A blue wooden house at the edge of the forest, lonely, but not peaceful and quiet. This is where Lydia lives, a transgender ornithologist who presents herself in high heels and a pearl necklace one day, in cargo pants and functional wear the next. Director Sasha Kulak calls her film a documentary fairy tale, and the borders between reality and fiction are blurred indeed, because Lydia loves play, staging, the uncanny – and David Lynch.

Lydia has watched “Twin Peaks” more than thirty times, its characters and plots have long since spilled over into Shcherbinka, a small town south of Moscow. She claims to find bodies in the underbrush and even Lynch’s “Red Room” has been replicated under the roof of her house. Now she’s facing a new challenge: the creation of Lara, a lifelike silicone doll whose voice also guides us through Kulak’s cinematic tale. Lydia works hard at realising her dreams, but she is equally passionate about studying birds and the so-called Nezhulyas, shy eyeless creatures that are exceedingly cuddly and have tantric potential. “A Hawk as Big as a Horse” becomes a vehicle of Lydia’s visions, using three-dimensional animation and various cinematic techniques to open a portal to a very specific fantasy.

Five young people from Ukraine talk about their lives after the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all of them fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the war, however, shattered their life plans. Representing “Generation Maidan”, they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. Theatre director Roza Sarkisian produces a Hamlet adaptation with them in which they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas on stage again.

For them Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is not just a historical text, but a current and existential dilemma that has no clear answer. The film follows the rehearsals where different biographies, self-images and political positions clash: A soldier meets his first LGBT person, the feminist quarrels with the fact that the war has undone hard-won emancipatory achievements. Frictions and differences are exposed, compromises are strenuously negotiated. Eventually the film’s focus widens and leaves the stage to introduce the five as individuals with their own inner struggles. The result is a many-layered, dense portrait of a torn and yet powerful Ukrainian generation who, due to the Russian invasion, find themselves at war again, only a few months after their production premiered.

The façade of the Paris cultural restaurant EP7 forms the presentation surface for an animated architectural collage. Staggered exterior views of buildings rotate. The game of deception of lines of sight, angles and geometries has an irritating effect. The spatial depths lure the eye into the supposed interior of the body behind the skin of the façade, which is at the same time the mirror of an urban architecture of restlessness.

Is he crazy or a genius? An impoverished compulsive hoarder or a millionaire? Many legends surround octogenarian Adolf Haeberli, who lives in a cramped and dilapidated house in the luxury spa town of St. Moritz. For some residents his home is an eyesore, while for others it’s a creative place of resistance. Haeberli himself thinks he was born under a lucky star. In this humorous but never exposing portrait of a lateral thinker, every voice is heard.

The yellow banana beckons from the fruit basket; it’s peeled in no time and about to disappear in the mouth. But stop! Before you can at last take the first bite, you have to share. The banana becomes smaller and smaller. The elephant, too, wants a piece of the sweet fruit. A piece for you, a piece for me … A little film about the joys of sharing.

A felicitous and at the same time almost unbearable cinematic experimental set-up that uses documentary means to show what the Belarusian reality behind the news items looks like. Based on eyewitness accounts, Pavel Mozhar re-stages Lukashenko’s perfidious and oppression-based power system. Violence in the shape of detailed reconstructions may seem abstract at first glance but drills itself into our consciousness all the more persistently in the course of the film.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed human relationships. Archive material, 360° footage and artificially generated images are used to create a synaesthetic essay film about loneliness, insecurity and the increasing shift of our everyday life into the digital realm. Dystopic and anonymous stories merge in a collage of the disturbing social and political phenomena of our time.

“Which side are you on?” sings Florence Reece, an icon of the miners’ movement in Harlan County, Kentucky, with a brittle voice into the microphone at a union rally. Barbara Kopple’s long-term observation of the 1973 Brookside strike might even be called a music film. Because aside from Reece’s classic strike anthem, song and speech, folklore and politics, rhythms of speaking and editing are combined throughout: a successful attempt at partisanship that appeals to all the senses, where slogans are absent – or put into song. “Harlan County, USA” was presented in a special screening at the Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche in autumn 1977, its fame having preceded it: It had already won the Oscar for Best Documentary Film in April of that year.

