A film commissioned for a school education programme. The goal of this programme is to teach children about their own history and that of their country – especially on the background of the recent wars. The hope is that this knowledge will also be applied to the future, that it will bring colour to the black and white, a smile to the gloom.

Felix Leffrank deals with the ups and downs of an artist’s life in colourful, computer-animated images. During his ordeal between depression, writer’s block, anger and urban loneliness, a story-teller is accompanied by three weird birds who sometimes appear as annoying neighbours, sometimes as inner demons. Jung, Freud and the psychologist Dr. Breuer in the shape of a grey cat promote self-reflection, but the most helpful thing is probably a beer with friends.

A girl affected by ostracism angrily creates a little demon that is to follow her forever from now on, comforting her in moments of disappointment, but also keeping her locked in her loneliness. In Budanova’s beautiful animation, mental pain takes the shape of an identity figure that seems impossible to get rid of.

We’re travelling from luxury kitchen to luxury kitchen with Agnes, from Bergisch Gladbach via Barcelona to the Faroe Islands. The cook’s luggage always includes her backpack containing various knives, cleavers and tweezers. The camera watches over the inquisitive young woman’s shoulder as delicacies are being prepared. Our mouths water. At the same time, we get insights into the different ways of running a restaurant. It’s about team spirit and equality at the stove.

Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels” comes to mind, because this observational documentary is also like a novel of development. Agnes is ambitious, knows her craft. She wants to be her own boss one day. She soon finds her way around every new team, takes her place. It’s a sensuous pleasure to watch how the many hands interlock, how culinary creations are lovingly made, delicately plucked salad leaves arranged as decorations. At the same time, Agnes has to struggle against opposition. Her wages are low. A colleague asks her what business she, who has just finished her apprenticeship, has in a three-star restaurant. Agnes is moving in a male domain, in an environment that tends to pass the pressure down. But in the course of her journey, she also comes across collective forms of cooperation and new visions of cooking.

Rolling into the village: Circus Hein. Angelika Andrees is interested in the individual acts presented in the ring, but even more in what happens before and afterwards. Or what the audience look like from below, when various bottoms are squashed on the wooden benches. Sometimes there’s clacking and knocking, or the pattering of rain, and in the end, Bob Dylan sings. “Travelling Circus” was made when Andrees was still at the Babelsberg Film Academy. She experiments with different elements, switches tones and thus captures the moods crystallising around the travelling attraction. A portrait emerges, without commentary and with very few, short interview sequences.

An animated folkloristic Western, using clichés, local stereotypes and national myths to sketch a kind of satirical profile of “wild” Slovenia, its colourful costumes and strange customs. Boris Dolenc has adapted a cartoon by Vladan Nikolić, who in turn drew on the motifs and visual language of the painted beehive boards typical of Slovenia.

Narimane Mari dedicates a touching portrait that tells of parting to her now deceased lover, the artist Michel Haas. She captures first and foremost the small, everyday moments – street scenes, working at the studio, watching films together, reading to each other in bed. The absence of a traditional narration, long shots and intense conversations invite us to think about our own relationship with temporality.

A recurring potpourri of poems, prose and music by Nâzım Hikmet, Stéphane Mallarmé through to Sun Ra gives the film its very own leisurely rhythm. The scenes at the studio are carried by this mood, too. As with Jackson Pollock, the art is created mostly on the floor. But Michel Haas works with ink, large-format paper sheets and hot water instead of canvas and thinned paint. Humming happily, he hits the soaked paper with his bare hands until edges, creases and folds form. The abstract outlines and flat shapes are recognisable as figures only when viewed from a distance: Often, they are intertwined couples. A contemplative tribute to love.

A hungry and solitary weasel roams the dry landscape, intent on hunting the last remaining birds in a tree. The birds try to keep the tree in balance while the weasel doggedly climbs its trunk. The tree sways, the stomach growls, the weasel persists until it’s too late. A classic anti-hero cartoon – not just for children.

