Click, click, she virtually recreates a cluttered, narrow kitchen on her computer. Lady Di smiles with creased photo edges from the refrigerator, a half-opened chocolate bar lies on the table. The technical-looking, detailed digital reconstruction runs like a fingertip along remembered images, tracing their nicks. The images feed off a blurred video in which the grandparents and their kitchen-cum-living-room live on – a nostalgic place in the distant Ukraine of childhood.

Running. Rapid breathing. A shot in the silence. The opening strikes the keynotes: caution, curiosity, thrills. A documentary film team spend 963 hours on the adventure playground of the video game DayZ. Online gamers explore the territory of a post-Soviet disaster province, permanently exposing themselves to the risk of being killed by hostile gamers. Despite their “press” badges, Guilhem, Ekiem and Quentin, as avatars, are subject to the same rules when they interview the gamers in their virtual world. The community is heterogenous: marauding gangs, cowboys with Samaritan ethics, curious wanderers.

Reality is never far away. The gamer “Feesh” is torn from her console during the interview because her IRL (in real life) child is crying. In the course of their conversation, “Iris” shoots her “toy”, a prisoner, before the eyes of the shocked documentary team – a conflict of documentary work opens up. “Knit’s Island” is a disturbing, melancholy to heartwarming tour of chance meetings and friendships of sleepless persons in the artificial world. Some avatars constantly twitch nervously and grotesquely because they act out darkest desires. Others “trick the game” and enter fascinating techno-psychedelic spheres. Game-playing and role-playing persona – sometimes they are one, sometimes two.

Lothar König is an original. The long-term youth pastor from Jena doesn’t fit into any system. In the GDR he was under state surveillance, after reunification he was one of the most tireless warning voices against the growing right-wing radicalism. To this day, he takes to the barricades against the extreme right, often on the frontline. Nevertheless, this film portrait by his son Tilman is not an homage but a critical tribute to an outspoken character forced by retirement to re-invent himself.

Pastor König is not only regarded as one of the figureheads of the left-wing scene that organises punk concerts, rallies and football tournaments with young refugees. He also has a reputation as a fairly challenging personality. Tilman König shows his father only marginally in his role as a church official. Most of all, he introduces a man who can be courageous and determined, but also stubborn and unfair. His film is enjoyably interested above all in the here and now of this man, the things that Lothar still has to come to terms with. How will he manage the transition to retirement after a restless life between community work and political activism? How can the old rhetorical warhorse hold his own among people who really agree with him but seem to move away from him in thought, speech and action? The border-crosser is entering unknown terrain.

For technical reasons – too massive! – this 50-ton bronze colossus was not demolished in 1993. Today it is listed as a historical monument, along with the associated housing estate. A relic from the old days: Today, the raised fist of the former German Communist Party leader and erstwhile GDR hero Ernst Thälmann in the Prenzlauer Berg park defies the collective forgetting of a not-so-long-ago past instead of heralding the victory of communism.

In 1986, an old municipal gasworks in East Berlin made way for a housing estate – and a monument that was controversial even then. Partly imagined, partly remembered and extensively researched throughout, Betina Kuntzsch assembles a complex narrative as part of her project “Vom Sockel Denken” about the Ernst-Thälmann-Memorial in Berlin: about a place full of history, viewed from ten different perspectives. In her omnibus film she skilfully uses various aesthetic and research tools. The successful combination of own footage, animation, archive material and oral history generates a kind of kaleidoscope, a gem of historiographic documentary-making and a parcours through a whole range of documentary film genres.

Russian-born director Aleksey Lapin travels back to his relatives’ home village near the Ukrainian border, where he himself used to spend every summer. The film crew introduce themselves at a specially organized musical event, claiming that they have come to cast a historical film that is to be set in the village. What follows is a charming, semi-fictional documentary by and with the village community.

The proposed film project is just a pretext, that’s obvious from the start. Nonetheless, the villagers are happy to take part. Inventively and with subtle irony, Lapin plays with the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Thus observed scenes unobtrusively merge into staged ones. He records marvellously absurdities, for example a tree being felled and laboriously put up somewhere else for the “shoot”, or broken-down cars fuelling the rumours of electromagnetism in the area. The cinematography in black and white is notable, full of references to classic Russian films, timeless and timely at the same time. Lapin’s feature-length debut is not only an affectionate local portrait with a sense for the absurd, but also a film about film: In a long dialogue by the river, two protagonists talk about cinema as an art form and how it is changing.

Director Nikola Spasić explains in an interview that in this film he was interested in the fluid boundaries between documentary and fiction, and that he found the perfect protagonist in Kristina: someone with an interesting personal story who can also act. And so she plays herself, Kristina, a transsexual sex worker in Serbia. She lives alone with her cat in a beautiful old house, collects antiques and practices ikebana on the terrace of her garden. She meets friends, visits a cloister, lives her religion, arranges a crucifix.

This idyll is regularly interrupted by the obtrusive ringtone of her work mobile. But the meeting with the client who appears at her door a short while later is well-orchestrated and no contradiction to Kristina’s elegant, graceful and serene existence, which she shapes according to her own ideas. All in all, these flawlessly framed and composed tableaus have an element of transcendence. But with his aesthetic directing, Spasić emphasises the incontrovertible freedom of this modern woman whom he captures in a portrait that is both intimate and daring.

