Perth has broken off contact with Poon. What’s left are images showing the two men’s sex life. Perth was Poon’s twenty years younger cinematographer. His images, as impressive as they are intimate, contain the beginning and end of a relationship which Thunska Pansittivorakul confronts again for “Avalon”. A painful look back that raises existential questions and is immediately affecting.

“In Thailand, sex is considered shameful, sinful, disgusting, and not to be spoken of in public. Sex is a personal and private mystery, revealed only to those who engage in it together”, Thunska Pansittivorakul comments his film in which he liberally subverts precisely this taboo. It shows not only two men who meet and unite in explicit poses – Adolf Hitler and King Rama VII, too, show up at a Berlin airport, the tender serenade of a Thai prince (said to be an expression of his unrequited love for a foreign princess) enters into a dialogue with the exuberant electronic compositions of the Thai musician Space360. And time and again the planes denoting distance and leave-taking fly by on the horizon. “You used to like my cock more. Don’t you remember?”

Everyday observations from Buenos Aires, shot on black-and-white 16mm film material, alternate with twenty-year-old Hi8 colour shots from New York. The perspective of a father who collects memories for his daughters. The perspective of a son who records his father’s reminiscences. Richard Shpuntoff’s multi-layered montage film is a clever essay on cultural identities, on cities and languages.

When we watch a subtitled film, we look, listen and read at the same time. We assume that the three levels are congruent or at least add up to form a whole. “Even the best subtitles suck”, the subtitles of this film announce, however, because “You are still reading instead of looking at the images.” Translating means rewriting. Therefore, “Everything That Is Forgotten in an Instant” tells parallel stories in images, words and writing: of urban development and power structures in two distant metropolises, of identity and its transgenerational transfer, of three continents and three languages which draw equally dividing and connecting lines through a family. The insecurity caused by the discrepancy between the filmic elements turns into a school of selective perception. Images, languages and texts are no dictate, after all: They leave us a choice.

A group of old men in an abandoned asbestos mining town on the edge of the Kalahari Desert resist evacuation. They have no place to go because they were once notorious as soldiers of the infamous South African Battalion 32, also known as “The Terrible Ones”. Both perpetrators and victims of history, they become actors in the biblical story of Judas Iscariot in Boris Gerrets’ equally disturbing and fascinating cinematic legacy.

The spectacle under a blazing sun confronts the men, who live in abject poverty, with their unresolved past. Many of them had been forcibly recruited by the FNLA and UNITA resistance movements in the Angolan War of Independence against Portugal. After the communist MPLA took power, they found themselves as mercenaries fighting alongside white South Africans against their own people and finally defending the Apartheid regime in the colonial struggle in Namibia and the South African townships. On the fringes of the surreal film location between the decaying buildings of the old mining town, they speak for the first time about their life stories, talk about betrayal, guilt and remorse. Having been steamrolled by global politics, turned into undesirables, exiles, forgotten, suppressed and broken men, they finally become visible again as human beings in front of the camera.

How come the moon is able to pour such equally familiar and mysterious light on the earth it shines on? And why have the countless lunar addicts among international filmmakers been so willingly seduced by this magic power that they set important scenes of their works in the somnambulistic mood between a deeply decadent blood moon and the fresh innocence of the new moon? “To the Moon” is an entrancing ode to one of cinema’s central motifs.

Director Tadhg O’Sullivan, too, surrendered like a hypnotized man to the strange light of the moon and its cinematic supercharge. Using 130 sequences from international film history and enchanting 16mm footage shot exclusively for this project he weaves an immersive meta-narrative in which precisely placed film dialogues, literary “moon passages” and an ingeniously eclectic soundtrack also do their part. Is this where you find your own moon films, with which you were hopelessly struck at a time? Did Tadhg O’Sullivan give due space to “Black Moon” (no), “Suspiria” (no) or “Carnival of Souls” (yes)? Many may ask this. But profound consolation awaits the disappointed ones: Every missing film is outweighed by three others that are so amazing that the loss is easily got over with.

“Zaho Zay!”, it’s me. This is the daily salute of the prisoners in a crowded Madagascan prison whose guard looks for her lost father in each new prisoner. Her projections and fantasies let the mystical, murderous father figure roam the island in simultaneously dreamlike and nightmarish sequences, accompanied by a poetic voiceover. A hybrid narrative, speculating about the mysterious paths and profound traumas of its landscapes and all who walk in them.

A pair of dice, a quiet murderer and his victims, traces of history and magic realism. Rituals and riddles, revenge, remorse and imprisonment are unravelled and re-interlaced between the brutal reality of a detention centre, the fantasies of the fictionalised narrator and the vast natural spaces of an island – slowly and poetically. Crises, colonial violence and its continuities are suggested and condensed. The montage of documentary material and staged sequences references western and film noir and develops an intense visual and narrative pull. An almost lyrical text and the precisely framed images bear witness to an impossible quest that’s actually a haunting, referring to individual and collective traumas and the strange forces with which such shocks inscribe themselves into narratives and places.