A nostalgic trip into a past when buying a car constituted a lifetime’s work – especially for those Europeans who had a maximum of two handful of brands at their disposal. This cheerfully edited collection of auto biographies from socialist production evokes seemingly carefree times when the motorized vehicle was allowed to be simply a status symbol: free from ideological turf wars revolving around the climate crisis and mobility diets.

From Russia via Bulgaria and the Czech Republic to Germany and Norway, love stories between humans and Trabi, Moskvitch and Volga are captured on film. We meet protagonists who are fond of their beloved piece of tin, then or now, or have even amassed a considerable collection. There’s a couple who met and fell in love at a retro car exhibition and still drive the same model today. We meet a sexton who passes on his official car after 32 years of use. We make the acquaintance of a pin-up who always poses in front of vintage cars from the East. They all have a soft spot for these rickety rust buckets, because even though the products of the socialist car industry were usually slow, chunky, tedious to drive and to repair, they were all regarded as showpieces of a successful life. And there was one in almost every family: coveted, long longed-for, assiduously polished.

Photographs are dusted, records cleaned, insects removed from books and everything is digitized for eternity. The matter-of-fact shots of fastidious archival work, though, are combined with the voice of a young woman who reports on the collapse of civilization, the fragile artefacts of which she secures as the last human being left in the “Congress”. In the field of tension between image and sound a space for our imagination opens up.

The archived testimonies of “Breaking the Silence”, an association of military veterans, are to be turned into a compilation of “service incidents” in the Israeli-occupied territories. But Avi Mograbi confesses: “My films tend to get complicated, even when my intention is to make a very simple film.” His reaction to a complex doom is artistically and intellectually commensurate: complex. Once again he uses a built-in commentary function in which he himself, white-bearded, explains the tricky situation to his audience: not as a special “Israel-Palestine” case, but as the bitter standard application of the globally familiar aporetic model of “military occupation”.

A stuttering boy transforms an Iranian kitchen into a fantastic cosmos. The father’s body becomes a refrigerator, the mother's belly a washing machine whose spin cycle gives birth to a screaming baby. Even birds on tiles and detergents have a surprising life of their own. This exuberant animation, dotted with real-life elements – fried eggs, broken plates, chess pieces – develops a subtle wit, ironizing ingrained family patterns.

Fast drawn lines fidget, in the middle a girl on a bustling street crossing, just now holding her mother’s hand … and suddenly alone! But what did Mama say: If we lose each other, stay exactly where you are. It’s just that the car drivers are not amused at all. Now everyone has to help, even the Prime Minister himself.

The NGO “Breaking the Silence” – BtS for short – consists of veteran Israeli soldiers who, by collecting personal accounts of their memories, want to raise awareness of everyday military life and the treatment of the population in the Occupied Territories. Director Silvina Landsmann’s film allows us a look behind the scenes of a contested group with a controversial approach in the midst of a conflict that’s been smouldering for more than 70 years.

What makes a good soldier? The ability to execute orders without scruples, or the consideration of higher moral goals when dealing with the enemy? For many members of BtS, the latter was only possible after active military service. In their work, they engage with operations and acts that in retrospect seem wrong to them. They address the Israeli population and foreign media with videos, lectures and city tours. The streets of Hebron are the site of frequent clashes between BtS, Israeli settlers and the army. On the political level, too, the organisation is harshly criticized. They are accused of fabricating stories, damaging Israel’s reputation and playing into the hands of anti-Semites. Landsmann observes with a cinematic, sober eye how the group struggles internally and externally to find its voice.

Barely a kilometre off the Belgian coast, 35,000 tons of chemical munitions are buried at the bottom of the sea. The scraps of yesterday’s wars are secreting toxic gases today and the film explores the effects this will have – from fishing boats to delicatessen counters. An ominous droning lies over the impressive images of already dubious production processes. The shrimp end up in fish cakes. The seagulls lament the calamity. The people are at a loss.

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.

