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.

Who hasn’t?! You arrive in a foreign land, ready to embrace the world, but the world refuses to be embraced. Tomoko from Japan travels to London. She is well-prepared, works hard on a language course and has brought her goldfish to fight homesickness. And yet she feels lonely and unable to utter a word when spoken to. What to do? How about a slight change of perspective?

Contemplating your naked body, drenched in tomato sauce, on a frozen pizza – that is the epitome of alienated wage work. Especially if it is the mass product whose quality has to be checked hundreds of times a day at the assembly line. Is it this alienation, the multiple daily consumption of precisely this meal or simply the absence of significant human relationships that make Frankie feel terminally ill and ready to say goodbye to an existence he feels is worthless and empty? Nobody cares, until his body transforms into a wild planet where evolution happens in fast-forward mode: the genesis of life, miniature Frankies performing absurd penis dances, cannibalism, Darwinism, mutual destruction, the eradication of other species – and finally the Frankie planet itself burning out.
Levi Stoops makes us laugh out loud – and yet we feel the bitter taste of self-destruction on our tongue. Will Frankie have the courage to risk a change of life after this apocalyptic experience? Or does the system have him so firmly in its claws that wholesome nature documentaries of exotic flowers are comfort enough – instead of cooking shows where the stone-baked pizzas are tossed into the air with verve?