The chalk chases the shadow. Once it is captured, only traces of the game remain. Drawing, erasing, drawing again on a porous surface. Like on a sloppily wiped blackboard, shades of images that have long ceased to exist shine through. Špela Čadež stages a race between fleeting and manifest forms that – at least in terms of film theory – knows no winner.

The self-taught nature filmmaker Ingeborg Tölke uses quotes from literary encounters with the flora and fauna of the moor in a gentle approach to this landscape. With great empathy, she uncovers the often all-too-hastily overlooked beauties and cruelties of the place, using time-lapse and macro techniques. Her debut work, which was also amazing in terms of film craft, won several awards.

Some light relief in the form of a snappy dance number! In colourful rotoscoping, in movement sequences drawn frame by frame, the figures whirl across the screen. Students of the TecnoCampus in Mataró near Barcelona created this short film as a joint project. One can see the fun they had in the process in every scene. Let’s just join the dance!

Julie lost her parents when she was still very young. Now she is 13 and has long since settled in her new home, with a family who loves her. Over the years she has managed to accept her fate. “Light” follows Julie for a while and shows a girl who, despite immeasurable loss, faces the world with her arms wide open.

Misty-eyed and nostalgic, this film takes us into the past. The accomplished illustrator Milanka Fabjančič uses sepia and pastel-coloured drawings to bring to life the miraculous story of the industrious and meek factory worker Liliana. Every night she takes off a shining necklace, every morning she puts it back on. During the day, the secret of her meekness remains hidden in her heart.

Louise the crocodile lives in a pretty flat in the city. The elevated train rattles, the coffee hisses on the stove and the walk takes her to a green park. But what is this? When Louise sneezes, all the colours fade away one by one! The crocodile also seems to lose her mind, because suddenly Louise can’t do the simplest tasks. Who can help her?

“Imagine this camera is your mother”, a father tells his daughter. In the 1990s, scores of families from the Republic of Moldova began a ritualised mail exchange between the mothers, who had emigrated for economic reasons, and their relatives back home. The former sent money and goods; the latter sent videotapes. These amateur recordings are the material of this film. They testify to the painful gaps the absent persons left in the lives of those who stayed behind.

Migration is a big factor in post-socialist states buffeted by recession and inflation after the end of the Soviet Union – and in this case, also by the civil war over Transnistria. According to data from 2011/2012, about a third of Moldovan children had one parent abroad. In this small country between Romania and the Ukraine, too, a higher percentage of fathers choose work migration. Otilia Babara, however, is specifically interested in the consequences of long absent mothers, who work for nursing services in Italy, for example, to earn their family’s livelihood, and who express their love through care packages. The loss of connection to their mother – all of whom stay out of the frame –, which affects girls in particular, emerges in the cracks of the staged home videos, when wandering glances reveal that the children no longer believe in their return.

A pain in the heart, never-drying tears and turned heads are hard to treat, but fortunately not incurable. In X-ray images and tissue samples, on examination couches and in waiting rooms, always under medical supervision, Špela Čadež’s puppet animation studies the difficult-to-diagnose lovesickness. An animated physiological case study.

As a pioneer of Neo-Andean architecture, Freddy Mamani Silvestre attracts attention far beyond the borders of Bolivia. His non-conformist designs are influenced by the culture of the Aymara, the biggest ethnical group in the country, echoing their myths and patterns. Buildings constructed between 2008 and 2021 are circled, inspected and captured, in part 35 of the ongoing series “Photography and beyond”.

Like giant jewels, the Cholets rise into the sky above the Bolivian city of El Alto, at 4,000 metres above sea level. Cholets, a neologism created from chalet and Cholo, the local term for indigenous people, are the creations of architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre, born in 1971. Several dozen buildings designed by him adorn the otherwise fairly unglamorous city otherwise mainly dominated by raw red brick. Mamani’s built fantasies, on the other hand, are striking, arrogant and bold. Snakes seem to be slithering up their facades, scattered diamonds cling to the glazing and occasionally the whole thing is crowned by a stand-alone residential building. But the Cholets are mainly used for festivities, because they house the so-called “salones de eventos”. Emigholz unlocks psychoactive places that evoke the interior of pinball machines and, in their confident splendour, triumph over the richer neighbouring city of La Paz.

Lukas Marxt’s fourth film about the Salton Sea in Southern California focuses on 1944/45, when about 150 dummies, replicas of the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were dropped there for ballistic tests. “Marine Target” measures the remains of the wooden target platforms from up close and high above. The disconcerting soundtrack to this fascinating filmic study is provided by a swelling adaptation of the Nigerian hit “Atomic Bomb” by William Onyeabor.

Daily life at the tailor’s shop is so tumultuous that sometimes you need to cheat a little to cope. Imagination and spontaneity will not always be enough. When the tailer feels unobserved, he tends to let his brain do all the work. But what happens when love enters the scene and thoughts get out of control?

For his monumental study of displacement, Nikolaus Geyrhalter has travelled across continents, mapping a new kind of landscape that has become detached from geographical or climatic conditions under palm trees, on mountains, at rivers, in the snow. Washed up, blown in, piled up, caught or left somewhere – where once the forces of nature were at work, garbage now dominates the shape of things. It has even brought forth a new social type: the relocator.

As in all his films, Nikolaus Geyrhalter operates the camera himself. It stands still, often for minutes, as if it couldn’t believe what presents itself: plastic webs seemingly grown together with the scrawny branches on embankments, decaying newspapers and cocoa powder packaging in the excavated soil of a potato field in Switzerland, beaches seamed at the waterline by a carpet of Styrofoam and plastic containers. In equally delicately composed images, the filmmaker focuses on the machines and people who work away at these garbage landscapes. They excavate and compact, collect and sort, sweep and rake, move one thing this way and the other that way with grapplers or hands. Well-formed and without comment, the inner workings of a self-sustaining system are revealed in which a process of alienation is underway that causes problem and solution to drift apart.

The mocking transvestite, the raging dog, the prophetic clown and the little girl are united inside the desperate protagonist. The longing to break free rises forcefully – like a pistol pressed against his chest. In humorous metaphors, Hakhyun Kim takes a crisis of disorientation to extremes, while his extraordinary stylistics lend it poetic dignity.

Dance is primarily physical. Smell, warmth, touch – “Meat Joy” presents their essence, set to a collage of ambiguous pop songs. Carolee Schneemann lets us experience from up close the unrestrained celebration of a physical, lubricious, erotic performance improvisation, using framing, montage and a visual aesthetic reminiscent of painting to dissolve the body shapes.

Cristobal, a young fisherman at work outside the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, shares his insights: Fishing is harder than working out. Also, he and the sea are connected by a progressing disease. At night he perceives what can only be grasped from the boat: the chemicals flowing into the water, the smell, the red lights of the steel mill. “Men of Salt” tells of a dilemma: What if you identify with an ecosystem that’s ceaselessly being abused?

The black circle becomes a round creature, becomes a worm, becomes a whale, becomes a swimmer, becomes a little deer. Coloured shapes playfully flow in and out of each other and transform. But before you can get dizzy, the little deer winks and runs away. A film that shows that everything is made up of many parts and that ultimately, we are all connected.