An added title like a lead weight. Four words from Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel “Malina” set the tone: “There is always war.” Who could ever accept this?! And who hasn’t long since come to terms with it?! “Tremor” is a harsh film in vibrating black-and-white images and a choir of voices from offscreen, as compelling as it is implacable. This continuing meditation on great brutalities, small impositions and omnipresent conflicts takes us to task. But it releases us not into short-lived outrage but into lasting rage. At the end an Afropop song by Jupiter & Okwess International: a song about crying and suffering – and fighting.

The semi-autobiographical account of a European plantation manager on Sumatra during Dutch colonial rule becomes a starting point for reflections on the structure of the plantation itself. An essay about local tobacco and rubber cultivation, the construction of skin colour as a social category and the "tropic fever” which rises slowly but inexorably, edited from archive material dating from 1890 to 1930.

While the transaction tax collectors seem to be dancing to jazz music, a pointedly staged text passage by Patrick Chamoiseau lets not only our visual and auditory but also our olfactory senses unfold: The third-largest Nigerian city can be experienced by smell. In this rhythmic portrait of life in Ibadan the urban cinematic poetry is by no means at odds with the profundity with which it captures themes like lack of perspective, globalisation and corruption.

Forty kilometres outside the small town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, in the middle of the desert, lies “Spaceport America”, the first private space mission launch centre. People there have been dreaming of tourism in space for the past decade. Hannah Jayanti observes the people of the town who live in the shadow of such great ideas. She tells of tiger bites and scrap collectors, of sparkling stones, of trailer life and how painfully the past still affects the present.

A shimmering shoal of herrings are swimming through the wide ocean when they are suddenly broken up by seagulls. Separated from the shoal, a small herring ends up all alone in a tidal pool. Looking for a way out, he encounters many other marine creatures. Some scare him. But there’s no time for this now: Only by joining forces can they defend themselves against the hungry seagulls.

Do computer-generated figures now look as “real” as “genuine” humans? For 26-year-old Lale, this question is not only exciting in theory, but in practice. She works as a model but would rather spare herself exhausting shoots by getting an avatar. But when she has taken the first steps towards “doubling” herself, she has second thoughts. What does it mean, in actual, legal and moral terms, to bring a virtual duplicate of oneself into the world?

An uncle you’re never sure you would like to have yourself but for whom you still shed hot tears when he will have died in the end. The essential material of this touching story – apart from the clay the figures are made of – is empathy. This melancholy farewell to a cranky old geezer deals with a small subject. But it’s about everything.

According to mythology, Prometheus was bound to the rocks of Mount Kazbek, more than 5,000 metres high and covered in ice. For Vakho, this mountainous region in the Georgian Caucasus is a self-chosen exile – out of deeply felt guilt. 48 years ago, he lost his brother in tragic circumstances that had previously come to him in a dream: “I couldn’t let go of the past”, the man, now in his eighties, explains in this visually impressive debut short film portrait.

Poznań, June 1956: For a long time, the “forgotten uprising” in which dozens of people lost their lives was a taboo in Poland. It was only in the mid-1980s, in a period of liberalisation, that Marek Drążewski could make this astonishingly frank review, in which he condenses the dramatic events using private photos, footage and memories of contemporary witnesses.

A look back on Hungarian history ends in the bloody present of October 1956: The suppression of the uprising in Budapest, filmed from the point of view of those affected. The material was smuggled abroad and assembled there by refugee filmmakers. A direct contemporary document which at the end reflects the powerlessness of the West: Nobody came to help.

Around 1,500 people from more than forty countries met in Dresden for the 1984 congress of UNIMA, the Union Internationale de la Marionnette. Founded in 1929, UNIMA claims to be the oldest international theatre organisation and has been promoting the global development of puppet theatre to the present day. This Kinobox item offers affectionate impressions of the high art of puppetry.

Our memory is not to be trusted; it is interwoven with wishful thinking, dreams, romanticisations or repressions, superimposed or replaced by accidentally glimpsed images. If you want to make sure of your history, you might seek out the places of your childhood or youth to embark on a journey into the past. But what if those places are long gone, themselves as fleeting as the memories of them?

Director Won Taewoong was born in 1981, at a time when the city of Seoul, devastated in the civil war, was rapidly developing. Under the South Korean military dictatorship rice paddies turned into business and residential areas, multi-storey department stores with long escalators and attractions for children were built. In front of the Universe Department Store in Cheonho-dong on the eastern outskirts of the city, a space shuttle was erected that made the children’s imaginations run wild. But while modernisation was picking up speed, most of these malls closed down again after a few years. “Universe Department Store” is an attempted reconstruction. In conversations with peers whose memories often show enormous discrepancies and in hypnosis sessions, the director gets to the bottom of what memory is and discovers a dazzling universe between fact and fantasy.

Two women take the ferry to an island cemetery to tend to a gravesite. With the utmost care and perseverance, they remove moss and candle wax from the stone, wash and scrub every chink, trim flower arrangements and set up lights that flash in different colours at night.

It is a work of mourning under special circumstances, as Sara Jurinčić makes plain in an early shot: She edits two picture galleries next to each other, one of male, the other of female portraits. The men suddenly vanish from their photos and thus from the island. The faces of the women remain. And it is these portraits, motifs chosen by themselves for their gravestones, that dominate the film, give a face to its experimental explorations of female genealogy. Jurinčić wraps them in visual metaphors of extraordinary intricacy, sometimes literally as in the spectacular finale, when the portraits of the dead women are superimposed on the faces of the living women – with an eerie effect that is as disturbing as it is sublime.

The towns and villages along the Peruvian section of the Amazon can’t be reached by road. If you can’t afford to take the plane, you travel by cargo boat on the river for days. As a means of transport, the boats are part of an important infrastructure: While the steamships of the “rubber barons” used to travel this route during the brutal rubber boom, cargo boats now bring goods to the communities on the edge of the rain forest.