A journey back in time to 1915 Dresden, where Karlchen lives, who dreams of seeing the famous elephants of the Sarrasani Circus one day. To earn the ticket, he delivers potatoes. But his few coins are not enough for the visit. When Karlchen’s dream at last comes within reach, everything turns out different than expected.

The first animated film by visual artist Fransix Tenda Lomba is a kind of parcours through Congo’s historical education systems – and an analysis of the ideological function of the institution of the school. Using impressive collages and an always ironic commentary, the film – tellingly produced in Belgium – confronts its Western audience with their own ignorance about the region, challenging both their aesthetic and political thinking.

Click, click, she virtually recreates a cluttered, narrow kitchen on her computer. Lady Di smiles with creased photo edges from the refrigerator, a half-opened chocolate bar lies on the table. The technical-looking, detailed digital reconstruction runs like a fingertip along remembered images, tracing their nicks. The images feed off a blurred video in which the grandparents and their kitchen-cum-living-room live on – a nostalgic place in the distant Ukraine of childhood.

For technical reasons – too massive! – this 50-ton bronze colossus was not demolished in 1993. Today it is listed as a historical monument, along with the associated housing estate. A relic from the old days: Today, the raised fist of the former German Communist Party leader and erstwhile GDR hero Ernst Thälmann in the Prenzlauer Berg park defies the collective forgetting of a not-so-long-ago past instead of heralding the victory of communism.

In 1986, an old municipal gasworks in East Berlin made way for a housing estate – and a monument that was controversial even then. Partly imagined, partly remembered and extensively researched throughout, Betina Kuntzsch assembles a complex narrative as part of her project “Vom Sockel Denken” about the Ernst-Thälmann-Memorial in Berlin: about a place full of history, viewed from ten different perspectives. In her omnibus film she skilfully uses various aesthetic and research tools. The successful combination of own footage, animation, archive material and oral history generates a kind of kaleidoscope, a gem of historiographic documentary-making and a parcours through a whole range of documentary film genres.

Russian-born director Aleksey Lapin travels back to his relatives’ home village near the Ukrainian border, where he himself used to spend every summer. The film crew introduce themselves at a specially organized musical event, claiming that they have come to cast a historical film that is to be set in the village. What follows is a charming, semi-fictional documentary by and with the village community.

The proposed film project is just a pretext, that’s obvious from the start. Nonetheless, the villagers are happy to take part. Inventively and with subtle irony, Lapin plays with the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Thus observed scenes unobtrusively merge into staged ones. He records marvellously absurdities, for example a tree being felled and laboriously put up somewhere else for the “shoot”, or broken-down cars fuelling the rumours of electromagnetism in the area. The cinematography in black and white is notable, full of references to classic Russian films, timeless and timely at the same time. Lapin’s feature-length debut is not only an affectionate local portrait with a sense for the absurd, but also a film about film: In a long dialogue by the river, two protagonists talk about cinema as an art form and how it is changing.

Inspired by ritual practices from different cultures, the VR experience addresses the loss of a sense of community and empathy, combining modern dance and VR technology to re-examine old rites and reveal their meaningful potential for future societies. The title of the work refers to what legend has it is an “enlightening” potion from ancient Greece.