What happens when we have to leave the destroyed earth? This VR experience takes us into space: Our consciousness becomes collective and our DNA is modified into new life forms. Time is nothing but an illusion here – past, present and future merge. We end up where we began, but in what form and when? A cycle of endless reincarnation.

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?

An Argentinean builder who has built council halls, cemetery gates and abattoirs in the pampa as if from a modernist assembly line. Then a Bolivian architect, whose gaudy functional buildings in the highland defy description and imagination. Last, but not least, a new old palace in the middle of Berlin. Connections are plentiful, none of them edifying. Heinz Emigholz uses them for a pamphlet against stylistic amnesia and historical falsification.

The first film in Heinz Emigholz’s series “Photography and beyond” was released in 1983 and, including the two works screened by DOK Leipzig this year in the Camera Lucida section, there are now 35. But although “Slaughterhouses of Modernity” uses a number of sequences from the other two works, it has little in common with them in terms of form and ductus. While the aforementioned rather minimalist films do without commentary and partly without inserts, this one is characterised by its edgy monologues and courageous use of stylistic inconsistencies. Polemics and black humour are not unusual in Emigholz’s universe. But one has never seen him spoiling for a fight as gleefully as in this complex exploration of German history and its ugly manifestations. Not so much a late work as a new departure.

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.

The railway from the point of view of people who travel by bicycle, on foot or by car: A Schlager music recording of GDR singer Chris Doerk is re-cut many times to accompany the endless-seeming wait at a railway crossing. Meanwhile, young people find each other, couples form. Even the birth of a child finds a place in this ironic short film.

Four creatures wobble like marionettes in the black void. An alien power tries to subdue them, police voices strike like truncheons. Bent, with bulging or thread-thin limbs, their skin turned inside out – human anatomy has mutated. But these vulnerable bodies start to fight back … “Scum Mutation” takes us into the battle zone without protection, into an indelible energy field of radical feminist protest – and becomes a resounding beacon of reconquest.

Ship ahoy, the musifants are back! This time, Charlie and Grandpa Günter get mail from the small green cactus in New Zealand and set sail with Fox and Captain Krause. On the way, they fish the little wild sow Svenja from the sea and sing their special shanty. The waves rise when the retired circus elephant makes musical forays into 1920s and 1930s song collections.

“Guess what we’re doing! We’re going to practice swimming.” Hanan accompanies her brother to classes in the public pool. The first swimming badge is called the Seahorse, their instructor explains, because it “stands” in the water and doesn’t drown. When Hanan’s family came to Europe in a rubber dinghy, she couldn’t swim. To forget this experience, she learned not to go under in the water – like a seahorse.

Nothing is closer to us than our skin. Its beautiful and less beautiful parts envelop the self, separate it from all else. A foray along naked parts of the body takes us from a shiny ridge via a rounded protuberance to a shady gorge. A neck. A belly…ear. A fellybear? Photos, videoclips and sounds form an irritating body collage.

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.

Movement, movement: In the early days of cinema, audiences were hungry for pictures bursting with vitality. For many film pioneers, the subject par excellence was the serpentine dance, which produced graceful shifting patterns by means of ample veils. The Lumière brothers additionally had the film hand-coloured, frame by frame, reinforcing the vivid expression of the dynamic body geometries.

Our everyday digital life is unthinkable without smartphones. Across the world, more than five billion such devices are in circulation. Each one of those is even touched more than 2,600 times per day. This AR experience takes us through the hidden history of this technology and thus into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. What natural and human resources does the tech industry require for its innovations?

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.

A giant ginger mountain landscape that five cooks spent a week to make: Once magnificent culinary works of art were created in Chinese restaurants. Food was associated with a wealth of money and time. The world today is short-lived, customers have become few and far between. Chefs talk about the connection between food culture and socio-economic change in China.

Ricky is a boy from the Ashéninka tribe who lives with his family deep in the Peruvian Amazon Forest. But even here, the children’s favourite pastime is watching videos on their mobile phones. One day, Ricky is faced with the task of overcoming his fears and going hunting for a huge catfish that can only be caught by hook. This is where his journey to adulthood begins.

In recent years, the number of diagnoses of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has skyrocketed. What are the reasons? Does a society geared towards efficiency use the label ADHS to weed out anyone who does not fit its frames? What are the consequences of the fact that medication treatment has become almost ubiquitous? Could Ritalin and the like have become the doping of the performance society?

In their very personal documentary, Gitti Grüter, diagnosed with ADHS since puberty, sets out to find answers. Grüter talks to five women who have been officially diagnosed with this disorder about lack of concentration, impulsive behaviour, overstimulation, relationship problems, depression and insomnia. The open conversations gradually reveal how hard life can be for women with ADHS, because social stereotypes of femininity often prevent or delay the right diagnosis. Through the calculated use of filmic means, Grüter manages to convey to the audience a sense of the permanent and overpowering inner and outer chaos. Skilfully and with a generous dose of irony, they focus on how people suffering from ADHS are stigmatised – and not least on the role of gender stereotypes in this process. The conclusion is surprising and encouraging.