“Everyone says fat people eat too much. But it’s not that simple”, Christiane Hein states at the beginning of her film which follows seven-year-old Robert Becher from Erfurt in his struggle against excess pounds. The stages include a dieting sanatorium complete with “juice day”, humiliating physical education lessons at school and a visit to relatives in the country where Robert experiences a life without teasing and self-punishment. This is where the boy lets go – not easy when thoughts of weight fence one’s life in. Again and again, director Hein inserts scales as a symbolic image reminiscent of a guillotine-like torture instrument. A compassionate portrait.

A handful of quarrymen in the Reinhardtsdorf open cast mine near Bad Schandau dig out the coveted Elbe natural stone. Gabriele Denecke’s approach to the men, who are of different ages, is almost trance-like, the movement to and from the stones marks the transition to another world. We hear about the merciless working conditions of the past, about alcohol, people worn out before their time. Today, digging out the massive rocks in the midst of nature also constitutes a degree of freedom. Open cast miners share a special mindset. And: Once you’ve worn out your first pair of wooden shoes, you’ll stay – probably forever.

Coal briquets hit the waggon with a thundering sound, are loaded, unloaded and finally end up in the houses of Prenzlauer Berg. Renate Uhle is the owner of a coal shop run by her family since 1922. Together with her men – Klaus, Kalle, Manne, Erwin, Pummel, Felix and Würstchen – she sees to it that no one in the neighbourhood freezes. Work is hard, the afterwork beer obligatory, and Renate’s tongue quick and sensitive. Helke Misselwitz follows the workers on their chugging diesel-driven ants through the streets and the watershed year of 1989, sweats with them as they climb up endless stairs and listens to them through the cigarette smoke.

The kidnapping and murder of the politician Aldo Moro; four slashed tyres that were to save a florist’s life; the lost soundtrack to Antonioni’s film “Zabriskie Point”; the meeting of two avant-garde composers; archive material and found footage – these are the elements of this “freely composed” film that is imbued with the city of Rome and juxtaposes the human urge for constant rebellion and the thesis of the end of history.

For the US electronic composer Alvin Curran, whose intellectual and artistic world are at the centre of Éric Baudelaire’s exceptionally rich collage, music is a vehicle that carries us to places we have never travelled before. In Rome, where Curran settled in the 1960s, he met his then considerably more experienced professional colleague Franco Evangelisti, who shocked him with the question: “Don’t you know that there’s no more music to write?” Baudelaire’s congenial montage of image and sound fragments suggests that Curran’s solo work – as well as his collaboration with the pioneering collective “Musica Elettronica Viva” – is the answer to Evangelisti’s question: We have to keep reassembling the world.

With this personal video diary from Kyiv, artist Hanna Trofimova manages to make us comprehend something of how the war infiltrates and destroys life and everyday routines, even if one’s own apartment has not been hit by a bomb yet. Images of an oppressive “normality” between alarm sirens and explosions are combined with the touching words of a young woman who tries not to lose herself and her life to the new reality.

“Sex does strange things to people!” This sentence reverberates from her childhood. What did her mother mean? What fears did she pass on to Emma? The budding filmmaker sets up the camera in her mother’s apartment, invites mum’s friends, creates an open atmosphere. Coby opens up more and more, talks about a repressed topic. At the same time, she gets to show a wholly different side of herself, performing song and dance numbers in front of her daughter’s lens.

The summer after graduation: Own life plans and expectations of the parents’ generation collide. While Shuli films his friends with a Super 8 camera, his mother wants nothing more than for him to get married. She resolutely refuses to speak about the fact that her son loves men and has been living with his boyfriend in Beijing for years. A deafening silence. Idyllic family pictures are overlaid by a long overdue confrontation.

On the occasion of the GDR Landeskulturgesetz (Law on the Conservation and Protection of the Environment), passed in 1970, the speaker explains the various aspects of environmental protection through vivid, visually pointed examples. The film repeatedly refers to the fundamental contradiction between exploitation and preservation of nature in a developed industrial state but is unable to resolve it.