A film commissioned for a school education programme. The goal of this programme is to teach children about their own history and that of their country – especially on the background of the recent wars. The hope is that this knowledge will also be applied to the future, that it will bring colour to the black and white, a smile to the gloom.

Filip lives next to Tereza, he is a blocked writer, she is an ageing prostitute. They have little in common, except for the wall separating their apartments. One day Tereza asks him to write a letter to her fiancé. But that’s only the beginning … Špela Čadež makes the puppets dance, loosely based on Maxim Gorky: a pas de deux of neighbouring lonelinesses.

This musical, richly detailed 3D animation is based on a Slovenian folk tale which tells the story of a peasant couple from wedding to death and is also the story of a lifelong deception: Day by day, the wife serves chicory coffee substitute, though her bully of a husband demands real coffee. Everyone knows about the swindle; he is the only one who remains clueless.

Since 1999, the Far East Film Festival, the biggest festival of popular Asian films in Europe, has been held annually in the Italian city of Udine. Špela Čadež was commissioned to design the trailer for its 11th edition in 2009 and delivered a crisp and short, wonderfully incisive puppet animation about the love of noodles – with or without cheese – that unites cultures and continent.

Lovro steps into the bathtub. A drop falls from the faucet and makes waves – into the past, back to the day he went fishing with his grandfather for the first time. Thoughts, sounds, bath utensils swirl memory and reality together … With this animated melancholia, Leon Vidmar, a student of Špela Čadež, continues in the vein of his teacher’s works in terms of craft and atmosphere.

An abstract, extremely reduced miniature that manages to express and capture all the more with minimal means. Only a few hand-drawn monochrome strokes, forming and transforming to the rough beat of electronic sound fragments, create a vast space. It is filled with image and sound signals, with successful and failed attempts at communication.

Drawn entirely on paper, Zvonko Čoh has created a milestone of recent Slovenian animation history. A combination of figurative outline, surface and spatial development and a story feeding on associative elements and bordering the surreal. Classic cartoon heroes are replaced by their animated movement patterns and silhouettes.

This 2D animation, reduced to clear shapes and colours, interweaves its narrative with the Slovenian carnival figure Kurent. In the evening, a boy on the threshold of becoming a teenager sneaks to the annual expulsion of winter. Wild masked figures romp there and ear-splitting cow bells ring out, and the next morning nothing is the same.

The chalk chases the shadow. Once it is captured, only traces of the game remain. Drawing, erasing, drawing again on a porous surface. Like on a sloppily wiped blackboard, shades of images that have long ceased to exist shine through. Špela Čadež stages a race between fleeting and manifest forms that – at least in terms of film theory – knows no winner.

Misty-eyed and nostalgic, this film takes us into the past. The accomplished illustrator Milanka Fabjančič uses sepia and pastel-coloured drawings to bring to life the miraculous story of the industrious and meek factory worker Liliana. Every night she takes off a shining necklace, every morning she puts it back on. During the day, the secret of her meekness remains hidden in her heart.

A pain in the heart, never-drying tears and turned heads are hard to treat, but fortunately not incurable. In X-ray images and tissue samples, on examination couches and in waiting rooms, always under medical supervision, Špela Čadež’s puppet animation studies the difficult-to-diagnose lovesickness. An animated physiological case study.

Daily life at the tailor’s shop is so tumultuous that sometimes you need to cheat a little to cope. Imagination and spontaneity will not always be enough. When the tailer feels unobserved, he tends to let his brain do all the work. But what happens when love enters the scene and thoughts get out of control?

A drunken drive through the night with a badger at the wheel. The car radio is a crooning, rhythmic companion and rhythm generator to the reeling road, the will-o’-the-wisp headlights of oncoming cars. The beginning becomes the end of a bizarre journey that turns our heads not by speed but by narrative sophistication in visually magnificent concentration.

To promote the start of season five, Špela Čadež summarises the first four seasons of the legendary US comedy drama show for Netflix. From the streaming provider’s logo to the canteen food through to vomit – Čadež “unravels” her condensed version of the stories from the women’s prison in soft and scratchy wool, yellow as urine and red as blood.

Coupledom has its own dynamics. Her professional obligations do not tick by the clock, his cooking and love are extraordinary, but, alas, precisely timed. This all too familiar incompatibility is condensed into murky, acrid roast fumes. What was intended as a pleasant evening for two ends civilized, but bloody: black humour, “well done”.

The Beezes are feathered but not very airworthy creatures, situated somewhere between primates and birds on the evolutionary ladder. Their appetite for cherries grows as soon as summer has arrived. But they are hanging so high in the trees that they are out of reach. Undeterred, the Beezes try to overcome the limits of their biological evolutionary stage – a gaudy affair.