Dreamy animated images in detailed henna painting and atmospheric watercolours dominate a young Spanish artist’s moving journey of discovery. In a small bookshop in India, Inés comes across the feminist-utopian science fiction story “Sultana’s Dream.” It is about the terrible revenge on men, the bookseller explains. In the slim volume she wrote in 1905, Rokeya Hossain describes the fantasy realm of Ladyland – a land in which women are self-determined and live in peace, in which they run all government affairs and all forms of education are open to them. And the men? Their place in Ladyland, the bookseller continues, is where they belong: locked up at home.

Fascinated by the literary “painting” of this place and its inventor, Inés sets out in the footsteps of the writer and teacher Hossain, who championed education and equal rights for Indian girls and women as early as the beginning of the 20th century. The trip takes the Spaniard across contemporary India. Her companions are the dreams of Ladyland – and the utterly different realities of the lives of the women she meets on her journey.

Every year on 15 August, Paul, his family and friends have a picnic on the island of Callot, which can be reached via a causeway at low tide. Summer holidays, carefree beach games – awesome! This time, however, they are surprised by the flood, because Paul’s father accidentally packed last year’s tide calendar. Now they are forced to spend the night on the island.

For a year, over all four seasons, Stéphane Manchematin and Serge Steyer keep returning to the Vosges where Suzanne lives. By now she looks back on more than nine decades of life, an old lady who stoically clings to the self-sufficiency of the house where she was born. The place lacks all comfort, neither electricity nor water supply help with cooking or heating. Nonetheless, Suzanne wants for nothing: When the indoor temperature drops to single digits in winter, she simply takes a hot-water bottle to bed and adds another layer of blankets. In the bathroom, water reliably flows from a groove, and if the light hits the surrounding glass carafes, it soon dances through the room.

Manchematin and Steyer know how to stage everyday procedures and conditions alertly and sensitively – their film’s meanderings are as casual as they are focused. And Suzanne, too, becomes more and more approachable. After a very short time, one develops a sense of her habits, registers with amusement her eternal twirling of the telephone cord, or discovers a quite assertive person behind the wheel. All this happens without romanticisation or kitsch. Instead, the observation is characterised by abundant laconic wisdom.

Leaving home to live in a new country isn’t easy at all. Lyri moves to the Netherlands with her family and talks about her experiences. Given the choice, she would have preferred to stay in Israel. So many things are foreign and different now. What strikes her most, though, is that the children here learn to swim in their street clothes.

Waiting people in the noise of the city. They begin to move, passing each other. Their portraits overlap, their bodies briefly collapse and for a fleeting moment form abstract time-space shapes. From the repetition and multiplication of the encounters emerges a daily accidental choreography of lifelines in urban space: delicate, intransparent and widely ramified.