In the Swedish town of Gullspång, Kari and May meet a woman who looks exactly like their sister Lita who died more than 30 years ago. No coincidence: Olaug was born on the same day as Lita in the rural north of Norway; a DNA test confirms that the two were born as twin sisters. The happy reunion with Kari, May and the rest of the family, though, soon shows the first cracks. At the age of 80, Olaug’s identity is shattered. Why did her parents give her away? Will she fit in with her new, deeply religious kin? She does not believe in divine revelations. Instead, she is haunted by Lita’s alleged suicide – and indeed her investigative research raises questions about the circumstances of that death.

At least at one point in the film, director Maria Fredriksson is audibly dumbfounded behind the camera. What starts as a feel-good film becomes a character study of identity, then a kind of true-crime and finally a mystery story. The direction takes it up a notch, sometimes to dramatic, sometimes to quite funny effect: The perfectly lighted country houses with portrait photos on the walls and the ironically suggestive use of music are reminiscent of “Twin Peaks.” Sometimes life writes the crazier plot twists.

Two siblings are sitting peacefully at a table and drawing. There is a swimming hedgehog in the sister’s picture. The brother wonders whether this would work in real life. He goes into the garden, grabs a hedgehog and throws him into the pool to test this. Not funny at all, thinks the hedgehog. But before he scurries back to his pile of leaves, he comes up with a wet surprise …

In the passing busses and trams, people look out of the windows in disbelief. The reverse shot shows a crowd of protesters. Two dozen people perhaps, some holding signs, one shouting “Putin behind bars!” It is a symbolic image of the pathetic state of the Russian opposition. The year is 2017, the war of aggression against Ukraine is still to come. Over a period of several years, “The Last Relic” portrays people from different opposition groups: a student from the Marxist-Leninist “Left Block,” a teacher with sympathies for Navalny; a digger driver demands the redistribution of resources. These activists lack support, but not courage. One of them has just been released from prison and survived a hunger strike. The others must expect to be prosecuted at any moment.

The setting of this film is the Ural metropolis of Yekaterinburg. The bulk of the population, an insert announces, dreams of a “return to imperial glory.” Estonian director Marianna Kaat, born in 1965, has spent a considerable part of her life in the Soviet empire. She shows the majority society as a uniform crowd at military parades, contrasting it with the individuals of the opposition. Few films offer such insights into the latter’s continuing precarious situation.

A pop art-punk-psychedelic trip into the life and rich fantasy world of a young 1970s London housewife. Marcia is mesmerised by the astonishing mountain of folds in the bedclothes where the tiny, almost invisible tribe of the mites lives, and drawn into a conversation with the ghost of dirt. But stop, her zeitgeisty-feminist friends are coming over for morning coffee.

Welcome to real life, little mole! Incited by a television report, the comfortable coexistence of the gardener and the builder of mounds is threatened, and not just that, so is the mole’s cosy home underground. Rarely did the colourful Czech animation series for children show such a serious and brutal fight for existence.

Without a working memory, the former sailor Jimmie is unmoored in time. Fragments of his former life and his younger self appear like islands on the horizon, glide by, disappear in the depths. The older Jimmie does not recognise himself and is frightened by the “strangers.” He gets lost in space and sinks into the empty background.

Traumas have often inspired filmmakers to contrast a documentary narrative with visual alienations. Asmae El Moudir chooses the form of a doll-populated miniature of the Casablanca neighbourhood where she grew up. In 1981, before she was born, a massacre took place there. The police and the Moroccan king’s military forces shot hundreds of participants of the so-called bread riots, who were protesting against continuously rising food prices. The detailed small-scale models – El Moudir’s father, a bricklayer, built the big versions with stone and cement! – may illustrate the events, but they also mark the distance to a history that lacks images and has long been concealed in Morocco.

The lack of images is mirrored in the family context. Why are there no childhood photos of her, the director wonders. Why does her mother finally present her with a single picture which, however, shows another girl? This film, cleverly constructed in every respect, finally gathers the family members around the miniatures of their neighbourhood. The constellation does not promise a collective truth, but, at least, a dispute of memories.

“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.

A series of tuba thefts that occurred ten years ago at Californian schools is the starting point of a multilayered and entertaining reflection about sounds and music, how they are represented in images and described in words. The artist Alison O’Daniel tells the story from the perspective of Deaf people; her film resembles a musical composition that varies its material in several movements.

