In a northern German attic: boxes of pinned butterflies, carefully hand-coloured photographs of the local flora and fauna, hundreds of stuffed and dusty birds – Jürgen Friedrich Mahrt (1882–1940) did a great job. His collections echo a present that doesn’t exist anymore. And yet all signs of an ecological crisis can be found buried in them.

Dead or alive? There is an uncanny element in Jürgen Friedrich Mahrt’s photos: One can’t always be sure whether the animal captured in the frame is the result of hours of waiting or just a specimen staged to look lifelike. The ripples around the duck on the pond are missing, the bird of prey looks suspiciously calm directly into the lens. Mahrt crossed borders. He sacrificed his duties as a farmer to the urge to document natural environments we hardly find in nature today. Ancient forests, enchanted moors, macro views of fat, colourful caterpillars – almost magical images that make one sad in view of a variety irretrievably lost. His great-granddaughter Sönje Storm has the quiet eccentric’s estate analysed by experts, shows peat cutters, extinct species and a changing countryside. An exceedingly stimulating excursion, congenially accompanied by the scurrilous electronica sounds of Dominik Eulberg and Bertram Denzel.

Accompanying Liselotte Schließer, who worked full time as a technical draughtswoman, in her private and professional daily life. She talks about the passion that became her second mission in life. The only woman in organised amateur filmmaking for many years and now head of the amateur filmmakers’ association of Radebeul, she still misses female directors and camera people.

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.

The semi-autobiographical account of a European plantation manager on Sumatra during Dutch colonial rule becomes a starting point for reflections on the structure of the plantation itself. An essay about local tobacco and rubber cultivation, the construction of skin colour as a social category and the "tropic fever” which rises slowly but inexorably, edited from archive material dating from 1890 to 1930.

Very few films have made use of the extensive material shot by the colonists in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Those who took up the task, like “Mother Dao” or recently “They Call Me Babu”, did so from a Dutch perspective. “Tropic Fever” is the first feature-length film from Indonesia that appropriates that stock, using photos, documentary silent film footage, home movies and feature films as well as development plans from the archives of the former colonial power, along with the report of a Hungarian who managed a plantation on Sumatra in the 1920s. Mahardika Yudha, Robin Hartanto Honggare and Perdana Roswaldy impressively demonstrate how forests and swamps turned into rigidly organised agricultural areas and how the plantation and its structure became the foundation of the colonial project as such. Suddenly the assumption that “tropic fever” arises from the heat seems doubtful.