The Baía de Guanabara is not just any bay: the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro has sprawled around it. Its waste water threatens the rich ecosystem, planes roar along the approach corridors above. These filmic explorations on the margins of the megacity portray various environments that are all connected to the bay in a specific way. The people here are micro-wage earners making a modest living.

At night the lights of the city and the promises of capitalism shine in the distance. To the people living at the periphery, they seem out of reach. In eight chapters this documentary essay meditates on their habitats along the bay, following the repetitive and physically exhausting activities of humans and farm animals. Unusual perspectives, careful camera work and a poignant sound design elevate these observations to a commentary on the crisis in Brazil. Murilo Salles, who won a Silver Dove in Leipzig in 1978 for his debut “These Are the Weapons”, sheds light on the close link between geographical space and social inequality.

Why this film document about a street in East Berlin is the way it is, why it conveys an almost touching, basically unformed honesty and perplexity, is due to the specific institution it was made for. The State Film Documentation was founded to provide the GDR with uncensored testimonies of its own reality. Three long-time residents look, through notoriously draughty windows, at the notoriously chilly German-Jewish history: Herr Miegel, former pub owner, Frau Kramp, former cinema employee, Mischket Liebermann, writer and GDR cultural politician. They have been neighbours in their district forever. They will probably remain strangers to each other forever.

On 29 April 1959, Hessian Broadcasting transmitted an alarming survey of the Federal German school system. The first of three parts of the report “Focus on Our Youth” investigates the question of what has stuck in the minds of higher form students about Hitler’s and Ulbricht’s Germanies. Hesse under Polish administration? Hitler sold badges to come to power? At least they are about right concerning the number of murdered Jews – that is, the third who could think of anything to say about this at all. One television critic rightly pointed out that this represented the sum total of all parental table talk. But were these parents watching television on 29 April 1959?

Icelandic musician Björk has always merged natural and technoid creativeness. She samples and loops environmental sounds and transforms them by means of electronic effects. Paul White translates this approach and aesthetics in the video clip for “Hunter”, morphing the singing Björk’s head and human features into an artificial polar bear that seems to be made of liquid plastic.

The inauguration of the “National Buchenwald Memorial”, the first national memorial of the GDR, took place in 1958. The monumental site was also meant to demonstrate the state-supporting importance of a selective culture of remembrance, commemorating the communist resistance fighters – and omitting the fact that the graves were mainly filled with Jewish victims. In 1961, DEFA completed this “introductory film”, commissioned by the Buchenwald committee, which talks about Goethe, Schiller, Thälmann, but only very marginally about Jews. Every visitor’s memorial tour started with this until 1975. Its scriptwriter and production manager was the playwright Heiner Müller, a fact that was not known until 2004.

Danusia and Basia are a mother and daughter, sharing a life presented by director Karol Pałka as supremely secluded. Far removed from any comfort, the seasons pass, a priest comes to visit, the women wade through mud and cultivate their habits. But, unnoticed by Danusia, Basia moves on a few back roads of her own that lead in other directions.

The nearest town seems light years away. Danusia and her daughter Basia lead a reclusive life in a ramshackle house in the country. The rooms are decorated with flower arrangements, scattered with devotional objects. Mother and daughter cultivate their connection to the supernatural, either in the shape of a strict Catholicism or as small rituals in nature. In one scene Basia dances around a fire like a witch. She is also the one who repeatedly seeks contact with the outside world. We see her with a mobile phone then, but the person at the other end remains intangible, unable or unwilling to break the spell around the mother-and-daughter team. It is a dense, almost deserted world which Karol Pałka in his debut film renders in gloomy, shadowed images that grow brighter only when spring comes. But even then, the dramatic opening piece “Specially for You” by the Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha still resonates.

The whole world, captured on a somewhat dreary pavement in Warsaw. For two years, director Paweł Łoziński stood on the balcony of his flat with his camera and watched the people passing below from up there. The ones he saw and persuaded to talk are young and old, neighbours or simply passers-by. The filmmaker addresses them, asks questions, listens and creates a space for conversations that rarely happen between strangers.

How do passers-by react when they are filmed from a balcony and addressed, stopped from above? Do they walk on, shaking their heads? Or are they willing to engage in dialogue? This place and this staged opportunity seem perfect for making a film that reflects its own premises, because apparently people feel a rather strong need to talk about themselves from this unusual position. Whether hurrying or strolling, happy or thoughtful, posing or quite natural: Each of the participants who happen to come into view reveals something special. Every encounter, however unpremeditated, turns out to be unique. Some expectations of a certain type of person are disappointed, because hardly anyone can be pigeonholed. Łoziński’s experiment invites us to pause, to wait until the world steps into the camera’s field of view.

With reference to Władysław Starewicz’s animation film experiments with insects, the Chilean artist duo León and Cociña develop a fictitious counter-narrative to the history of the stop motion technique – and a vision of a Chile liberated from autocrats. A pigtailed girl in puppet form confidently handles the remains of the authoritarian power tradition, in the shape of morbidly staged body parts of two symbolic representatives of the oligarchy and Pinochet’s dictatorship – Diego Portales and Jaime Guzmán.