Birdsong and meandering lines, sometimes solo, sometimes as a swarm movement. In their midst a park landscape, a staircase, and a man with a dog seem to emerge fleetingly. In Robert Breer’s minimalist drawn animation, the abstract and the figurative briefly overlap, then fall apart again. The permanent change of the forms follows the pulse rate of the birdsong recorded in nature.

In the mythology of the Kikuyu community the Mugumo, the Kenyan fig tree, represents transformation and rebirth. This multiplayer VR experience invites us to witness a sacred ritual: Dancing around the Mugumo can turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man. We follow Waicici, a genderless person, in the quest for the most honest version of themselves.

The Whitney brothers are pioneers of abstract animation. In 1943/1944, they experimented in five film exercises with modernist form and a device of their own that wrote directly on the soundtrack of the film by means of an impact pendulum. The resulting analogue electronic bleeps and bits are accompanied by moving stencils in constantly alternating coloured backlight whose shadows change their geometrical shape.

A visual artist all her life, Luchita Hurtado only reluctantly experienced her breakthrough at the age of 97. “Green Turns Brown” is a minimalist eulogy to the publicity-shy painter. Shot on Super 8 film stock during the last months of her life, this film, which revels in autumn colours, paints the portrait of a woman in tune with nature who sees death not as the end but as the crossing of a border. “Life goes on.”

A washing machine less ordinary: The electronic music duo Matmos probes the music making capabilities of the “Ultimate Care II” by Whirlpool and weaves the sounds of its housing, laundry cycle and switches into a beat. Using animation, optical effects and advertising film quotes from the time when fully automatic machines had their breakthrough, a lively piece of music video is created that makes us forget all our laundry worries.

A background study of a dying amusement culture, filmed in slovenly dressing rooms in front of badly polished make-up mirrors. – Director Yoichiro Okutani follows the Odoriko, the Japanese strippers, through their daily routine between dressing and undressing, between pragmatic approaches to life and eroticism made fit for the stage. Okutani’s cut begins naked: A nude woman descends a staircase, filmed not to advantage but with the brutal ordinariness of routine. One production year and five minutes lie between this – Okutani’s – director’s cut and Mary Stephen’s editor’s cut “Nude at Heart”. But how much more?

The Sand Creek Massacre on 29 November 1864: More than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho were murdered by the U.S. Cavalry. Ignorant hand-downs from the past and the omnipresence of statues glorifying murderers are juxtaposed with an empty museum of indigenous history for which there is no funding. This film against forgetting by a white female director also examines its own position: she talks frankly with descendants of the survivors – many of whom are choosing a scientific approach to history.

In spring 2017, authorities in China’s Xinjiang region, without any legal basis, began detaining thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in so-called re-education camps. This animated 360° film reconstructs the memories of three men who had to endure political indoctrination, torture and solitary confinement.

Chivas DeVinck works his way up from the soil to the stars to find out what constitutes Nevada outside of Las Vegas. Milieus, places and people are intertwined in a collage. The magnetic core of the whole is the subterranean water from which everything seems to grow and for which everyone strives. What looks like an arid desert landscape or a sleepy little town from afar, turns out on closer inspection to be an atmospheric representation of the rural U.S.

Just before the COVID pandemic brought the whole world to a standstill, DeVinck captures the curious, the mundane and the harrowing in White Pine County in eastern Nevada. There are well-nigh endless community meetings about dog-keeping issues, and farmers who talk to their Peruvian shepherds in appalling Spanglish. There are droning radio shows nobody may listen to anyway, and special church services for sex workers. But people are also preoccupied with explosive political issues: the distribution of water supplies in the arid region, the thirty-year dispute over the construction of a water pipeline to Las Vegas, the continuing discrimination against the indigenous people. Resonating in all this is the myth of the US concept of freedom, manifesting itself in gun possession, the idea of every man for himself and an unwavering faith in the healing powers of capitalism.

In her light-footed film miniature, Zaina Bseiso links the disappearance of the last orange grove from the suburbs of Los Angeles with the fate of the Jaffa orange, a native fruit of Palestine. When she engages her father in a conversation regarding this content and artistic concept, it turns into a discussion about how a good documentary can approach reality and why – with all due respect for realism – we must never underestimate the power of illusion.