In one sequence we hear the swelling drone of a passenger plane flying at low altitude over a residential area and gradually drowning out the sounds of the wind before we first see its shadow glide over the houses and at last the source of the noise. The subtitles, an integral part of this film, not only describe the sounds in amazing precision but also quantify their acoustic pressure in decibels.

Alternating between passages with and without sound motivates us to be more differentiated, focused, targeted in our perception. The film revolves around the motifs of hearing, sounds, noise pollution more than around the narrative of the mysteriously vanished tubas, more even than around the impressive protagonist Nyeisha “Nyke” Prince who plays a Deaf drummer in “The Tuba Thieves.” The tuba thefts are first and foremost a metaphor: What does the lack of a specific sound do to our perception?

Before photography and film were invented and constructed the “Wild West”, the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis, whose travels made the westwards expansion of the still young USA possible, died under mysterious circumstances. The present-day narrator of this film, a distant descendant, portrays him as the tragic hero of a speculative gay love story. The potential lover, Meriwether’s “Louisiana Creole” servant John Pernia, is historically documented. But the archive material, which favoured the white folklore of the so-called age of pioneers, lays no trail to this romance.

Ben Young wilds the early Western imagery and queers the nationalist historiography from the perspective of people who are missing in the tales of glory and whose originally free space was occupied by the settler movement and its subsequent legend formation. He uses associative montage and gossip to rehabilitate John and Meriwether, the undocumented romantic couple, as the real pioneers. And they have a score to settle with the U.S.

The Wall as a symbol. While the deadly border has already been overcome in Berlin, freedom must still be fought for in other states. A piece of the Wall was sent to Riga in 1990 – as a gesture of solidarity. A short cinematic essay in which people’s looks waver between hope and uncertainty.

A diver encounters an injured whale. He decides to help the animal and gets a friendly look of thanks. For the space of a few seconds, the border between the two species seems permeable. The whale disappears in the depths of the ocean and leaves the diver wondering whether this was all just a projection of human hopes.

Authentic and symbolic descendants of the Canadian Indigenous community lead us to a place where past and present intertwine. Two Indigenous men reveal their disturbing physical experiences with systemic racism. Their reports break taboos. And they implore us to carry the knowledge, grief and anger into the world like raging buffalos! Join up!

In 2002, the filmmaker moved into an apartment on the 15th floor of a Kyiv high-rise. She was twelve at the time. Today, from the safe distance of another country, she talks to people who remember the flat and the time spent together. Coming-of-Age, the love of cinema, a sense of community and the erotic charge of individual moments combine to create an image of missing home and intimacy. With every memory, we zoom a little out of the still image on screen: three windows facing southwest, a balcony facing southeast, a rooftop protected from view, a high-rise panorama. The warm and personal gaze at the sky and houses of Kyiv is mirrored in the cold attentiveness of international war reporting.

Following in the footsteps of the Hamburg film director Hans Schomburgk who travelled through the German colony of Togo from Lomé to the north with his companion and actress Meg Gehrts in 1913, Jürgen Ellinghaus screens the footage shot then at its locations in modern-day Togo. Schomburgk’s affirmative images show slave labour, humiliation and the arrogance of the colonial power. The material is contrasted by Gehrts’ romanticising diary entries and other colonial reports which often testify to a horrifying coldness.

The screenings of this material, which has never been shown in Togo before, prompt the audiences to reflect on tradition, stereotypes, the “white gaze.” In the villages, the colonial images conjure up memories of handed down stories. In the metropolis of Lomé, young film enthusiasts deplore that these images were kept from them until today and discuss in which contexts they should be screened. But “Togoland Projections” not only shows how much these painful documents and texts are needed in contemporary Togo, because they are part of the country’s history. The film also demonstrates that they are needed in Germany so we can take responsibility for our suppressed history and face our own racism – past and present.

A shimmering shoal of herrings are swimming through the wide ocean when they are suddenly broken up by seagulls. Separated from the shoal, a small herring ends up all alone in a tidal pool. Looking for a way out, he encounters many other marine creatures. Some scare him. But there’s no time for this now: Only by joining forces can they defend themselves against the hungry seagulls.