“Boo” – the name is as unusual as the sound is special. The avant-garde composer Harry Partch invented instruments for micro-sounds and completely new musical experiences. The musician and instrument maker Thomas Meixner dedicated two years of his life, marked by family and health losses, to rebuilding 75 of these sound-generators for a concert tour. The film portrays a monomaniac who fiercely avoids social life but with great sensitivity makes material sing.

Maya Steinberg is a secular Israeli. Her father, however, had a late religious awakening. He will not appear in her film. Instead, the young director approaches his faith and her lack of understanding for it through a visit to the gravesite of rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in Galilee, where she spends a few weeks, observing believers, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, and wondering: Is there a place here for women? And can there be a place for queer women?

AIVA is an artist, animated by algorithms. But above all she is the soberingly limited male tech vision of what more diversity in the arts could look like. In her paintings AIVA prefers the vertical, to some acclaim. A naive and cliché-ridden “art documentary” lets us participate in her work. Precisely observed, with sparse gestures and trenchant wit, Veneta Androva reflects a current status quo in her computer-animated future fiction.

Partly rhetorical, partly ironic and partly profound, the film deals with the Germans’ strange, three-hundred-year-old relationship to their stereotypical ideas of America’s native population. This includes the question of how the audience themselves feel about this ominous object of fascination. The backdrop and starting point of a floating journey through the history of various stereotypes are the ruins of the former U.S. embassy in East Berlin, where an exhibition on the subject took place in 1986.

Because his single mother criticised the state, Alex was sent to a special children’s home at the age of eleven, in order to shape him – like almost 500,000 children in the GDR – into a “socialist personality”. He escaped and ended up as a punishment at the Torgau Closed Juvenile Detention Centre, more prison than social institution. His life was now dominated by military drill and violence … Reduced rotoscope images follow Alex’s memories and show how the trauma affects him even today.

In November 2021, people tried to enter the EU via Belarus and Poland, but the route turned out to be a death trap. All access points to the border region were blocked in order not to create an escape corridor. Men, women and children were stuck in no man’s land – in the middle of winter, in the middle of the forest, for weeks. The film follows Polish activists on their mission. They learn that humanitarian aid, just like the refugees themselves, comes up against borders.

Quiet, dark shots of nocturnal fog, of a mine, a dump truck or a wreck, of huge earth craters and new surface contours created by excavation. Raw material extraction, economisation and exploitation of nature are the themes of this visual study. It’s accompanied by an unobtrusive, but threatening and assertive sound that underlines the mystic quality of the images. Post-industrial landscapes become post-apocalyptic.

In the mid-19th century, a massive fireplace was the centrepiece of every stately home in England. Children are agile enough to keep the flow of air going in the narrow and dark flues. Their young skin is scraped raw by the sooty stone walls. Their fear of falling is as strong as their fear of the master’s punishment. Black-brown-red cross hatching and unusual camera perspectives bring to life the report of a chimney sweep of the time.

Eating together with chopsticks, forks, or cheese sandwiches: Heinz Toku-Zen Anneser and his students practice Buddhist rituals without pretension. In his study, which is as precisely measured as it is poetic, Thomas Köhling observes the daily routines of this small, quiet group in the German provinces and finds appealingly bizarre moments when Eastern religion and western culture overlap. The sky above the Velux window is the same as above Mount Fuji.

Felix Leffrank deals with the ups and downs of an artist’s life in colourful, computer-animated images. During his ordeal between depression, writer’s block, anger and urban loneliness, a story-teller is accompanied by three weird birds who sometimes appear as annoying neighbours, sometimes as inner demons. Jung, Freud and the psychologist Dr. Breuer in the shape of a grey cat promote self-reflection, but the most helpful thing is probably a beer with friends.

Most accidents happen at home. Thus a likeable, jazz-loving drawn figure is unprepared for an appeal to his own political responsibility. A random Brecht reading spurs her to do something – at the very least so as not to end up on the wrong track or wrong side of things. Pointed, tidy, and full of humour and affection for human dithering, Anne Isensee questions the illusion of a permanent contradiction in reality.

Small and cu… no, not cute. This knee-high creature seems somewhat affectionate and shy instead. Until it comes snarling around the corner, sprinting after you on short legs through the empty suburb. An uneasy lurking, a lurking unease starts to spread. With hand-drawn austerity, mean sounds and not-so-friendly characters, Malte Stein prepares the surgical instruments for some terrific mental cinema – for the protagonist and for all who watch him.

His mother starts drinking when he is eight years old. Jan Koester projects photos from his childhood on his own body that tell of loneliness and helplessness in toxic relationships. These Rorschach-like superimposed images put physical abstractions in relation to their violent and alienated surroundings. Shifting between fluid and halting movements, telescoped pixels tugging at each other deconstruct predominant gender norms.

The biography of the female elephant Bibi, who is considered to display abnormal behaviour, is marked by misfortunes: Born in Zimbabwe in 1985. Lost her mother shortly after birth. Imported by the East Berlin zoo in 1989. Deported to the Halle zoo in 2008. On the basis of an empathic reappraisal of these traumatic events the film reflects on the significance of social issues and how to deal with exclusion today: a therapy by proxy on film that will hopefully have a long-distance healing effect on Bibi.

58-year-old Erwin introduces himself as “old but horny”. He has declared the mobile home in his front garden his favourite refuge, where he has everything he needs: a computer, a bed, a coffee machine. Two webcams link Erwin to other men who satisfy his carnal desires. In this tiny space, Jan Soldat comes close to him, of course. He learns of love affairs, as great as extinguished, of a complicated family web and worries about the future.

How does a woman deal with the hair that grows other than on her head? A young woman talks about her journey between first depilation attempts, recurring frustration and slowly, but steadily growing pride in her own body. With verve, humour and honesty, this short, animated documentary visualizes a subject that’s all too often hushed up or shaved off. Strong performance, great cinema!