The setting and cast of characters seem like the prelude to an unusual fairy-tale. An elderly man, a hermit living in a remote cabin, is visited by a young woman, almost a girl, who can understand and imitate the language of birds. Deep in the forest, Jean and Mana record and catalogue the calls of the different species day by day, night by night. But then they hear the voice of an unknown animal and set out to find it.

The focus is on birdcalls and their classification. But instead of making the meticulous analysis of sound events look like a quirky hobby, the film inspires us to listen closely. The two scientists’ unperturbed curiosity is catching, and as we watch, we are gradually infected not just with their enthusiasm for their object of research but also with their childlike desire to discover a secret.

After Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious commander of the American Civil War, maverick Jim Finn has now tackled the Apostle Paul. Eighteen centuries lie between the two and yet those historical super-figures have a lot in common. The acts of both were epoch-making, both had to undertake prolonged expeditions to achieve them, and both have inspired a host of propaganda, including numerous board games that also serve as a visual framework for Finn’s latest film. Above all, both remain controversial to this day, though Paul’s actions, due to the thin factual basis, provided and still provide better groundwork for substantially more outlandish interpretations. The films quotes some of the more outrageous ones in an eclectic montage of red-tinged excerpts from biblical epics, Christian fundamentalist talk shows, cartoons, children’s books, dioramas, theme parks and performances by magicians and rapturous choirs.

The curious title refers to a paper of the German theologist Ernst Käsemann, whose research snatched Paul from the grasp of the Antisemites who had usurped him and placed him back in the tradition of Jewish mysticism. That is also the objective of Jim Finn’s film as it gleefully dissects two thousand years of appropriation and propaganda in a wild ride through history.

“Words are the only instruments I have”, says Aslı Erdoğan in this powerful audiovisual collage. The writer, physicist and human rights activist who lives in exile in Berlin writes against the disappearance and loss of her own language. As a former political prisoner in Turkey, she knows only too well what autocratic violence and oppression intend: to silence people.

In this sense, this filmic portrait sets itself vociferously against the silence. Words flicker between fragments of the history of protest in Turkey. Working with text, photography and archive material, the film embarks on a vibrant visual and acoustic journey through places and times that shaped Aslı Erdoğan’s homeless life. Taking inspiration from her autobiographical collection of prose, “Requiem for a Lost City”, individual history becomes collective. A many-voiced choir reminds us that language is the thing that nonetheless holds everything together.

Tomaž Pavkovič finds reams of film material in a box that tells not only the story of his family but of a whole country: His father’s life ran almost parallel to the development of Yugoslavia, which permeates each of his recordings. The parades in the countryside, later the move to the city and life as a working-class family, in between always President Tito, even if only as a tattoo on a diver’s chest. The sons are left with the abstract memory of a state that has ceased to exist, that is itself a box. Do the images you find in the box tell you something about yourself, too?

The essayistic off-text by the Croatian poet Marko Pogačar, written in close collaboration with the director, frequently describes scenes that are shown at an entirely different point in the film – gaps yawn between the representation and one’s memory that can only be approached by circling them. To do this, not the least tools the film uses are an idiosyncratic, driving selection of music and a good dose of dry humour.

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.

The actor Hiam Abbass, who lives in France, is one of the greatest movie stars from the Middle East. She played leading roles in the award-winning films of Israeli director Eran Riklis, acted in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and recently in the U.S. hit series “Succession.” She served on the juries of the big Festivals in Cannes and Berlin, presented her own directing debut in Venice. But she is also a mother, daughter and sister in a large Palestinian family full of resourceful women. In this real role she steps in front of the camera in her daughter Lina Soualem’s work and travels back to her hometown of Deir Hanna in northern Israel – an Arab village in the Jewish state.

“Don’t open the gate to past sorrows,” the director quotes a kind of family dogma. It refers, among other things, to the family’s traumatic expulsion from Tiberias, the city on the Sea of Galilee, in the 1948 Palestine War. But with her confrontation of the family history, Soualem also opens gates to past joys and allegedly discarded identities. Between home videos, historical archive footage, photos and letters, Abbass is a touching and approachable screen presence as she returns to her roots. The long shadow of her origins also falls on a woman of the world.

Sheila died of hay dust in the lungs, and the family-owned farm somehow died along with the horse. After it was sold, the narrator visits it digitally on 3D online maps. But even the most detailed view reveals nothing about the grave of the three-legged farm cat. Using animation and image processing, he reclaims the remembered place of his childhood and youth.

A poetical quotation puts a damper on high expectations of earthly life. Because human beings were not sent to earth but cast out to it. Disappointments are to be expected. In “I Still Talk to You,” Turkan Huseyn illustrates a conversation with her friend. It is about love and the longing to return to the past, about childhood and its no longer existing coordinates in time and space. A melancholy dialogue broken up by brief encounters: stranded looking people who also explain their views of and experiences with love. Meanwhile, the fish in the Caspian Sea are coated in a thin layer of oil that merely needs to be wiped off. It used to be less dirty here, Turkan Huseyn says. When you are a child, everything seems less dirty, her friend replies. A laconic zooming back and forth between inside and outside, in the centre of which a few buckets of blood-red flowers bloom anyway.

Nature is out of joint. Frogs are raining from the sky. A young woman has returned to her childhood home but no longer feels at home there. The loneliness on a few square metres makes her fall into a kind of twilight state. The anguish erupts in nightmares that leave marks on her body. The past tugs at her, insects take possession of her, her body shell dissolves.

In 1971, Karpo Godina, then 28 years old, took his camera on a trip through the flatlands of Vojvodina and shot an unusual road movie. Only fragments of that footage have survived to this day. Forty years later, another camera undertakes the same journey, retracing the paths of the young Godina and imagining his impressions of the lives of ordinary people in this rural region. A new unusual road movie emerges. It is about places, times and memories. It is also paying homage to Karpo Godina, whose work flourished during the so-called Black Wave period of Yugoslav cinema.

A pop art-punk-psychedelic trip into the life and rich fantasy world of a young 1970s London housewife. Marcia is mesmerised by the astonishing mountain of folds in the bedclothes where the tiny, almost invisible tribe of the mites lives, and drawn into a conversation with the ghost of dirt. But stop, her zeitgeisty-feminist friends are coming over for morning coffee.

Without a working memory, the former sailor Jimmie is unmoored in time. Fragments of his former life and his younger self appear like islands on the horizon, glide by, disappear in the depths. The older Jimmie does not recognise himself and is frightened by the “strangers.” He gets lost in space and sinks into the empty background.