It’s only after the separation from her husband that another man tells her how valuable she is: the Chladek family, she’s a teacher, he’s a student. The first few years were nothing but quarrels: the Surau family, he’s a plumber, she’s a postal worker. Should she really intend to get further education at evening school, he won’t accept this: the Lehmann family, he’s a locksmith, she’s a lecturer. Three thirtysomething couples live in the Potsdam high-rise behind whose windows Petra Tschörtner looked for her graduation film. Long interviews that pierce the surface at once, equally revealing and oppressive. Promptly awarded a prize at the West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.

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.

Just hold your breath. Perhaps this helps as much against the pain of parting as the stinging nettles of one’s childhood. Sheila died of hay dust in her lungs and it seems as if the family farm died with the horse, too. After its sale, the laconic narrator pays digital visits via 3D online maps. But even the most detailed view says nothing about the grave of the three-legged farm cat. Using animation and image manipulation, he reclaims the remembered place.

In works like “Guide Dog Ruepel” (1962), Bärbl Bergmann was the first feature film director in the GDR to portray children in their often pitiless but also honest dealings with each other, something that was almost impossible in the documentary films of that period. But she also managed to sneak lessons on how to pursue educational goals with creative obstinacy into popular science films. Thus her educational piece about two boys who discover that magic, too, requires hard work, despite its rational approach, is far from disenchanting: The protagonists reach their conclusion via detours that take them through mysterious corridors, furtive looks through keyholes and bewitching dreams.

Omid and his family came to France from Iran a while ago. He is often made to feel that he doesn’t really belong. Even his daughter keeps correcting his French. When he’s attacked, the knife pierces his heart. No, he doesn’t have a heart, as it turns out in the hospital … An animated black comedy about what one leaves behind in one’s home country.

At home in the uncanny: Startled, a woman turns on the light, hesitates, listens and goes to the door, full of dark forebodings … In this montage of similar scenes from Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, the various actresses merge into a meta-protagonist who experiences the same horror over and over again: She is trapped in her home and in her classic movie role.

Rose and Rolf in the still-young FRG. He, 13 years her senior, was in the Second World War. She, who wants to have many children, accepts his proposal and leaves school. Rose watches Super 8 home movies from the fifties, sixties and seventies with her granddaughter Annika Mayer, the director of “Home Sweet Home”: her two boys in short leather pants, a home with a manicured front garden, dad coming home from work, mom cooking soup with sausage links. Rose does not recognise herself in these ideal images of the German economic miracle. This pretty young woman is a stranger to her.

Annika begins to ask questions. Together with her grandmother, she starts to look for traces of domestic violence in the latter’s marriage, which is invisible in the films. But Rose’s open narratives gradually make her experiences tangible. What biographical abysses may lurk behind Rolf’s proud smile? Judiciously deployed slow motion effects dissect the apparent domestic happiness. Atonal and hyperrealistic sounds lie under the distorted soundtrack. The birds sing all too happily, the idyll suddenly seems deceptive.

Everyone in Leipzig is familiar with the Hotel Astoria, which has stood vacant since 1996. This film takes a look back to the time when the hotel was the hotspot of the trade fair city, where professionals, politicians and guests from all over the world were entertained with the greatest possible GDR pomp. But the Stasi also came and went in the hotel. The story of an exciting chapter in the city’s history is told with archive material, staff reports, and the distinctive animations by Falk Schuster.

A device that can create the illusion of movement can be built by coupling the speed of a rotating disc to the recording frame rate of a camera. This so-called phonotrope is a contemporary version of the phenakistiscope. In her how-to video, Tess Martin explains how this technique works and how it was used in her film “Orbit.”

In Norse mythology there are numerous sagas about water creatures that lure sailors out to sea. This VR experience takes us on a meditative journey to this mythical reality. While the world around us is dissolving, voices draw us into a lost underwater universe in which the boundaries between reality, fantasy, humans and nature fade.

When their parents go in search of berries and honey, the little brown bears stay in the meadow with the sheep. They don’t want to go to bed yet, no matter how lovely the lullaby sounds. Romping through the landscape, they get entangled in a ball of yarn, only to fall asleep peacefully in the end … A “cuddly” animated film based on a Latvian lullaby.

In collaboration with the mycologist and activist Giuliana Furci a VR experience was created that actually contains a whole universe. Hardly anyone knows the world of fungi, though it surrounds and shapes us. We shrink to the size of a hypha, communicate with tree-roots, transform toxins into valuable nutrients and become part of a nearly endless but invisible network carrying our earth.

The term hysteresis soberly describes a processual behaviour where the previous history affects the result as much as new changes. Robert Seidel enters analogue drawings, performance footage of the queer dancer Tsuki and pluck sounds and drones by Oval into a feedback system that reorganises time and movement in a multicoloured and sensual organic tableau.

Emanations of a nightmare. Drawings of fragile girls’ bodies from which the silhouettes of massive men emerge devouring each other. Obsessive images from the inner perspective of a nude dancer during her performance. Shreds of acoustic memories of sexual abuse. And always recurring: the rapist in a hat, the forever unerasable unreal reality.

Two siblings are sitting peacefully at a table and drawing. There is a swimming hedgehog in the sister’s picture. The brother wonders whether this would work in real life. He goes into the garden, grabs a hedgehog and throws him into the pool to test this. Not funny at all, thinks the hedgehog. But before he scurries back to his pile of leaves, he comes up with a wet surprise …

Hammer and compass in Mozambique. We see a GDR flag waved at a rally in Maputo, carried by “Madgermanes”, contract workers who once toiled in eastern Germany. Some of them founded families there, like Eulidio. His daughter Sarah grows up with her mother in Berlin. The relationship with her “second home” is slow in growing, partly thanks to Luana, Sarah’s baby, whose father Eduardo is also from Mozambique.

Eulidio still remembers the Lubmin nuclear power plant. Today he fries chips in Springs, South Africa. Meanwhile, Sarah only knew her father from a photo for the longest time: rather cool-looking, wearing a cap. She met him for the first time when she was eleven and felt how comfortable she was surrounded by people whose skin is as dark as hers. As an adult woman she decides to spend some time in Mozambique – and meets Eduardo. On the flight back she’s pregnant. This documentary observation by Brenda Akele Jorde deals with Sarah’s attempt to weave together and spin out threads that were torn by the fall of communism. And it shows the challenges this brings: While Sarah is confronted with racism in Germany, in Africa she’s regarded as a German. While once her father Eulidio was expelled after the fall of the Berlin Wall, now it’s Eduardo who sees his daughter only sporadically.