The teenager Zoe and her little brother Theo spend a day at the public swimming pool. Theo loses himself in his childish fantasies. The visitors of the pool look like characters from Greek mythology to him. Zoe, less than pleased at having to watch her little brother, hides in the changing room. She has problems of her own because she is struggling with the changes in her youthful body. She looks at her breasts in the mirror, which the tight bathing suit does nothing to disguise. The horror that this change provokes in her manifests in a terrible panic attack.

Theo’s flight to the realm of mythical creatures and Zoe’s anxiety attack are both caused by a shared traumatic experience. The two find a way to overcome past experiences – even without their mother’s support. Ingenious transitions, cleverly constructed details and, not least, great empathy for the siblings’ communicating inner and outer worlds make this film a convincing double portrait.

Porto Maurizio, where the director, who lives in France today, grew up, is located on the Ligurian coast. The village is the starting point for a cinematic journey into the past that spans a surprisingly wide arc to a time when Muslim pirates, the corsairs, haunted the Mediterranean and took Europeans as slaves. To this end, the film light-handedly draws from the rich fund of film history and its iconography.

Adventure films from the 1940s and historical murals depict the naval battles of the early 19th century in powerful images. The director ingeniously combines such visual finds with analogue new recordings of a journey with two friends. Their seemingly loosely told anecdotes and chance encounters combine to form a coherent whole, forming a geopolitical system of coordinates around the Mediterranean that deals with eurocentrism, colonial history and religiously motivated conflicts between Christian and Islamic countries. The subjects couldn’t be more topical.

Lee Anne Schmitt’s first feature-length essay tours through California’s former company towns, which originally sprung up to house those working in the state’s primary industries and later slipped into dereliction or oblivion with the arrival of globalisation. Ghostly shots of decaying homes and dilapidated facilities rub up against vistas of verdant nature and open horizons, just as tales of prejudice and exploitation intermingle with thwarted utopian dreams. Augmenting her own ravishing 16mm footage with archive material, historical photographs and contemporary radio soundbites, Schmitt scours this hybrid landscape like a beachcomber for all the ideological traces it holds, whereby no story nor detail is too small to be excavated.

The Huerta Valenciana is a unique cultural landscape of fields and plantations. For generations this region, mainly planted with perennially rotating crops of tigernuts, artichokes and onions, was regarded as the vegetable garden of Spain. “Camagroga” is a filmic elegy about peasant pride and how it is inscribed in the physiognomies, gestures and postures of the people behind these agricultural products.

Tardor, as autumn is called in the Valencian regional language, is the season when the tigernut straw is burned on the fields to make the winter harvest of the nut-sized bulbs easier. Antonio Ramon and his daughter Inma run a farm of just under four hectares north of Valencia – hardly a profitable size nowadays. And yet they apply a surfeit of care and traditional knowledge to their products, seemingly following the impulses of their vegetative nerve system rather than a deliberate programme. Ever since their fields were also identified as prime real estate in the development plan of the expanding provincial capital, however, they have known that the battle zone has already reached their barn door.

Two different planets: men and women. What used to be one in paradise was divided by original sin. Ever since then, the sexes have been facing each other in conflict, all the while consumed with longing for a reunion. Expectations are high, the excitement is immense, the imagination is boundless. A day in the garden of carnal delights – from ecstasy to exhaustion and back.

We would not be surprised if this multiple-award winning, internationally acclaimed, and extremely charming film were to be found in an encyclopaedia under the entry “colourful”. Protean shapes in dynamic motion visualise the rhythm of a lively piece of music, leaping like fireworks from the textured black background and animating the screen.

It could be called a portrait or a composition with text and sound. Ulrike Meinhof’s “Letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing”, written in prison in 1972/73, a document of detention in thought cascades, lends structure and weight to fifteen minutes of film. The apparently black background is dimly animated at intervals, hinting at a nocturnal outside or an area near water. This attempt to communicate the sensory deprivation resulting from isolation attempts what’s actually impossible, pushing towards abstraction, harsh, brutal, dry. Any narrative “grease” is discarded. There is no space at all, hence not for a narrative, either.

Everything seems neat at first in Randa Maroufi’s performative reconstruction. Cars form orderly queues; market women tie up their baggage. On the monotonous grey background, the scenes appear schematic, like a blueprint where suddenly everything becomes graphically condensed. Everyday life at the border between the Spanish exclave of Ceuta and Morocco, which is crossed illegally by all kinds of goods.

