A feeling of fear spreads: In an apartment building, the stairs follow no logic, men get lost with a wardrobe, everyone is lonely. The surreal threat suddenly becomes real when security agents ring the doorbell: “Csengőfrász”, the symbol for the arbitrary arrest of citizens allegedly hostile to the state from the time of the Hungarian Uprising.

A fly rotates around a lightbulb, a spoon turns in a cup. Everything moves in circles here, including the life of the couple. He looks at his mobile phone, she does the sun salutation. Even her somersaults don’t make him look up. The minimalist black and white animation begins to vibrate. The monotony gets out of rhythm. She imagines him as a fly and chases him. Scenes of a marriage, reflected in the yellow eyes of a gecko.

Somewhere in the eternal ice. All around nothing but snow and pleasant silence. Until a helicopter lands to drop off a group of tourists. A few quick photos are taken and off they go. The uninvited guests leave behind a pile of rubbish – and a small dog who is suddenly quite lost. Four snow hares take heart-warming care of him.

Ginkgo trees are separated by sex; only the female trees bear fruit. Once highly esteemed as natural sources of health, city dwellers today object to their pungent smell and, as gardeners, prefer the less complicated, more fragrant “fruitless” male plants. Tang Han explains with infographics, apt short sound comments and sympathetic objectivity.

There’s probably no other citizen of Gelsenkirchen who has ever mastered Nō singing and playing the Shakuhachi flute as authentically as Uwe Walter. He has lived in the mountain village of Miyama north of Kyoto for three decades and emulates the local residents, whether they earn their living on the fields, breeding cattle or hunting. People tend their gardens, repair fences to keep away the macaques and grow their own rice. Uwe has become perfectly Japanese, at one with his environment.

However well-suited his Ruhr area wit makes him as a figure of identification, the camera keeps a respectful distance, more reserved than Uwe himself. Only at one point does it come touchingly close: When he is forced to say goodbye to an essential part of his past in the interest of the village community. But the real subject of this film is not the German with his greyish blonde curls but rather that very community, portrayed by Rainer Komers in bittersweet polyphony. It emerges in the children’s games, the adults’ pursuits and the old people’s tales, in the summer downpours of the rainy season, the white moon over the nocturnal village and the blood-red leaves of autumn.

After years of touring together, the Berlin supergroup “Moderat” decided in 2017 to go on a (recently terminated) hiatus. “The Last Days” portrays the three protagonists of “Intelligent Dance Music” at their most human. Black and white images taken around their last concert tour serve as a projection surface for off-screen interviews in which Sascha, Szary and Gernot describe each other, allowing deep insights into their artistic dynamics.

Please note:Stroboscopic effects are used in this film.

In Hamsterland, everybody is 100 percent happy. Their religion is statistics and the perfect employee is young, a team player and stress-resistant. Even the most mindless computer jobs and piece work drudgery are fun, without exception. Until one day something goes wrong after all and the mantras “think positive” and “follow your dreams” are temporarily silenced. An entertaining polemic on hyper capitalist, neoliberal societies that makes you smile.

On a moonless night, a cheeky bull escapes from his herd. He dashes through fields and over hills until he finally stops at a pond, where a piece of paper on which a poem is emerging attaches itself to him. The bull shakes off the paper and sneaks into town, where he watches people at their nocturnal business. He witnesses a police investigation, listens in on two truck drivers and observes the theft of a bus stop shelter. All these experiences are accompanied by the narrator’s poetic comments and culminate in a hilarious singing sequence, complete with a dance and performance number by the bull.

Meanwhile, the people in the town are in an uproar about the undetectable moon. They search, discuss and protest. But the moon stays missing – until the bull transforms himself at the end of his journey.

Vincent Monnikendam calls his archive film “a kinematographic image of the Dutch-Indies 1912 – c. 1933” in the subtitle, echoing the ponderous bureaucratic language of the Dutch authorities who at the time commissioned the footage he re-edited. He condensed some 280,000 metres of nitrate film, shot by professionals but left largely uncut, into a compilation about indigenous people and their immigrant rulers in the former colony. The originally silent footage begins to speak – not in an explanatory voiceover, but in the songs and stories of the colonized. The images are unchanged. But they have to be read in a new way.

Dragica does not lack for work. The house and cattle in western Serbia demand toil from dawn to dusk. She milks, harvests, prepares porridge for her handicapped daughter. Her own mother recently passed away. Now Dragica wears black and shaves her old father. Can there be an alternative to this daily self-sacrifice? Almost casually, Isaac Knights-Washbourn leaves space for such reflections: While chopping tomatoes, the woman opens up to a guest from town.

In rural northern Colombia, where the railway has long been discontinued, people help themselves with a fleet of “Motorrodillos” – motorcycle-driven miniature trains. Every day, Dolly and her colleagues take school kids, goods and travellers on rugged routes from village to village. If you meet oncoming traffic on the way, you get off the rails. If you find holes in the rails, you mend them yourself. The affectionate portrait of a self-organised transport system.

Four paramedics in a distant mountain village at the beginning of the Covid pandemic go from one house to another, from measurements to diagnoses, from tired older women to drunk middle-aged men. Hreshko watches them closely: They get baptised, married and buried. Yet the ambulance team stays the same, does its job, and ultimately provides the emotional core of this kaleidoscopic view of people’s stories and tragedies.

Two mice discover a big wheel of cheese. Paradise, no less! But how to get in? One mouse has made it, its little brother is outside on his own and must watch out for the hungry cat. Inside the cheese wheel, the mouse lives like a king, eating its way through the yellow treat. But every bite brings it closer to the collapse of its house …

Jane’s mother is going through hard times and informs her that she will have to spend Christmas with her grandmother “Onion” in the country this year. No argument. Jane doesn’t feel like it at all: how boring! Against all odds, the holidays turn out to be a real adventure. Jane meets new friends and begins to open up to others.

Today is the great derby between FC Cubs and FC Tigers. With the brawny Cheeky in the goal, the kitten’s victory is all but guaranteed. But their plan is thwarted by the cunning Scallywag. Will his tricks be enough to win the match? “Muri the Cat” is a mini-series based on Slovenian children’s books: gaudy and merry.

Sexual hallucinations of an abandoned man in which literally everything turns into a questionable object of throbbing lust. The hell of jealousy mingles with the bonfire of vanities and pink longing fades into purple desire: lecherous bodies. Pounding pain. Panting music. Phallus seeks vagina. Eternal, restless, greedy.