An abandoned amusement park offers a secret real-life retreat for young people in Casablanca. They escape their restrictive society digitally into the Internet to soak up international trends and amplify themselves. A camera floats through the tableaux vivants they have formed. Their eyes are frozen, the self-chosen poses seem undead.

Electromagnetic waves cannot be detected by our conventional sensorium, but are perceived as stressful by electro-sensitive persons, “like a substance pouring all over you”. Karl Lemieux and David Bryant translate this invisible, inaudible threat into decay damage to original 16mm film stock. Visual wounds, wrapped in subtle drone sounds.

At the end of the first Space Age wave, bird-like and bowler-hatted creatures enter the TV screen. The Shadoks and the Gibis live on distant two-dimensional planets. Jacques Rouxel’s absurdly funny, minimalist animated science fiction world of drawings is spiked with the electro-acoustic, cartoon-like, extra-terrestrial sounds of the composer Robert Cohen-Solal, well-versed in musique concrète.

A place in Ghent, watched by the flightless and garrulous pigeon Lukaku. Living in a particularly close relationship with its owner, Francesco D’Amico, he gains insights into the human grotesque. Director Annelein Pompe lets him talk, introduce us to the world of pigeon breeding and reveal the thoughts of a few persons who retain small, hidden refuges in the mundane daily business.

“I look behind things,” says Lukaku. Neck twisted so that he sees the world upside down, strange things are revealed. He guides us through a Flemish microcosm that tells of a honey shop as well as a kiosk. Usman, a Pakistani pigeon lover, works in the latter. He is his own boss, unlike the “Dutch good-for-nothing” of the honey shop who is harassed by surveillance cameras and must fear for his job. Annelein Pompe creates a modern fable that tells of people’s attachment to their ordinary existence – but also of those invisible moments when spirit and body drift apart, when dreams and poetry begin. Pompe intertwines this human talent for shadow work with the fascination for pigeons, which always return to their owners and yet live in freedom.

The Mexican island of Capaluco was once home to a flourishing holiday resort. Now it is deserted. The tides are chipping away at the ruins of the amusement park and hotel complex. Sensory explorations of the terrain meet tales of a mythical sea monster from the Philippines that ended up here. Beguiling science fiction in the mirror of post-humanist theory.

“Welcome to Capaluco, the only all-inclusive island in the world! A place where fun is guaranteed for the whole family,” echoes from the loudspeakers. Gaudy dolphin sculptures stare into space. A crumbling Nestlé emblem reminds us of the glory days of an out-of-date civilization. Miko Revereza and Carolina Fusilier stage their location as an in-between place where the past reverberates and the future pushes its way in. In the meticulous observation of formations and textures, architecture and nature begin to converge. Is that still the droning of a radio mast or is it the ocean? The two directors speculate from offscreen who will be next to make use of the relics of the human empire in the relay race of the species.

On a hot June day, the two friends Ádel and Berci are lying on a meadow, looking at the clouds. It’s the summer holidays and they are talking about everything that crosses their minds. Berci has a lot of imagination and is looking forward to the next school year. Ádel, on the other hand, is more anxious and worries. The clouds drift past, as fleeting as the summer.

Boys who from earliest childhood have sung in a choir have now entered puberty. They have to wait in the “Voice Break Choir” until their voices can be relied on again – in order to continue singing with the men. In interviews and impromptu songs, they describe personal changes and searches for identity. A film about the threshold between being a boy and becoming a man.

A Nazi propaganda film that survived only in fragments and never got to “test” its effect. It took intensive research to identify the scattered remains, correct the title in circulation, “Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt” (The Führer Gives a City to the Jews), and clarify who was able to see the roughly 90-minute attempted defraud at all before it disappeared. The intended international audience was no longer within reach in 1944/1945. But would they have been convinced by the retirement home for “resettled” Jews staged here? Kurt Gerron, film and theatre celebrity, interned in the Ghetto and conscripted as co-director, was deported to Auschwitz and gassed as late as 1944.