The inhabitants of a village witness an unusual event. The religious figures that surround them come alive and leave their accustomed places. The statues step down from shrines and niches, from altars and pedestals. They turn their backs on the village. Nobody knows where they are heading and why they are departing.

Most of the people are frozen in religious adoration, but some of them overpower a statue of the Virgin Mary and smash it on the ground. The fragments of the broken statue, however, live on, and are still heading away. A young girl – born boneless and unable to move without help – manages to make contact with one of the departing statues.

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.

We are exposed to evaluations every day. The norm by which they are made is usually out of our hands. This VR experience creates a field of tension between arbitrariness and control, power and impotence, diversity and uniformity. A circle of 16 real objects marks the entrance to a virtual process of evaluation in which 16 giant grey statues examine us.

These fucking doubts! And isn’t a 100-kilo massif of a man who recites tender poetry on stage a contradiction in terms anyway? He almost fell silent. But then he defeated the booming silence and made his own fears the subject of his slam poetry performances. One small step for mankind, one big leap for a shy giant.

“No freedom without dwarves!” What form of oppositional logic can take hold when nothing is logical anymore? “The Orange Alternative” has answers. When living conditions in communism reach the threshold of the surreal, the protest movement that sprang from student circles decides to subvert the order of the regime by Dadaist artistic interventions.

The Bytom area was once known for its coal mines, but structural change has caught up with it, too. The decline of the region is vividly demonstrated by the pawnshop of the Silesian city. Probably the biggest of its kind in Poland, the shop has seen better days. Jola and Wiesiek, the idiosyncratic operators, are each trying in their own way to cope with the crisis and revive business.

The closing of the mines and the resulting unemployment in Bytom left behind all those who were unable to adapt to the new age. In the huge hall, they put increasingly absurd and worthless objects on the counter. The once lucrative trade in jewellery, electric devices and furniture has dwindled and however hard the employees work, the till stays empty. The wiring is unsound, nerves are raw and the tone between them gets rougher. Before they know it, the small business has turned into a kind of counselling centre: drying tears, ladling out soup and giving away goods instead of selling them. Jola in her voluminous fur coat always has an open ear and a warm blanket ready. Wiesiek devises one marketing scheme after the other. But will it be enough to save their business? A documentary report from the “Polish Detroit”, observed with delicacy and pitch-black humour.

Our heroine’s previous film was invited to multiple festivals and awarded a number of prizes. Maybe the success went to her head a little. She was so busy working that she spent four years without a single day off. Now she sits in her parents’ garage and works on her graduation film. Its heroine is the animation film student Julita who is working on her graduation film. An affectionate film-in-film puppet animation with a surprising end.

According to mythology, Prometheus was bound to the rocks of Mount Kazbek, more than 5,000 metres high and covered in ice. For Vakho, this mountainous region in the Georgian Caucasus is a self-chosen exile – out of deeply felt guilt. 48 years ago, he lost his brother in tragic circumstances that had previously come to him in a dream: “I couldn’t let go of the past”, the man, now in his eighties, explains in this visually impressive debut short film portrait.

Poznań, June 1956: For a long time, the “forgotten uprising” in which dozens of people lost their lives was a taboo in Poland. It was only in the mid-1980s, in a period of liberalisation, that Marek Drążewski could make this astonishingly frank review, in which he condenses the dramatic events using private photos, footage and memories of contemporary witnesses.

Imagine the last day of your life has dawned. What will stand up to review? What brings contentment? What brings regrets? “Vika!” is a film about the value of life and self-discovery, inspiring us to reflect on one’s chosen path and its forks and to stay true to oneself.

Vika, the 84-year-old main protagonist, a mother and grandmother several times over, looks back on a difficult childhood and many years of working in a “proper” job. When she retired, she seized the opportunity to reinvent herself. She became a DJ and star of the Warsaw nightclubs, who regularly drives her young audience wild. Super cool? Inappropriate for an elderly lady? Agnieszka Zwiefka’s portrait deconstructs the borders between the “acceptable” and “unacceptable” roles of a woman who refuses to acknowledge her age. Vika wants to live in the moment, with no ties to the past. Zwiefka combines elements of music and narrative documentary films and creates an enchanting, immediately accessible and utopian world. Dancing to Vika’s rhythms means freeing yourself from the limitations dictated by society, age and sometimes even one’s own children.

The letters Halina receives from Farouk in the late 1970s are as haunting as they are hopeful. They have a long journey between them: from Iraq to Poland. But at some point the contact breaks off, and the reasons remain a secret. Their son Adam manages to build a bridge. And the latter’s son, Ignacy, tells the story from his perspective. It’s a delicate visual treatment behind which complicated fates are hidden.

Ten years after the bloody suppression of the workers’ uprisings, the dead are commemorated in front of the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980. The memorial service conceived by Andrzej Wajda could only be documented after sustained pressure. The resulting montage, which links images of the event with emotional reports by contemporary witnesses, was never supposed to be.

Going under or a lonely island life – there is not exactly a surfeit of options in this Polish village by the sea. The community functions, but social intercourse is rough, alcohol present. Archaic-seeming rituals and social patterns are handed down from the old to the young men. Winter envelops the village in white silence which every now and then betrays its deceptive appearance in small things. At midnight on Christmas Eve the voices of the dead and tortured souls ring out. Anka lives in the middle of this. The young woman takes hits, gets up, struggles through with her love of Jesus.

“Zima” portrays a state of suspension with occasional rollercoaster rides and builds up to tremendous emotional power. Colours are rare in the black and white drawings of the winter landscape and the dark houses, but when they appear, they lend great intensity to the events. Scenes of daily routines and village life are associatively interwoven both on the sound and graphic level. They burst with excess and expressive design, transforming into mystical dream images.