This musical, richly detailed 3D animation is based on a Slovenian folk tale which tells the story of a peasant couple from wedding to death and is also the story of a lifelong deception: Day by day, the wife serves chicory coffee substitute, though her bully of a husband demands real coffee. Everyone knows about the swindle; he is the only one who remains clueless.

There are children, too, among the Palestinian insurgents. For some time now, the Israeli side has observed minors who take an active part in an Intifada, especially with knives. They are harshly dealt with: prison, hardly any judiciary support. Ada Ushpiz, filmmaker and journalist, comes surprisingly close to some of the Palestinian families concerned. She has accompanied the dubious insurgents over several years and witnessed terrible pressure.

Freshly released from prison, 12-year-old Dima encounters a crowd of television people. A few months ago, she was caught with a knife. The attack was said to be aimed at Jewish Israelis. Now, in a frenzy of camera flashes, her mother stands close by her side. But instead of offering protection she assumes the role of an agitator, demanding that her daughter report how she was treated by the Israelis. But Dima remains silent. Her family describes the pubescent girl as mentally handicapped. Dareen is younger than Dima and lives with her brothers, father and a few snakes in the immediate vicinity of their Israeli neighbours. Soldiers stalk the house, sometimes stones fly, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, is allegedly involved. In her astonishing film, Ushpiz shows a life in constant tension. Her approach is unapologetic and familiar.

In 1973, General Pinochet, with the support of the US secret service, staged a coup against the democratically elected Marxist-Socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende. Pinochet’s military junta murdered and tortured their way across the country. Juan Forch, Santiago-born journalist and filmmaker, managed to escape the terror via Mexico to the GDR and continued his opposition work from here until his return in 1979: as a director at the DEFA Studio for Animation Film in Dresden. With silhouette film specialist Jörg Herrmann he realised this animated agitation miniature, in which the dictator and his allies dance to the caustic artist’s tune – and to organ music.

In September 1992, four tower blocks in the town of Mantes-la-Jolie, not far from Paris, were demolished. They were part of the Val Fourré district, which was celebrated as a flagship social housing project in the 1960s, as archive footage reminds us at the beginning of the film. But filmmaker Dominique Cabrera, who grew up in a similar housing project herself, is not concerned with urban planning or architectural failures. Instead, she is interested in the residents’ memories: remembrances of the poor and the wealthy living together, of insidious but persistent decline, but above all of the beautiful things that make up a life, the variety, the emotions, the personal happiness.

An oily liquid oozes across the frame. Wafting windows in the black mass draw the eye to the levels below. Everything is in motion. Hypnotic music enhances the viscosity of the soft body until we believe that we see a “Liquid Light Show” from the 1960s. But these are the dark revenants of psychedelic hippie visuals that put us into a black trance.

What do the Algerian war of liberation and Yugoslavia have in common? Stevan Labudović. In 1959, Tito himself sent his favourite cinematographer to Algeria. The resistance against the French colonial rule needed the eyes of the world, and the experienced partisan Labudović helped open them: His images gave the lie to the propaganda of the occupiers and their Western allies. This is a portrait of the man, the mission and the age – as film, ideological and personal history.

For three years, until the Democratic Republic of Algeria was proclaimed, Labudović put himself and his camera at the service of the people fighting for independence. Mila Turajlić found the newsreel footage shot at the time in the Filmske Novosti archive in Belgrade, got in touch with the aged pensioner and followed his trail. From a wealth of archive material, diary entries by and interviews with Labudović, with contemporary witnesses from Yugoslavia, Algeria and New York, where the young Maghreb state, like many other former colonies, struggled for admission to the United Nations, she distils the promising origins of an alliance that stood at the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was to oppose the dichotomy of the superpowers. Thus the bow to her compatriot also gains global political topicality.

Soft clouds of light rotate, fan out and change colour: With his cosmic “Luxograms”, Pawłowski radically rethinks the Lumières’ serpentine dance and dematerialises the moving body. It exists neither on a real stage nor in the shape of a real dancer but solely in the projection with a sophisticated system of optical lenses.

To the film enthusiast Marshall Tito, who had his own projection room and employed a full-time projectionist, cinema was also a means to consolidate socialist Yugoslavia. Filmmaker Mila Turajlić, on the other hand, raised in a state that was falling apart, draws on the wealth and glamour of Yugoslavian cinematography in her first long film to better understand her own history. In a clever montage of interviews and film clips, she tells stories of nation-building and images of a nation, but also of how the collapse of the film industry after Tito’s death heralded the collapse of her country.