Hammer and compass in Mozambique. We see a GDR flag waved at a rally in Maputo, carried by “Madgermanes”, contract workers who once toiled in eastern Germany. Some of them founded families there, like Eulidio. His daughter Sarah grows up with her mother in Berlin. The relationship with her “second home” is slow in growing, partly thanks to Luana, Sarah’s baby, whose father Eduardo is also from Mozambique.

Eulidio still remembers the Lubmin nuclear power plant. Today he fries chips in Springs, South Africa. Meanwhile, Sarah only knew her father from a photo for the longest time: rather cool-looking, wearing a cap. She met him for the first time when she was eleven and felt how comfortable she was surrounded by people whose skin is as dark as hers. As an adult woman she decides to spend some time in Mozambique – and meets Eduardo. On the flight back she’s pregnant. This documentary observation by Brenda Akele Jorde deals with Sarah’s attempt to weave together and spin out threads that were torn by the fall of communism. And it shows the challenges this brings: While Sarah is confronted with racism in Germany, in Africa she’s regarded as a German. While once her father Eulidio was expelled after the fall of the Berlin Wall, now it’s Eduardo who sees his daughter only sporadically.

The day is dwindling, and the world is exhausted. The hour of the great sandman has come. He enchants his clients with grains of slumber while busy helpers fluff up pillows so that everyone who is sleepy may lie softly. At some point, almost everybody is likely to sense that there are more things between night and day than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

On an uninhabited island off the Mexican Pacific coast, members of the army do their uneventful duty. The film watches drills and everyday routines, but mainly the breaks which they spend playing board games in the shade of trees, in hammocks, swimming, flying kites or doing karaoke. The peaceful environment, however, does not hide the violent reality of their country which they are always confronted with, even out here.

In this paradisiacal seeming island landscape, the life marked by gang wars which these young men and women escape for an indeterminate time is visible only in metaphorical images, for example when the calm ocean surges up or when an octopus caught at the beach is slaughtered with bare hands. But in the conversations, the self-descriptions of the military men and women, everything revolves around the reality they grew up in: the brief moment that determines which side you’re on, the constant game of hide-and-seek, kin liability, the cruel consequences of wrong decisions. In her first feature-length documentary film, which is carried by the tension between the visible and the invisible, Mariana Flores Villalba wisely chose not to show the event but its effect.

In the passing busses and trams, people look out of the windows in disbelief. The reverse shot shows a crowd of protesters. Two dozen people perhaps, some holding signs, one shouting “Putin behind bars!” It is a symbolic image of the pathetic state of the Russian opposition. The year is 2017, the war of aggression against Ukraine is still to come. Over a period of several years, “The Last Relic” portrays people from different opposition groups: a student from the Marxist-Leninist “Left Block,” a teacher with sympathies for Navalny; a digger driver demands the redistribution of resources. These activists lack support, but not courage. One of them has just been released from prison and survived a hunger strike. The others must expect to be prosecuted at any moment.

The setting of this film is the Ural metropolis of Yekaterinburg. The bulk of the population, an insert announces, dreams of a “return to imperial glory.” Estonian director Marianna Kaat, born in 1965, has spent a considerable part of her life in the Soviet empire. She shows the majority society as a uniform crowd at military parades, contrasting it with the individuals of the opposition. Few films offer such insights into the latter’s continuing precarious situation.

A pop art-punk-psychedelic trip into the life and rich fantasy world of a young 1970s London housewife. Marcia is mesmerised by the astonishing mountain of folds in the bedclothes where the tiny, almost invisible tribe of the mites lives, and drawn into a conversation with the ghost of dirt. But stop, her zeitgeisty-feminist friends are coming over for morning coffee.

Welcome to real life, little mole! Incited by a television report, the comfortable coexistence of the gardener and the builder of mounds is threatened, and not just that, so is the mole’s cosy home underground. Rarely did the colourful Czech animation series for children show such a serious and brutal fight for existence.

Without a working memory, the former sailor Jimmie is unmoored in time. Fragments of his former life and his younger self appear like islands on the horizon, glide by, disappear in the depths. The older Jimmie does not recognise himself and is frightened by the “strangers.” He gets lost in space and sinks into the empty background.

She opens her arms wide: “I want to go home, do my dreaming.” Crossing from an unbearable reality to the world of magic sometimes takes only the snap of a finger, sometimes several press-ups. Gudrun Krebitz’s poetic combination of video and animation recommends pushing the gravestone aside and descending into one’s subconscious.

