An overcrowded dog shelter in Serbia. It’s hard to see how many animals are kept here behind wire mesh in desolate kennels. They are cared for and trained by prison inmates who are shown doing their job without further comment or explanation. However, the camera never focuses on the men’s faces. Observations take place at eye-level with the dogs. Especially shaggy Vanja and his training progress are at the centre of Dejan Petrović’s short study of freedom. The uniform, concentrated shots leave plenty of space for questions, above all whether this (dog’s) life is really unfree or whether the desire for freedom must take a backseat under these circumstances, since there is a roof over one’s head and a task that fills the day. While we are still thinking about this, Vanja with his alert eyes and engaging nature has already found a place – not just in the heart of his initially rather dismissive trainer.

The film opens with the wedding of Garik and Hasmik and ends with a decorated tree for their son’s first Christmas in the new house that his father built himself. Between these fixed points of middle-class family life, nothing is as heteronormative as this bracket and above all the political and religious mainstream in Armenia would lead one to expect.

Hasmik is a lawyer who fights for LGBTQIA+ rights, her husband appears in the media as drag performer Carabina, does sex work and makes his life in a queer-phobic environment the subject of an autobiographical theatre performance. The film, which evolved out of close friendship and is always one step behind the wild energy of Garik/Carabina, takes a precarious, raw, but also utopian-tinted look at current social struggles. The longing for normality, emancipation and responsibility find themselves exposed – sometimes powerless and unprotected – to violent defamation. TV images show the zeal behind the attempted construction of homosexual and trans persons as “Un-Armenian.” Meanwhile Carabina, in a moment of rest from plastering the house, trowel in hand, plays a song by Charles Aznavour, whose family came from Armenia – “What Makes a Man?”

A green lawn like an unused carpet, encircled by a neat forest edge, in the background the steaming cooling towers of a coal power station – impressionistic camera images from Lusatia. They summarise in one pan how a used-up utilitarian landscape is trying to recultivate itself. Can ancient identity and language be re-discovered amid this strange artificiality? The director travelled through this region in search of her origins. She was born here, in Lusatia. This is her home and that of the smallest of all Slavic peoples: the Sorbs.

She thinks about the assimilation of this cultural and linguistic community with the indigenous people, about its history of oppression in the various German systems, about a region caught up in structural change and the identity-shaping power of words – even if one has to learn them anew first. She meets a German Anna who becomes a Sorbian Hanka. She encounters people dedicated to preserving the traditions. The younger folks especially see their Sorbian-ness as a commitment to a community spirit, if not – like the artist, Hella – as an alternative way of life. Accompanied by old and new Sorbian sounds, along the filmmaker’s offscreen reflections, the many-voiced portrait of a nation within the nation emerges who reclaims its culture out of the local museums back into its everyday life.

The sea on whose shore Weronika Szyma has set her film is a dense, pulsating blue. The beach and the family who are staying there, meanwhile, are limited to delicate black and white line drawings. Their minimalism makes the blue stand out all the more enchantingly: Sometimes represented as a horizontal strip that promises freedom but also fuels insecurity. Sometimes sloshing diagonally across the screen, swallowing up the image completely for a brief moment and marking a caesura. And there are quite a number of caesuras, because the seven film minutes span the story of several generations.

At one point the father disappears and the mother and her almost grown-up daughter are left to fend for themselves. They learn to comprehend the loss, support each other, turn gestures of distance into gestures of affection. Until the confidence grows to start all over again. The only thing that does not change here is the blue of the sea.

The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 also resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe. Many were affected, including eight-year-old Anatoly Rizov. In “Boy, Bloodbrother of Death,” Maja Weiss draws an emotionally shattering portrait of the unfulfilled childhood of a boy caught between the apocalyptic scenario his Ukrainian hometown became and – utterly ironic – the no less threatening state of emergency in Slovenia. During the summer holidays, Anatoly is supposed to recover there from the frightening conditions at home. But in the fight for independence from Yugoslavia, the place of refuge becomes a crisis area, too.

Chernobyl, 25 years later. Maja Weiss meets the boy, Anatoli, as a young man. What has happened in the meantime – between the nuclear disaster and the prospect of another tragedy? Where have all the international relief funds disappeared, and where did the millions intended for the reconstruction of the decaying sarcophagus of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant seep away? Where is my life taking me? What legacy will I leave to my son? These are just some of the questions that Ukrainian Anatoly Rizov, now grown up and twenty years after the first documentary portrait about his fate shaken by crises and wars, tries to answer.

Siren-like singing and rhythmic light reflections segue into a lyrical text and sketched silhouettes of coastlines and waves. Delicate lines and soft shadings on superimposed transparent foils form many-layered networks of shapes and structures. What is offscreen creeps into the frame through reflections and blends in with the visual design of the film. Then and now meet and merge into a poetic narrative about a childhood in Stralsund, at a time when the city was still part of the GDR. A fenced-in, circumscribed childhood, framed by nocturnal floodlights, the bawling of drunk sailors and the crumbling plaster of facades and walls gone grey. The narrator manages to leave this oppressive fortress behind, but she can never escape completely. The memories that have settled like grey dust on her interior will stay with her forever.

We are exposed to evaluations every day. The norm by which they are made is usually out of our hands. This VR experience creates a field of tension between arbitrariness and control, power and impotence, diversity and uniformity. A circle of 16 real objects marks the entrance to a virtual process of evaluation in which 16 giant grey statues examine us.

Most accidents happen at home. That is where a jazz-loving drawn figure is unexpectedly re-confronted with a text by Bertolt Brecht that brings an appeal to their own political responsibility. Something at least must be done to avoid ending up on the wrong side. A trenchant, tidy contemplation that shows some understanding for human indecision.

Trucks crawl along the road, decorated with garlands of flowers, loaded with the mortal remains of people who were murdered at the Srebrenica massacre. The bereaved receive the coffins to bury the only recently exhumed and identified dead in the sprawling cemetery of the city which also doubles as a memorial. This is the overwhelming opening of a film that goes on to concentrate on three of the few survivors of this mass murder which claimed the lives of thousands, mainly men and boys, within a few days in that small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 1995.

Srećko returned and now lives in the woods on a hill above the town. Mirza escaped by wandering through the mountains for days and now resides again with his wife in their old house. Mejra has lost her husband and sons and, aged 85 now, still supports herself only from her field. Their quietly observed everyday activities alternate with poignant archive material which shows the inconceivable events in minute detail. Shaky and blurry videos contrast with clear images of fieldwork and an enchantingly innocent nature. The past still weighs heavily, but the tenacity of the human spirit in bearing up under the most horrific circumstances emerges.

Everything goes downhill. For whom? Marian Cholerek leaves that to the audience. After all, there was no way he could tell his story about a joint action of alleged oppositional forces in 1979 unequivocally. His years of work on animated series for children and his penchant for erotically charged humour, however, are unmistakeable. A cheerfully subversive children’s film for adults.

Femicides are daily in Mexico. We follow Maremoto in her fight against sexism, fear and anxiety. She is an illustrator and visual creator, but first and foremost a sensible artist. This VR experience is inspired by her art, her search for identity, her self-empowerment, her way of making herself and others aware of their own bodies and of finding allies in the struggle for change.