Four creatures wobble like marionettes in the black void. An alien power tries to subdue them, police voices strike like truncheons. Bent, with bulging or thread-thin limbs, their skin turned inside out – human anatomy has mutated. But these vulnerable bodies start to fight back … “Scum Mutation” takes us into the battle zone without protection, into an indelible energy field of radical feminist protest – and becomes a resounding beacon of reconquest.

Ship ahoy, the musifants are back! This time, Charlie and Grandpa Günter get mail from the small green cactus in New Zealand and set sail with Fox and Captain Krause. On the way, they fish the little wild sow Svenja from the sea and sing their special shanty. The waves rise when the retired circus elephant makes musical forays into 1920s and 1930s song collections.

“Guess what we’re doing! We’re going to practice swimming.” Hanan accompanies her brother to classes in the public pool. The first swimming badge is called the Seahorse, their instructor explains, because it “stands” in the water and doesn’t drown. When Hanan’s family came to Europe in a rubber dinghy, she couldn’t swim. To forget this experience, she learned not to go under in the water – like a seahorse.

Nothing is closer to us than our skin. Its beautiful and less beautiful parts envelop the self, separate it from all else. A foray along naked parts of the body takes us from a shiny ridge via a rounded protuberance to a shady gorge. A neck. A belly…ear. A fellybear? Photos, videoclips and sounds form an irritating body collage.

Parts of the house director Anna Dziapshipa traces in her autobiographical roamings through the past look like straight out of a horror film: cobwebbed, dark, derelict. It is located in Abkhazia, the region officially off-limits to Georgians, protected by Russia and not recognised as an autonomous republic by the international community.

One half of Dziapshipa’s family comes from here, including a football player who once was a key player for Dinamo Tbilisi. The filmmaker edits footage of his sports activities into “Self-Portrait Along the Borderline,” but also shows the splendour of the former Soviet holiday paradise. It is a personal, associative approach in which Dziapshipa analyses and reflects on her own experiences as a child with both Georgian and Abkhazian family backgrounds. Discrimination plays a role, as do solemn and disturbing things. Time and again, spiders crawl through the frame, weaving their webs and thus connections.

Movement, movement: In the early days of cinema, audiences were hungry for pictures bursting with vitality. For many film pioneers, the subject par excellence was the serpentine dance, which produced graceful shifting patterns by means of ample veils. The Lumière brothers additionally had the film hand-coloured, frame by frame, reinforcing the vivid expression of the dynamic body geometries.

Our everyday digital life is unthinkable without smartphones. Across the world, more than five billion such devices are in circulation. Each one of those is even touched more than 2,600 times per day. This AR experience takes us through the hidden history of this technology and thus into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. What natural and human resources does the tech industry require for its innovations?

The two main characters of this film seem made for each other. They literally fit together, merge into each other, melt into a colourful, psychedelic, swirling whole. They function together, until one of them disconnects. The madness of this riot of colours turns into a dark nightmare when the one left behind re-absorbs the other by force. Against her will, the renegade must now be sewn to her partner. The once flourishing relationship degenerates into an irritating visual and audio chaos of aggressively twitching drawings and shattered sounds. Impaled on a gnarly tree, the couple’s bodies decay. As they are dying away, darkness turns into light and fresh blossoms open on the pale bones.

A giant ginger mountain landscape that five cooks spent a week to make: Once magnificent culinary works of art were created in Chinese restaurants. Food was associated with a wealth of money and time. The world today is short-lived, customers have become few and far between. Chefs talk about the connection between food culture and socio-economic change in China.

Ricky is a boy from the Ashéninka tribe who lives with his family deep in the Peruvian Amazon Forest. But even here, the children’s favourite pastime is watching videos on their mobile phones. One day, Ricky is faced with the task of overcoming his fears and going hunting for a huge catfish that can only be caught by hook. This is where his journey to adulthood begins.

In recent years, the number of diagnoses of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has skyrocketed. What are the reasons? Does a society geared towards efficiency use the label ADHS to weed out anyone who does not fit its frames? What are the consequences of the fact that medication treatment has become almost ubiquitous? Could Ritalin and the like have become the doping of the performance society?

