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.

“Apparently, it had to happen to me before I learned it was ‘normal’.” This statement by a protagonist sums up how our society deals with stillborn children or children who die young: Star children are omnipresent (one in four mothers has lost a child) and yet absent. We lack the vocabulary, the sensitivity, and the tranquillity to enable parents to mourn.
Remo Rauscher’s animated documentary confronts us with this inability, letting twenty people in mourning or who deal with mourning speak: Thinking out loud, struggling for words, regarding the pain from different perspectives, discovering dignity and strength in it and helping us to overcome the taboo. They object to being an “error in the system”, to accepting the speechlessness. In Rauscher’s film, the darkness is ambivalent and palpable on all levels: It is absorbing and caring. It is generous and gives us moments of beauty, humility, and hope. The 2D animations in muted colours on a dark background are always abstract, sketchy, and restrained – an expression of tact and respect. They draw attention to themselves only once in a while, while the voices are given a lot of space and can unfold without fear. This film opens a space to mourn that society is unable to offer yet.

“Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean – so get yourself a little loving in between.” This advice of the African-American civil rights activist and jazz poet Langston Hughes precedes Jyoti Mistry’s found footage storm of images and runs like a guiding line through the archive material, a panopticon of revelries: parties, boxing matches, visits to the beach and above all, time and again, testimonies of lived queer sexuality. Sometimes clandestine, sometimes quite public.

Mistry mirrors the uninhibitedness of her sources in the way she arranges them – not neatly staggered but boldly mixed. The associative editing often virtually leaps into the images, linking them with purple colour explosions and three-dimensional animations of shoals of fish. On the soundtrack, a spoken word performance joins multi-channel dubbed noises and countless variations of the jazz standard “Diga Diga Doo.” This is how the film wrests its testimonies from the past and returns them to their inherent liveliness and transgressive explosive power.

Lukas Marxt’s fourth film about the Salton Sea in Southern California focuses on 1944/45, when about 150 dummies, replicas of the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were dropped there for ballistic tests. “Marine Target” measures the remains of the wooden target platforms from up close and high above. The disconcerting soundtrack to this fascinating filmic study is provided by a swelling adaptation of the Nigerian hit “Atomic Bomb” by William Onyeabor.

For his monumental study of displacement, Nikolaus Geyrhalter has travelled across continents, mapping a new kind of landscape that has become detached from geographical or climatic conditions under palm trees, on mountains, at rivers, in the snow. Washed up, blown in, piled up, caught or left somewhere – where once the forces of nature were at work, garbage now dominates the shape of things. It has even brought forth a new social type: the relocator.

As in all his films, Nikolaus Geyrhalter operates the camera himself. It stands still, often for minutes, as if it couldn’t believe what presents itself: plastic webs seemingly grown together with the scrawny branches on embankments, decaying newspapers and cocoa powder packaging in the excavated soil of a potato field in Switzerland, beaches seamed at the waterline by a carpet of Styrofoam and plastic containers. In equally delicately composed images, the filmmaker focuses on the machines and people who work away at these garbage landscapes. They excavate and compact, collect and sort, sweep and rake, move one thing this way and the other that way with grapplers or hands. Well-formed and without comment, the inner workings of a self-sustaining system are revealed in which a process of alienation is underway that causes problem and solution to drift apart.

Fluctuation at the Vienna football club RSV is high. Coach Robin, who once hosted parties at the Prater sauna, sees his club as a political project, too: Players from various birth nations come together in his “dirty rotten bunch”. Athletic highlights are quite often followed by relegation, discipline and excess are cheek by jowl at RSV. Director Jasmin Baumgartner has followed Robin and his team over several years.

“My players are like my kids”, Robin says. And kids can be exhausting. They are caught with joints by the police on their way to the Slovenian training camp or prefer to go to the casino instead of completing their training units. But even president Robin isn’t averse to parties. On the sidelines of the amateur league it can get boozy and often rough: Opposing fans insult and discriminate against black athletes in particular. A behaviour for which Robin has no patience at all. He sees it this way: “If we integrate the super sweet Muslim fraction in our club, with our Serbian nationalists, uneducated Austrians and our Muslim-hating Congolese players, then we’ll not only be promoted to the fourth division. We’ll even stop the rise of the right-wing nationalists.”