Memories of a loved one: The camera explores the dark confines of a flat. Light is still burning in the kitchen; objects are scattered haphazardly on the living room tables. The eyes follow into the labyrinthine self, now turned into space, of a once familiar and now absent person. The narrator’s voice begins by asserting that everything in this place is true. It “shows” the places where the remembered person learned to crochet and where she shelled peas.
The narrative remains factual, but a gap begins to open. Ghost-like apparitions intrude in the old video images, phantom voices populate the noise-like echo sounds. Just like the crocheting and the peas, a naked murderer and other unpleasant shadows are part of the house inspected here. As things progress, individual threads are spun together to form the symbolic crocheted doily of a home. Incredibly poetic and very personal, Ayden Lamb’s “Haunted House” brings to life on film a person who during their lifetime was present – had to be present – in two worlds.

There are large paintings showing views of houses wherever you look. Each house is meticulously outlined; at first glance, they all look the same. Sometimes they keep their distance from each other, sometimes they seem to float in the void. Combined in ever new arrangements, these houses seem strangely unlocalised. With stencil and brush, Johannes Kloosterhuis is already working on the next painting. Each house has its own story, but perhaps the idea of privately owned homes is an outdated ideal, he muses aloud.
As he draws, Kloosterhuis thinks about different forms of living and housing. He himself prefers to look at the world from his window, enjoying the view of car park roofs, gardens and trees. His usually monochrome tableaux, though, have no horizon. Perhaps Kloosterhuis’s artistic vision are so fascinating because they develop an unfathomable life of their own. We get the chance to watch with the camera as they take shape, as a new miniature house, a new miniature fate emerges with every brushstroke.

A music video realised as a sand animation and visualising the eponymous rap song of the Mestizo band Ojos de Brujo from their 2002 album “Barí”. Swirling, merging, powerfully rhythmic images materialise in the flow of sand. The energetic beats and the haunting vocals carry a tale of greed and deceit that we follow as if in a trance.

A man in socks takes a shower and melts. A claw machine in which nothing can be grabbed is fed coins. A mermaid makes sculptures of feet. A woman packs a banana into a plastic bag, then into another and another and … Figures suffering from the absurd wander through a good dozen laconically drawn momentary miniatures, ceaselessly looking for what can’t be found: meaning. Katarzyna Miechowicz’s animated folly prickles, even existentially.

A voice speaking the Aztec language Nahuatl and a ritual song accompany the children’s games in the Mayan rain forest. They put their ears to the trees which seem to speak to each other and to the universe. They listen to an ancient love story that continues today. A myth of Mesoamerican culture is invoked. Animated sequences and extreme backlighting visualize the tree’s inner life. What images may emerge in the children’s mind’s eyes?

Blessed is the person whose home is his kingdom of heaven. They do not have to choose between staying and leaving. The filmmaker left with Katya, Olya, Misha and Finn when his home country Russia covered the whole of Ukraine with terror. They found a piece of heaven on the Turkish island of Heybeliada, where they were soon joined by the painter Yu, who comes from China but studied art in Russia. “China and Russia are very big countries,” an insert explains, “yet here we are, sharing a room in Turkey.” “Heaven and Home” is a snapshot of a temporary exile, a clever and melancholy reflection on origins, community and parting.

The Turkish flag flies from one of the hills on the island. If you climb a mountain you raise your country’s flag to say: This is where I come from. At the Chess World Championship 1990, the Russians Karpov and Kasparov played against each other, one of them under the Soviet flag, the other under a new one representing a democratic Russia. Today, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is waged under this flag. At a pro-war motorcade in Berlin both flags fly in harmony, the Soviet and the Russian one. And Kasparov is once more presenting a flag for a future Russia from which the bloody red has now been erased.

A home in the middle of the day, only the electrical appliances are whirring. The camera gaze glides through the rooms and floors which are unfolded and seamlessly joined by the editing. Small oddities proliferate in the bourgeois habitat: an unanswered doorbell, an open freezer emitting light. Normality, perhaps unintentionally, whispers something uncanny.

Institutionalised children in Mestlin, Mecklenburg: With no off commentary to provide context, the young people talk about their worries and problems, about violence and alcohol abuse in their families – a forthrightness inacceptable to the DEFA management. When the rough cut is presented for approval, the production is stopped. The film can only be shown after the fall of the Wall.