A new Musifants episode! Grandpa Günter – a retired circus elephant – and grandson Charlie take another musical excursion into the songbook of the 1920s and 1930s. This time, it’s the little green cactus’s birthday and Charlie bakes a cake. No sooner is it on the table, smelling delicious, than a bit is missing. Charlie wants to know who has been sneaking a bite …

Quietly and discreetly, the French director Sarah Mallégol follows a group of thirty-something protagonists who survived the 1994 Rwanda genocide as children. They have no memory of the events – neither those whose fathers were murdered nor those whose parents were responsible. A confrontation begins: focused conversations between generations which, captured by a gentle camera, are meant to cautiously break the long silence – in order to be able to understand, process and mourn.

Sarah Mallégol herself grew up in Rwanda, before the genocide. She has no memories of her childhood either. But there are home movies shot on Super 8 that show carefree days in a still peaceful countryside – and her nanny from back then, Christine. She died in 1994, which is all the director knows. Her motivation for this filmic search is thus personal. But after the short introduction, she gives all the space to those who live in Rwanda today with the trauma that has spread over the country like a shroud. Grief is at the forefront and the film work contributes to a much-needed coming to terms – accompanied by chants and landscape shots added to the memories of the survivors that bear a different form of witness.

This 2D animation, reduced to clear shapes and colours, interweaves its narrative with the Slovenian carnival figure Kurent. In the evening, a boy on the threshold of becoming a teenager sneaks to the annual expulsion of winter. Wild masked figures romp there and ear-splitting cow bells ring out, and the next morning nothing is the same.

The Nepalese shaman Lil Bahadur and his granddaughter Hima have dedicated themselves to the revival of his native language, Kusunda. It’s about more than communication, namely identity, tradition and awareness of one’s own history. The interactive voice-control of this VR experience allows us to learn Kusunda ourselves. We learners become human archives of an all but lost indigenous language.

Inspired by ritual practices from different cultures, the VR experience addresses the loss of a sense of community and empathy, combining modern dance and VR technology to re-examine old rites and reveal their meaningful potential for future societies. The title of the work refers to what legend has it is an “enlightening” potion from ancient Greece.

Breasts lifted, bottom tight, feathers smoothed. She is ready for her date. But her daughter clings and refuses to let her go to this as yet incomprehensible, repulsive ritual of desire. Very soon the fully-fledged adolescent will indulge in sexual lust herself … and experience disappointments. In the conflicted world of the two women, men evade partnership and fatherhood. The faithful bitch offers the only support.

As in her previous film, Carla Melo Gampert transfers her impressive but uncompromising analysis of family relationships to the lives of wading birds. Human traits show through in the anatomy, but the bird’s bodies including their feathers and sounds lend themselves perfectly to the apt exaggeration of emotions. Delicate strokes turn into cuttingly sharp movement lines of the animal characters, both in their erotically crude acts of love and their “hands-on” disputes. Soft splashes of watercolour glow incandescently in the heat of lust and warningly in the hopeless fury.

With childlike ease, entertaining and touching, this colourful animation shows the transition of a woman who was born in the “wrong body”. With her family’s support and understanding, Ivan becomes Lada – a happy, content person. Based on a true individual story, this film is also a parable on the ingenuity of the transgender community who sometimes have to take unusual paths to establish a life worth living in an ignorant environment.

A group of old men in an abandoned asbestos mining town on the edge of the Kalahari Desert resist evacuation. They have no place to go because they were once notorious as soldiers of the infamous South African Battalion 32, also known as “The Terrible Ones”. Both perpetrators and victims of history, they become actors in the biblical story of Judas Iscariot in Boris Gerrets’ equally disturbing and fascinating cinematic legacy.

The spectacle under a blazing sun confronts the men, who live in abject poverty, with their unresolved past. Many of them had been forcibly recruited by the FNLA and UNITA resistance movements in the Angolan War of Independence against Portugal. After the communist MPLA took power, they found themselves as mercenaries fighting alongside white South Africans against their own people and finally defending the Apartheid regime in the colonial struggle in Namibia and the South African townships. On the fringes of the surreal film location between the decaying buildings of the old mining town, they speak for the first time about their life stories, talk about betrayal, guilt and remorse. Having been steamrolled by global politics, turned into undesirables, exiles, forgotten, suppressed and broken men, they finally become visible again as human beings in front of the camera.

Valentyna and her bed-ridden mother live on a small farm surrounded by the evergreen, lush flora of the rain forest. The works and thoughts of the poet and the artist, though, are filled with the landscapes of their old home, Ukraine. Memories of snow and birch trees, thistles and orchids, vegetable gardens and their animal residents come to life in Tamara’s poems and Valentyna’s drawings.

Life flows quietly in the small house in the middle of nowhere. Valentyna takes care of the few animals, milks the cows, makes cheese, cares for her mother. The photos on the chest of drawers, the allusions to the Chernobyl disaster only hint at why the two left Ukraine a long time ago. But what they left behind still lives in exile. One wonders whether she, the celebrated poet, still remembers her writings? Mother and daughter are as gentle with each other as the film’s gaze on the two women, their animals and surroundings. Without a trace of nostalgia, cinematographer Mariano Maximovicz’s images let us see not only the beauty of the landscapes we live in but also of those that live on in our minds.

The chalk chases the shadow. Once it is captured, only traces of the game remain. Drawing, erasing, drawing again on a porous surface. Like on a sloppily wiped blackboard, shades of images that have long ceased to exist shine through. Špela Čadež stages a race between fleeting and manifest forms that – at least in terms of film theory – knows no winner.