A life dedicated to decay. Johannes Weigelt (1890–1948) was a palaeontologist, a dilettante photographer, a Nazi, all of it fervent. This essay is dedicated to the pioneer of taphonomy – sober and at the same time exciting in form. Three image fields are filled with changing content: black and white documents of fields of animal carcasses, a snapshot with Göring, text panels, artful photomontages. They all charge one another, containing a vibrantly shimmering biography fossilised in images.

The peace of the superpowers is based on “mutual assured destruction”. States can annihilate each other completely with their arsenals. On 13 January 2018, 1.4 million people on Hawaii got a taste of this: A false missile alert text message brought their lives to a standstill that lasted 38 minutes, panic broke out and the nuclear threat suddenly became real.

When director Mickaël Bandela was six months old, his biological mother Gisèle, who lived in France, handed him over to his foster mother Marie-Thérèse, who cared for him for almost twenty years. Though he stayed in touch with Gisèle, visits were always irregular. Now Mickaël is 35 and about to found his own family. It could be the perfect moment to include Gisèle into his life as a grandmother. But she decides to return to her old Congolese home.

Mickaël tries to understand – the woman who gave birth to him, the woman he grew up with and himself. His autobiographical film turns into a fragmented search for the traces of memories of his own becoming. Some sequences show moments of extreme disorientation. A loss of balance while revolving around oneself, as one might assume? No, that’s precisely what does not happen to Mickaël Bandela. His work, which counteracts the lack of archive material with visual ingenuity and an idiosyncratic rhythm, is full of empathy. Not only does he shine a light on growing up unprivileged in the French province, he also allows us to understand the actions of both his “mamans” and reveals backgrounds. In addition, he achieves an elaborate analysis of (un)interchangeability: that of every individual, even the often sacrosanct-seeming figure of the mother.

Quartzsite, Arizona. A town in the middle of the desert which regularly turns into a huge camping ground where up to a million people from the northern US states escape winter. It’s less chilly here, and people of every kind are welcome to rent a plot of dry land for 180 dollars. Ryan Maxey joins them for three seasons in a row, approaching the motley community with an intimate and at the same time soberly observant eye.

Meth junkies, gun lovers, constitution keepers, a trans woman dressed in pink and breeding cuddly pets and white men wearing “Black Guns Matter” t-shirts. People trade everything and help each other. Sometimes it can get rough. But the US-American flag, the ever-present guns and collective prayer are part of life, just like the democratic choice between pancakes and hamburgers. Maxey’s documentary foray takes him through all these lives and lifestyles which he seems to register sometimes with affectionate tenderness, sometimes shaking his head. Despite his critical semi-distance, he is clearly a part of the community he portrays. His film, a collaborative work in some ways, combines shots of this place from different perspectives and different times. Ambivalences persist, which is why all judgement must be preliminary.

A ghostly voice sings about transience while the camera glides past closed curtains, capturing the expressive, lived-in face of a dozing Val Kilmer. Rick Alverson’s disconcerting stroboscopic video editing makes the dozing body twitch. The inner turmoil of a troubled soul and restless memories rise to the surface.

To promote the start of season five, Špela Čadež summarises the first four seasons of the legendary US comedy drama show for Netflix. From the streaming provider’s logo to the canteen food through to vomit – Čadež “unravels” her condensed version of the stories from the women’s prison in soft and scratchy wool, yellow as urine and red as blood.

The vast expanses of the Argentinian salt deserts hold one of the greatest lithium deposits in the world. International corporations are mining the “white gold”, robbing the indigenous groups who, since time immemorial, have bred llamas and lived on traditional salt-mining in this area, of precious ground water. In magnificent images and with a narrative approach that combines poetry and agitprop, “Oro Blanco” shows how the indigenous population are fighting against the exploitation and destruction of “pacha mama”. Their resistance needs some heightened awareness on the other side of the world, where lithium batteries are all too often regarded as the cure-all against the use of fossil fuels.

Shaking his head, Michele looks at the olives lying on the ground. Nobody collects them now. He once planted the olive trees. They were his pride and fed the family. Now he sits by the fireplace with his wife. Their hands show the years of hard field work. With a tender gaze, their grandson watches his grandparents cook, argue, take walks. Moving snapshots that coalesce into a life lived, a chronicle of the rural exodus in Italy.

A purely acoustic collage whose sounds seem by nature indefinable and yet somehow organic. They mesmerise us, occasionally make us shiver at some unknown thing. Gravity seems to be suspended. This piece needs no images, because they will intuitively materialise before our inner eye like thousands of hallucinations.

Corine Shawi’s father spends four years in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities in Beirut because of sudden paralysis – a time in which the state of emergency becomes routine and filming becomes a strategy: in search of the right balance of closeness and distance, in search of one’s own position in the structure. Shawi sets herself the task of documenting, putting herself in the picture, keeping the family together and at the same time recording movements and changes.

Family life shifts to the sickrooms. The radio plays, the mother smokes countless cigarettes on the balcony, her eyes and fingers graze figures of saints, she attends Holy Mass in the various facilities and shares her worries about an adult son with her husband and daughter. They argue, laugh and sometimes dance around the sickbed. Between the family capsule and drifting through the city – Beirut, night, cemeteries, sensualities –, the filmmaker inserts interview sequences with her siblings, staged on the backseat of a moving car. Attempts to cope and to draw borders, loneliness in company. Brief moments when wishes and projections of mobility are experimentally translated into virtual space – a gauging of possibilities. A touching description of a status quo and a testimony to resignation and renewal.

Magic mobile on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? A young woman slips into a second skin. She goes out, drinks bubble tea with her friends. Selfies are made. The mood is cheerful. But once back home, she and her outward skin melt into each other; a self dissolves. Her own reflection becomes a chimera. A surreal body horror animation about beauty ideals and the compulsion to fit in.

Petra looks back on an eventful day: Together with other kids she went on a paperchase, solved a few small tasks and coordinated with her assigned partner. There were some adventures, but also a classroom situation set up in a meadow where one’s knowledge of the local flora was tested. In the end, they all boarded sailing boats and glided off into an atmospheric evening. A protocol in letters, accurately drawn up at the Potsdam Pioneer House, serves as the framework for one of the first completed films of the newly founded German Academy of Film Art in Babelsberg.

An investigative examination of the colour spaces of the 100 Yuan note reveals a paradigm shift. Officially declared by the central bank to be red, the note bearing the portrait of Mao is, physically speaking, actually pink. This has consequences for China’s political narrative, as Tang Han’s uncompromisingly precise and refreshingly clever cinematic experimental setup illustrates.

Eva Dzhyshyashvili shows us a family that lives in the mountains following their daily rituals. At first glance, it’s a simple, quiet life unbothered by the outer world. However, as the picture is revealed, we see that the grandfather was wounded in the east of Ukraine and listen to countless conversations about this war. The feeling that there is nowhere to hide from military aggression is starkly evident. But the ending provides a sliver of hope.

The days in the hospital are boring, the monotony only interrupted by parents’ visits. Listlessly, the girl lies in bed, staring out of the window for hours. But one day she gets a very special present. She slowly recovers and her injuries heal … This story, animated in soft, bright colours, shows that faith can help us get better.

A sentimental journey through the main market in Odesa. Pryvoz is a place of recurring myth. It is mentioned in songs and books and is truly the heart of this disorienting city with a complicated history. Neymann looks at the inhabitants with empathy: lost souls in the bodies of humans, dogs or cats. The opera soundtrack adds a sense of fatality to the old vivid market that will become reality. The city of Odesa has been under Russian fire since February 2022.