A new father takes his wife and daughter on a journey to his mother’s birthplace in Scotland. It is 1976 – the year in which NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 space probes land on the surface of Mars. They send images of an only vaguely explored area from a great distance, enabling a first look into the history of an alien planet. Like the NASA scientists, the small family are hoping that their journey will give them insights into the past, an understanding of the present situation and perhaps even the chance to anticipate the future.

Texts from the father’s travel diary, photos and video recordings are interwoven with visual and sound material from the NASA archives to form a multilayered narrative that navigates several decades of family history, cosmological questions and philosophical reflections. A filmic multiverse unfolds before us whose elementary particles oscillate between times and worlds, between reality and fiction.

At first glance, Brett Allen Smith’s memory worlds seem slightly otherworldly but peaceful. There is a little pug – curious, bouncy and, most importantly, alive, a harmless explorer of lawns and living rooms. At the same time, the director is driven by an inner fracture, an irritation to be illuminated by means of phone conversations with family members: How real are the memories that had such a tremendous impact on him? Like the hill towering in front of Smith’s inner eye under which two dogs lie buried. And there are sunflowers, imposing plants that are impossible to pick for his five-year old’s hands because their roots have bored so deeply into the soil.

Today the director is a father and dog owner himself – there are shots of a baby and a pug – and his thought construct, maybe even something that shaped his identity, is blurring. The phone calls with his sisters lead nowhere. On the visual level, “Au Revoir, Pugs” plays with images, animation and nostalgic effects, while melodies can be heard from far away, sweet and melancholy but also a little uncanny. A compact work of less than ten minutes, a soft-toed sneaky jolt.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

In only ninety seconds Marcus Grysczok tells a touching personal story of loss and takes us to great emotional depths. Tune in: an electronically distorted outcry. The protagonist talks to himself and to someone who no longer lives in this world, but all the more in his heart. He looks for a way out of this state of powerlessness, assuming a stranger’s role, a free-roaming paper dog that runs between real shelves and across tables, races past people on black-and-white photographs and everyday objects, chases himself on a plate rim. The images convey a feeling of home – a home for memory and for life. Tune out? As soon as the dog stops, reality puts an end to this restless racket and brings the awareness of enduring loss. Poetic in language and design, the film formulates a moving but clear-eyed farewell to a brother.

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.

The teenager Zoe and her little brother Theo spend a day at the public swimming pool. Theo loses himself in his childish fantasies. The visitors of the pool look like characters from Greek mythology to him. Zoe, less than pleased at having to watch her little brother, hides in the changing room. She has problems of her own because she is struggling with the changes in her youthful body. She looks at her breasts in the mirror, which the tight bathing suit does nothing to disguise. The horror that this change provokes in her manifests in a terrible panic attack.

Theo’s flight to the realm of mythical creatures and Zoe’s anxiety attack are both caused by a shared traumatic experience. The two find a way to overcome past experiences – even without their mother’s support. Ingenious transitions, cleverly constructed details and, not least, great empathy for the siblings’ communicating inner and outer worlds make this film a convincing double portrait.

A man on a river at dawn. He prays, dives into the water, and comes back up with a bucket of sand. The single father Thomas Boa toils away as a sand diver in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. The sand eventually ends up at the construction site of Jianmin Luan, a Chinese construction manager who went to Africa to further his career. Luan pays a price for this opportunity: He lives very simply, plagued by power failures and fears of malaria, typhoid, and civil war. After years abroad, he has become estranged from his family in China; his wife is mentally unwell.

Directors Ningyi Sun and Pascale Appora-Gnekindy tell a story of globalisation, poverty, and labour, asking how life can be lived with dignity. Instead of perpetuating clichés they introduce us to two men (and their families) who are tiny cogs in the gears of a global competition machine. There is a lot of inequality in this system and next to no winners. But there are also moments when it all seems worthwhile: when Luan’s wife visits Africa and intimacy is suddenly rekindled, or when Thomas cultivates a field and is finally able to look ahead. A visually powerful, enthralling and horizon-expanding film that skilfully evades stereotypes.

András and his daughter Zsófia enjoy a relaxed Sunday in their stately city mansion, just before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. But soon the silence in the house is disturbed by an escaped pig, closely followed by an unexpected visit: András’ brother, his large family and lots of luggage barge in through the front door. Running children and garrulous relatives bring noise and bedlam to all floors. Art objects are handled without permission, furniture is moved, objects fall to the ground. The visitors have brought chaos. Zsófia’s father and the maid try in vain to restore calm and order. Though András and his brother get closer to each other, the old house is not up to the changed circumstances. A leaking water pipe heralds a finale that at least makes them all stand still together.

In this animation-documentary hybrid, four older women reflect on their memories of the old times when they were young and relations between the sexes were completely different. Their many voices merge into one: Grandmother Vera speaks. She tells her story in precise detail, gives insight into the turbulence of her youth and shares memories of her intimate life. She speaks as a representative of Slovenian women in the first half of the 20th century and illustrates their status in the gender and social hierarchies of that era.