In their very personal documentary, Gitti Grüter, diagnosed with ADHS since puberty, sets out to find answers. Grüter talks to five women who have been officially diagnosed with this disorder about lack of concentration, impulsive behaviour, overstimulation, relationship problems, depression and insomnia. The open conversations gradually reveal how hard life can be for women with ADHS, because social stereotypes of femininity often prevent or delay the right diagnosis. Through the calculated use of filmic means, Grüter manages to convey to the audience a sense of the permanent and overpowering inner and outer chaos. Skilfully and with a generous dose of irony, they focus on how people suffering from ADHS are stigmatised – and not least on the role of gender stereotypes in this process. The conclusion is surprising and encouraging.

The rules in rural Poland are clear: Every man must have a woman; every dancer must have a female dancer. The pubescent Miłosz feels safe here, especially after his mother’s death. His sister Agnieszka, who is in a long-distance relationship with her friend Majka, does everything to obtain custody of her little brother. Gradually, a new family model is revealed, documented by Marek Kozakiewicz as an attempt that is as restrained as it is determined.

The windmills behind the houses rotate steadily, standing in place, signalling stability. But the lives of Miłosz and his 35-year-old sister are in turmoil. They are facing a red-tape marathon to make Agnieska his legal guardian: Both have been orphans for a few months. Director Marek Kozakiewicz depicts the establishment of a new family no one expects much applause for in conservative Poland. Because for Agnieszka and her partner, who is ten years older, the determination to try living together manifests tentatively. Without kisses, without celebrations, the decision almost casually becomes reality – the women are exploring the boundary between platonic tenderness and enforced secrecy. And Miłosz, too, seems to realise only slowly what the relationship between Majka and Agnieszka really is.

Alyona, Alik and Katya belong to a generation of young Russian women who demand what they are not allowed. They are part of a global youth that dreams of self-determination and freedom. Sybilla Tuxen followed her protagonists between 2018 and 2022, up to the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the three young women find themselves in a new reality. Now more than ever, they are rebelling against Putin’s state and have since lived life on the go.

One of them has made it to Georgia, another goes to Spain, while the third stays at home. They keep in touch by smartphone and social media. One hears from their conversations that they, like many others, don’t believe that political engagement can change anything. Their resistance rather consists in leading modern and western lives in which gender, sexuality, pop music and identity issues play important roles. Tuxen’s darkly poetic debut film is set in nocturnal cars, flats and backyards. The transit in which the three find themselves becomes physically tangible. Their stories allow us rare glimpses into an almost invisible side of today’s Russia and the complexity of lived contradiction.

The tumultuous 1960s in China as a collage of archival images, clay figures and interviews. Lei Lei lets his father and his grandfather talk, about bicycles and bank clerks, about life in the countryside, re-education and class enemies. Their memories generate a multicoloured surreal world that is an enchanting fantasy of the time before and during the Cultural Revolution.

In his second feature-length film, artist and animation filmmaker Lei Lei once more takes up experiences of family members and uncovers a piece of national history via private stories. For more than six years, he collected family photos, postcards, propaganda images and old films. On this backdrop he forms and moves his characters made of gum-like pastel modelling clay, whose colourful, almost childlike appearance supports the impression that this is where a grandson imagines the anecdotal memoirs of his ancestors. But this imaginative animation is anything but naïve: It takes the time to accommodate the detours and pauses in the narrative and takes us – by means of a restrained soundscape, too – deep into a universe where one can lose oneself.

Two sisters travel to the realm of clouds on a paper plane. They are looking for the big tree with the golden leaf. Their plane has to be mended again and again, and the big sister is worried. When she falls ill, the little sister takes control. Slowly they get closer to each other and their goal on this arduous journey.

A wall stands in a barren, inhospitable landscape, insurmountable. While the birds are flying unhindered through the air, a human being struggles in vain to open a door in the wall. First as a small child, then as an adult, finally as an old man. When the door at last unexpectedly gives way, it seems too late. A dark allegory by the Leipzig-based painter and graphic artist Rainer Schade.