a poem by Andres Ehin about a grueling, gluttonous daily routine that’s gone to the dogs.

What did the Corona lockdown look like from a window in the residential towers of posh East London in the spring of 2020? The reflective two-week observation shows serious shifts in the everyday coordinate system of a privileged urban population at an immediate level. Meanwhile, the vacant apartments in the district, which were deliberately caused by speculation, represent a warning sign for the future of investor-friendly urban spaces.

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.

Thoughts, sometimes just numbers, reach us from offscreen almost like music, like a mantra or a prayer. What we see are circular fragments from familiar spaces: a mirror, a magnifying glass. A day like any other day: without medication, or perhaps better with? A film like the investigation of an uncertainty principle: do we really see better with a magnifying glass? A face scratched out of the family album: the gap is draped with flowers and cut-out pictures of clothes and finally filled again by a drawing.

Take: three generations of women in Covid lockdown in New York, enough white wine, vodka and time to talk about the really important issues. Dana Reilly makes the best of the pandemic restrictions and films what happens when her mother Janet and 90-year-old grandmother Sylvia decide to move in together. The result is a funny and at the same time lovingly raw tribute to two strong personalities, their not uncomplicated closeness and completely different worlds.