In 2018, a user called AnathematicAnarchist published a suicide note in an online forum for incels – a subculture of heterosexual men whose self-pity, misogyny and fantasies of violence dominate the internet in many places and trigger offline actions in some. Did he really take his own life? Is America responsible for his death, as he claims in his text? A search for clues in the darkest corners of the net, an essay about pain and loneliness in the age of algorithms.

The carelessness of Western consumer society follows the absurd conviction that humans can live independently of nature. The earth’s resources are being used up without asking how they can be replenished. This VR parable tells of a past in harmony with what sustains, surrounds and nourishes us. We find not only devastation and destruction, but also hope.

Traumas have often inspired filmmakers to contrast a documentary narrative with visual alienations. Asmae El Moudir chooses the form of a doll-populated miniature of the Casablanca neighbourhood where she grew up. In 1981, before she was born, a massacre took place there. The police and the Moroccan king’s military forces shot hundreds of participants of the so-called bread riots, who were protesting against continuously rising food prices. The detailed small-scale models – El Moudir’s father, a bricklayer, built the big versions with stone and cement! – may illustrate the events, but they also mark the distance to a history that lacks images and has long been concealed in Morocco.

The lack of images is mirrored in the family context. Why are there no childhood photos of her, the director wonders. Why does her mother finally present her with a single picture which, however, shows another girl? This film, cleverly constructed in every respect, finally gathers the family members around the miniatures of their neighbourhood. The constellation does not promise a collective truth, but, at least, a dispute of memories.

“No freedom without dwarves!” What form of oppositional logic can take hold when nothing is logical anymore? “The Orange Alternative” has answers. When living conditions in communism reach the threshold of the surreal, the protest movement that sprang from student circles decides to subvert the order of the regime by Dadaist artistic interventions.

A door that has been closed for seventy years serves as a MacGuffin in Mila Turajlić’s double portrait of her mother and her mother country of Yugoslavia. That very door has divided the bourgeois family apartment ever since Tito’s communists assigned several rooms to proletarians in need of shelter. Srbijanka Turajlić never cared a fig for her neighbours. But when Serbian nationalists began to threaten the unity of her country, she turned into a fierce opponent of the Milošević regime. In a virtuoso montage of archive material and conversations with her mother, the filmmaker recaps the latter’s development while gaining a new perspective on the time of her own youth.

It has been said that the baroque artist Diego Velázquez didn’t paint figures, but the air and light between them. And one could say about this film that it is not Velázquez’s larger-than-life painting “Las Meninas” that is the subject, but the penetrating gaze with which it looks back at his viewers. Among the many clever minds that discuss the artist and the intricate structure of this painting’s composition, it is curiosity itself that somnambulates here.

“Paintings aren’t movies, they’re paintings”, insists art critic and historian Svetlana Alpers. She’s right, of course – and then again, she isn’t. She’s one of the renowned talking heads interrogated by director Andrés Sanz Vicente to solve a crime. But who or what actually died? Perhaps our ability to see, as Alpers claims? For around 400 years, Diego Velázquez’ painting has been exposed to the eyes of its public, the analyses of its scientifically advanced critics who have racked their brains over who on the canvas enters through which door and why. “The Painting” is a continuation of this painting-eye-encounter with the means of cinema. The air and the light between the concrete thing and its passionately glowing aura are captured. In this, but only in this, a painting can be a movie after all.

An abandoned amusement park offers a secret real-life retreat for young people in Casablanca. They escape their restrictive society digitally into the Internet to soak up international trends and amplify themselves. A camera floats through the tableaux vivants they have formed. Their eyes are frozen, the self-chosen poses seem undead.

The Bytom area was once known for its coal mines, but structural change has caught up with it, too. The decline of the region is vividly demonstrated by the pawnshop of the Silesian city. Probably the biggest of its kind in Poland, the shop has seen better days. Jola and Wiesiek, the idiosyncratic operators, are each trying in their own way to cope with the crisis and revive business.

The closing of the mines and the resulting unemployment in Bytom left behind all those who were unable to adapt to the new age. In the huge hall, they put increasingly absurd and worthless objects on the counter. The once lucrative trade in jewellery, electric devices and furniture has dwindled and however hard the employees work, the till stays empty. The wiring is unsound, nerves are raw and the tone between them gets rougher. Before they know it, the small business has turned into a kind of counselling centre: drying tears, ladling out soup and giving away goods instead of selling them. Jola in her voluminous fur coat always has an open ear and a warm blanket ready. Wiesiek devises one marketing scheme after the other. But will it be enough to save their business? A documentary report from the “Polish Detroit”, observed with delicacy and pitch-black humour.