The flowing movement of a mountain landscape shrouded in orange fog is disturbed. The regular wafting stops, the landscape structures crumble. The atmospheric sound becomes a shrill screech. “For Tashi” describes the physical and emotional turmoil of a woman after the loss of her unborn child, seeking resonance with the viewers, hoping for comfort.

A couple of filmmakers – she produces, he directs – are trying hard to assemble the autobiography of the woman, Caroline. A long time ago the man, Frank, won an Oscar for the adaptation of his own life on film. Now he just wants to help Caroline a little, but of course have a say in things, too. Caroline isn’t exactly enthusiastic.

In mathematics, a function describes the relationship between two sets that assigns to each element of one set exactly one element of the other. The term function in general defines the purpose for which something exists. This film is a rhythmic examination of abstract organic and inorganic processes, embodied by oscillating shapes in intense colours.

Biology lesson. On one side the teacher in the light of the entomology projection, on the other the classroom in semi-darkness. Attention is slackening. Adolescent daydreaming: The boy at the desk in front is actually quite cute. The fingers want to run off. Still, rather touch only oneself at first. But then there is a spark …

Having a crush, what a beautiful and intense, but equally fleeting and sobering moment. Eyes, nose, ear, mouth and hands go on their first physical explorations, breathtaking, deviant or repulsive. Zhen Li observes with microscopic precision and magnificently captures this exceptional state of mind with different animation techniques. Charcoal drawings with smeared marks, furry waves of mould, intricately animated bodies and buzzing, sticky sounds circumscribe the sensual surge.

The rising sun reveals a gruesome crime. In the orange-red dawn, between the dunes and the rippling sea, a young woman is strangled to death. The victim’s neck is marked by the deep imprints of her murderer’s hands. The mother’s moving dirge – based on a poem by Percy Shelley – accompanies us as her daughter Ginevra is laid out and resurrects.

How are art and social reality connected? How can art respond to the horrors that happen in this world every day? At what point does art become political, at what point corrupted by the market? Leon Golub (1922–2004) works on huge canvases in his New York studio, uses press photos as models, distils gestures from them, applies paint, removes it, scrapes free what was hidden. The process has a violent side – like the martial motifs of his works. They show shootings, tortures or grotesque figures that enjoy their inhuman acts. These are motifs usually unearthed by investigative journalism in times of war. Now they are hung in an exhibition room supposedly free from the banal – and shock the viewer.

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.”

“Which side are you on?” sings Florence Reece, an icon of the miners’ movement in Harlan County, Kentucky, with a brittle voice into the microphone at a union rally. Barbara Kopple’s long-term observation of the 1973 Brookside strike might even be called a music film. Because aside from Reece’s classic strike anthem, song and speech, folklore and politics, rhythms of speaking and editing are combined throughout: a successful attempt at partisanship that appeals to all the senses, where slogans are absent – or put into song. “Harlan County, USA” was presented in a special screening at the Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche in autumn 1977, its fame having preceded it: It had already won the Oscar for Best Documentary Film in April of that year.

Memories of a loved one: The camera explores the dark confines of a flat. Light is still burning in the kitchen; objects are scattered haphazardly on the living room tables. The eyes follow into the labyrinthine self, now turned into space, of a once familiar and now absent person. The narrator’s voice begins by asserting that everything in this place is true. It “shows” the places where the remembered person learned to crochet and where she shelled peas.
The narrative remains factual, but a gap begins to open. Ghost-like apparitions intrude in the old video images, phantom voices populate the noise-like echo sounds. Just like the crocheting and the peas, a naked murderer and other unpleasant shadows are part of the house inspected here. As things progress, individual threads are spun together to form the symbolic crocheted doily of a home. Incredibly poetic and very personal, Ayden Lamb’s “Haunted House” brings to life on film a person who during their lifetime was present – had to be present – in two worlds.

This experimental animation shows the enigmatic shapes and colours of cultured crystals. Their production, once an indispensable basic process of material science and research, has lost its scientific usefulness today. But the beauty of the resulting objects has no expiry date. Enlarged, sorted and arranged, the crystals become art.

To put it bluntly, one could say that most of de Antonio’s films are courtroom dramas. In this sense, “In the King of Prussia” is typical – and at the same time unusual, starting with the title. King of Prussia is a small town in Pennsylvania which became the scene of an action by radical Christian pacifists in September 1980. They broke into a factory where, unbeknownst to the public, parts of the nuclear missile Mark 12A were produced, and held a happening inspired by the Sermon on the Mount and Fluxus. The film is a re-enactment, but not of the action, rather of the trial against the so-called Plowshares Eight. In de Antonio’s first video production, shot in the trial breaks, the defendants played themselves. The role of the judge was played by New Hollywood star Martin Sheen.

Highly focused groups of humans move through nature. It is night and they are listening. Or it is midday and they are counting. Sometimes they carry antennas on their backs and roam meadows at the edge of the forest. They are the witnesses of the so-called sixth extinction, the people who document the disappearance of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Marianna Milhorat approaches them with patience, spending a long time with women who discuss the intensity of the croaking of frogs, while the roar of the streets can be heard in the background. Others report on the “sea star wasting disease”, a mysterious illness that turns starfish into a whitish mush.
“Just Above the Surface of the Earth” leaves little room for hope, but at the same time puts its faith in the indefatigable individuals who have at least decided not to close their eyes. It is to them that Milhorat dedicates this experimental portrait, sophisticated on all cinematic levels. For it is not only bats that flutter through the film, but also thoughts: by Cormac McCarthy, William Golding, Martin Heidegger, or about the mythical river of the dead, Styx. The score, composed by Brian Kirkbride, translates the various microcosms into immersive sound art, giving us access to a world that we often inhabit as if blind and deaf.

To the sweeping sound of a sitar, thousands and thousands of dots orbit a kaleidoscopic centre, like the individual notes of a raga circle the keynote. Repeated graphic patterns blossom and crumble back into the mass. As traditional as the reference points for James Whitney's breathtaking visual music were, the realisation with early computer animation by his brother John Whitney was just as innovative.

Spurred by an extremely convincing young man with an American accent, the spirits of the dead rise from their graves in a Mexican cemetery and set out to cross the wall to the United States. This ghost story from 1994 gives us goosebumps with its topicality and enchants with its wit, shimmering colours and vibrant shapes.

Wang Xilin does not enter the stage in a suite, as the title might suggest, but completely naked. He stretches and bends, appears to familiarise himself with his surroundings, does some vocal exercises, sits down at the piano. Wang Xilin is one of China’s most important composers of contemporary music, having written his first symphonies in his youth. Wang Bing gives the 86-year-old more than a little space. For his portrait, he presents him with the entire Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

This is where Wang Xilin reviews his life of torture and oppression, recapitulates the tribulations in communist China, reports knocked-out teeth and nightmares, suicides among intellectuals. His testimony is frequently underlaid, sometimes even drowned out by grandiose musical arrangements. When an orchestra thunders from offscreen, Wang Xilin’s body rears up – “Man in Black” is also an exorcistic oral history. The composer turns himself into his own instrument, into the medium of a violent epoch, sharing his emotions literally unveiled.

A macabre Italian children’s song tells the story of Mario, a soldier who returns from war and must learn that his girlfriend has left him for another man. Mario decides to kill her. The film picks up on the ambivalent mood of the song and reinforces its vibration in the space between blithe children’s game and brutal murder.