SOS – help! A clear and simple visual language to disturbing sounds. The distinguished Lithuanian film and theatre director Vladislovas Algimantas Blinstrubas condenses the violent, centuries-long history of the Baltic in timeless metaphors. The naked, vulnerable human being is at the centre of this filmic exploration. The space opens up to pain and grief.

In this indie game we embark on a journey into the vast expanse of the void. If you like, you can contemplate, rest, observe yourself. If you feel like moving, you can navigate the white space step by step – or just take a break … But not for too long! Or you will miss the chance to uncover hidden secrets and find your own path in the middle of nowhere.

12-year-old Nikita and his family have been staying in an underground station in Kharkiv for weeks. The place promises protection from Russian attacks, but there is not much distraction down here. The glaring lights and provisionally furnished carriages create a surreal to dreary atmosphere, pets roam the aisles, an aging musician plays songs on his guitar.

Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík condense the first months of the war in Ukraine into an oppressive but not hopeless narrative, because the station is also a place of encounters. Niki soon meets Vika, who is his age and who coaxes the lethargic boy out of his shell. Together they roam the underworld, but while Vika is permitted to go to the surface at least once in a while, Niki’s radius of movement ends at the stairs on which sunlight falls occasionally. And yet an outside exists which the two directors make visible by Super 8 shots scattered in between. They show a damaged Kharkiv: destroyed vehicles, a charred bed, provisionally protected monuments. “Photophobia” is a hybrid, introspective film that manages to find something like tender romance in an unreal situation.

Peter Mettler sets out to look for northern lights with photographer Andreas Züst and a small film crew. In order to be able to capture this miracle of nature on film in the first place, the team has built a special camera that has to withstand the extreme climate conditions. On location, they patiently surrender to the state of waiting. They are in the border region between the geographical north and the populated south. The formal structure of the film, on the other hand, shifts between trance-like essay and analytical research trip. And the filmmaker is left with the fundamental question of whether the experience of this spectacular natural phenomenon can be filmed at all.

How do you grow up on a planet that is being destroyed by humanity? This film looks for answers to this urgent question and introduces us to Bo and Luca. The close friends are enthusiastic climate activists, connected by their commitment. We follow the two teenagers for four years on their contradictory and surprising path to adulthood.

Microplastics are everywhere: in the air, the soil, and the water. In this “surreal eco-fiction,” plastic and the environment live in peaceful coexistence. They invent a comforting world in which we merge with plastics to become hybrid creatures, endowed with a new identity and DNA. In the plastisphere we become the material that unites us all – if only it were finally allowed to re-shape us.

If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.

Lancit deeply involves his family in his fantasies, letting them become demons and lurch through the living room together. The documentation of his own diabetes also allows us a look at a modern Paris family life with two small children and a partner who usually plays along sympathetically with her husband’s carryings-on. Lancit’s approach deliberately transgresses borders, opens body, soul and front door. The result is a humorous and occasionally disturbing self-testimony.

A film about men and games, somewhere in the Mediterranean, directed by a Slovenian master of the playful, somewhere between speculative and pseudo-documentary form. Oily bodies in a wrestling match, hooking fingers, a wheel of cheese rolled through a village – all these are archaic occupations of the utmost importance. The filmmaker meticulously captures the events until he is overcome by a major creative block. From now on, he will experience his surroundings as part of the game. Childhood memories and the footage of the unfinished film project merge seamlessly into an ode to the absurdity of the gesture.

A brief historical summary to begin with: The Lagos International Trade Fair centre was built in the mid-1970s, intended to serve as a marketplace for the non-aligned states. Archival footage and inserts alternate abruptly. While the news images of the time are rather propagandistic in tone, the inserts supply the sober facts.

Some fifty years later, vast tracts of the exhibition halls are under water – an ideal place for ferns and other humidity-loving plants. The initially static camera begins to move. Young craftsmen have converted one tract of the giant complex into workshops: they hammer, carpenter, repair bicycles, prepare meals. There is also a lot of activity outside the rambling site with its artificial lake; people are still trading; everyone is busy with something. A woman’s voice remembers bygone days while two young men ride a bicycle through an empty exhibition hall. A building may have lost its original purpose, but new and independent life has moved in. An open, trans-historic space in the making.

When puffins on Vestmannaeyjar leave their nest, they often get lost in the village, irritated by all the lights. Birta and Selma live on this small island a few kilometres off the coast of Iceland. Together with other young people, they have made it their mission to find the little fledglings and bring them back to the cliff the next day, where they will take their first flight.

Nobody likes to play tennis with Tyrano so he endlessly hits the ball against the wall – until one day he meets Brachi. Playing a match, however, doesn’t quite work out as Brachi keeps falling over. Tyrano tries everything to make Brachi stay and finds out in the end that all the other dinos have their problems, too. But hey, whatever!

Opening the film is a highly visible Soviet coat of arms with translations of Marx’s call “Workers of the world, unite!” into several languages. In the middle of a media circus, representatives of the Soviet Union restituted art treasures to the GDR. The highlight was the return of “evacuated” objects to the Green Vault in Dresden.

From a distance, the glass greenhouse looks like a spaceship which could have landed decades or only minutes ago. In any case, the Botanical Garden in Berlin seems to belong to another era. A group of young people are exploring, feeling plants, trees, and the building according to their very own criteria. Are they aliens? Are they imitating the expeditions of German explorers from the colonial period?

The commentary muses on the history of the place: at the end of the 19th century, work began on the construction of the new greenhouses of the Botanical Garden in Dahlem to bring the world to one garden. This idea formulated a claim of omnipotence, too. In the rambling park, the camera comes across the naturalistic statue of a semi-nude man sowing seeds. It was created by the sculptor Hermann Joachim Pagels, who was very successful under the Nazis. The deeper the film penetrates the thickets of this garden, the more traces of imperial and colonialist thinking come to light. But the Botanical Garden is also a utopian place. What if this greenhouse-spaceship were to take off to distant spheres again? Could the plants guarantee the survival of our species on other planets? But perhaps they have a different plan, a life of their own?

A pair of socks used to be inseparable and lived as soulmates in their drawer. But they lose sight of each other during the spin cycle in the washing machine. How awful to be suddenly alone, one of the socks thinks. But for the first time it becomes aware of the other clothes around it. These new encounters put the socks’ friendship to a tough test.

Parts of the house director Anna Dziapshipa traces in her autobiographical roamings through the past look like straight out of a horror film: cobwebbed, dark, derelict. It is located in Abkhazia, the region officially off-limits to Georgians, protected by Russia and not recognised as an autonomous republic by the international community.

One half of Dziapshipa’s family comes from here, including a football player who once was a key player for Dinamo Tbilisi. The filmmaker edits footage of his sports activities into “Self-Portrait Along the Borderline,” but also shows the splendour of the former Soviet holiday paradise. It is a personal, associative approach in which Dziapshipa analyses and reflects on her own experiences as a child with both Georgian and Abkhazian family backgrounds. Discrimination plays a role, as do solemn and disturbing things. Time and again, spiders crawl through the frame, weaving their webs and thus connections.

The two main characters of this film seem made for each other. They literally fit together, merge into each other, melt into a colourful, psychedelic, swirling whole. They function together, until one of them disconnects. The madness of this riot of colours turns into a dark nightmare when the one left behind re-absorbs the other by force. Against her will, the renegade must now be sewn to her partner. The once flourishing relationship degenerates into an irritating visual and audio chaos of aggressively twitching drawings and shattered sounds. Impaled on a gnarly tree, the couple’s bodies decay. As they are dying away, darkness turns into light and fresh blossoms open on the pale bones.