Nothing is closer to us than our skin. Its beautiful and less beautiful parts envelop the self, separate it from all else. A foray along naked parts of the body takes us from a shiny ridge via a rounded protuberance to a shady gorge. A neck. A belly…ear. A fellybear? Photos, videoclips and sounds form an irritating body collage.

The film opens with the image of an elderly individual in a hospital, hooked to a machine: assistance is needed to slowly breathe in and out. This existential moment of physical precariousness is followed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s typical long shots, though in this case they do not document work processes but look like a prequel to his fantastic science fiction documentary “Homo Sapiens” (2016): deserted airports, swimming pools, playgrounds.

The filmmaker sets out with his identifiable aesthetic tools to tackle the documentation of the first three waves of the Covid-19 pandemic, from March 2020 to December 2021. In Vienna, a major city with a relatively well-functioning health system, he looks at institutions that are in a “flexible learning mode”: intensive care units, emergency shelters, schools, cinemas. Time and again he visits a flower shop that is not system-relevant but, by its own definition, sells food. Lockdown followed by eased restrictions followed by lockdown. The camera registers how paralysis in the face of a natural disaster is superseded in some people by anger at the restrictions. Meanwhile, cases of Long Covid are being treated in the hospitals. Topical, only a little later, these images cut across the repression of what has been experienced.

A nervously vibrating camera, a rubber duck being beheaded by algebra. In only one minute and with a vengeance, David Lynch lights a beacon against the school-inculcated view of the world. Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic – the three basic cultural techniques “drilled” into us turn out to be childhood traumas and opponents of the immeasurable, the mysterious and the indescribable.

Her “artificial assistant” is what Claudia Larcher calls the AI that digitally analysed her analogue “Baumeister” series of collages and generated this film from them. Creator or servant spirit, the machine makes architectural sketches waft biomorphically and enlivens (i.e. animates) rigid shapes. The Japanese Metabolists who called for the fluid renewal of their buildings, the organic growth, deformation and decay of architecture, would have liked “The Artist in the Machine”.

She opens her arms wide: “I want to go home, do my dreaming.” Crossing from an unbearable reality to the world of magic sometimes takes only the snap of a finger, sometimes several press-ups. Gudrun Krebitz’s poetic combination of video and animation recommends pushing the gravestone aside and descending into one’s subconscious.

She opens her arms wide: “I want to go home, do my dreaming.” Crossing from an unbearable reality to the world of magic sometimes takes only the snap of a finger, sometimes several press-ups. Gudrun Krebitz’s poetic combination of video and animation recommends pushing the gravestone aside and descending into one’s subconscious: with overpaintings and superimpositions.

Covid-19 has made quarantine and self-isolation the everyday experience for many. This project, developed at the CPH:LAB, invites people to scan their most personal places and moments. The resulting VR experience is a walk-in archive and time capsule, the collective memory of a state of emergency which also preserves forgotten virtues like deceleration and the spirit of discovery.

A film projection shows a woman sitting by the water. In “her back” is the shadow of a female figure who conjures radiant golden clouds of dots and balls of lines into the frame with her hands and is even able to blot it out. The magical trailer for the “Tricky Women” festival was made by manually editing the image and sound sequences recorded by Moïa Jobin-Paré when she was artist-in-residence in Vienna.

Over the course of a season, the film follows the many manual operations behind the façade of a “carefree” beach holiday. A seaside resort, artificially constructed on Italy’s Adriatic coast, is the setting of this stoically surrealist observation. In the hotels’ canteen kitchens, meals are prepared without pause; sun loungers and umbrellas are put up in endless rows on the beach, illuminated letters polished to perfection. The holiday production workers are busy around the clock, tirelessly working in the name of the ultimate diversion. The goal: The guests are to regenerate in the best possible way and waste no thought on the conditions behind the scenes.

Even if everything here seems to revolve around the best time of the year, there is an obvious contradiction at the centre of the film. We see people whose job it is to amuse those who in turn are trying to recover from their jobs. An absurd undertaking, sure. The images of a demonstration for better working conditions disturb the perfect machinery only briefly. Rather, the march of this nameless army of employees looks like a staged and well-controlled break from a never-ending cycle. For if they do not do it, dozens of others are already standing by to secure a meagre income in the giant business of tourism.

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.