On the occasion of the GDR Landeskulturgesetz (Law on the Conservation and Protection of the Environment), passed in 1970, the speaker explains the various aspects of environmental protection through vivid, visually pointed examples. The film repeatedly refers to the fundamental contradiction between exploitation and preservation of nature in a developed industrial state but is unable to resolve it.

A jumble of emerging history is contrasted with the present efforts to optimise profit through ventures and ominous business ideas. In the midst of this labyrinth is a duo of artists who only want to make films. Their misfortune: the German film funding system allows only those who work in an artistic-documentary style to realise science fiction films. Cause enough to find true science fiction material on real German soil instead of looking for a fiction.

Rothenstein, south of Jena. A mountain, hollowed out and built on. Labyrinthine corridors cast in concrete spread over a distance of more than five kilometres. The film precisely constructs – stone by stone, image by image – a story which, composed as a mirror of German history, touches on archaeological finds from twelve thousand years ago and at the same time projects into the uncertainties of the future. Bizarre energy fields, myths and tales of dragons, plans of U.S. preppers fleeing from the end of the world meet facticities of National-Socialist exploitation and forced labour, stories of flight from the 1930s, and the military history of the GDR.

With no introduction, the audience find themselves in the middle of the film’s subject. Soviet ballet master Arkady Sakharov instructs the children’s and youth dance ensemble of the Radebeul district’s arts centre with an insistent voice. Belarussian, Ukrainian, Uzbek and Russian folk dances are rehearsed under his strict guidance and performed at the packed local arts centre.

“I don’t want to say it out loud, but my flat’s lower down,” the narrator remarks. The camera at first follows her legs climbing up the stairs of the hallway. That is all we see of her. Very soon, her gaze determines our perspective in this unsettling story. At first it all sounds like a mistake, but at some point, the tenant gets used to the fact that in some inexplicable way and completely unceremoniously she is pulled down from the fourth floor to the coal cellar, floor by floor. A decline that the neighbourhood lets happen in deafening silence.

The “falling” protagonist’s irritated soliloquy, sometimes resigned, often full of calculated optimism, is accompanied by charcoal drawings. Their clarity and architectural detail – down to the curlicued decorations of the upper-class mansion – gradually fade over the course of events. The spatial representation becomes more and more vague and is reduced to a few strokes, only to dissolve into soft areas of charcoal dust in the end. In this nightmarish story, reality no longer offers any support, only one’s own ego. Susi Jirkuff has adapted Ilse Aichinger’s eponymous, multilayered story, which was first published in the mid-1950s, with a remarkable urgency that demonstrates the topicality of Aichinger’s text and writing.

On Guadeloupe, an archipelago in the Caribbean, the past speaks up. Sylvaine Dampierre has the workers of an old sugar refinery read passages from the transcripts of an 1842 court case, while the machines roar and groan in the background. The testimonies of the slaves from back then in the rusty halls of today give rise to a polyphony both explosive and poetic in nature.

The “Grande Anse” sugar refinery is a monster from a distant past: Flames like long tongues spew from the furnaces, piles resembling bones everywhere. The workers cut them with machetes in the plantations of Marie-Galante, a tiny island that belongs to the archipelago of Guadeloupe. The long bones, the sugar cane, are the scaffold that keeps everything together here. Sylvaine Dampierre is in the thick of it, shows the pulsating factory and the hard labour that goes on inside. Seasonal workers come and go; the men organize themselves. They are free. There are occasional flashes of the peculiar bond with France, of which this overseas territory is an integral part, but Dampierre foregrounds the transcripts of a court case from almost two hundred years ago, in which slaves testified against their violent master. An act of self-empowerment, whose gestus the director brings into dialogue with the present.

“Y” sensually draws the progress of a same-sex relationship from playful beginning to turbulent end. Charcoal strokes become the language in which the filmmaker tells us of the process of growing closer to and away from each other, of intimacy and estrangement. A shared chapter of life is sketched, corrected and discarded.

But the line also explores the female body. The tip of the charcoal wanders through curves, hills and valleys, circling soft flanks like a finger and gently stroking breasts and hips. In the darkness of the cinema, the eye is free to glide along the emerging and disappearing shapes. We become part of an erotic triangle and are given an intimate insight into the protean psychological and physical aspects of this partnership.

Yaren’s mother died four years ago. This summer she is excited to go to a special camp: a bereavement camp. All the children here have lost someone close to them. In five beautiful and intense days, Yaren and the other kids deal with what unites them all: their pain. A film about loss, healing and friendship.

Sphere, cuboid and potato figure hang out in the playground of grey everyday life. After a literal short trip of the spherical fellow into the gaudy, psychedelic cosmos where colours and forms blur, the only thing to do is to bring along the friends. The three of them pool all their skills in a rubber ball and jump into the new timeless world.

Shots of ordinary life from seven months in Tallinn, where nothing is ordinary in 1988. In the course of perestroika, the people’s national awareness grows stronger and the return to Estonian identity is celebrated by the masses. Soviet occupation must end. Observations from a country in upheaval, commented on with tender irony.

Yasin El Harrouk is Yonii is actor, rapper, singer, Swabian, Moroccan. This portrait presents him as a lively shifter between life and creative cultures, between the roles he plays in the studio and in front of the camera, and the expectations that family and community have of him. Yonii has two languages and even more worlds – and enjoys this wealth. But on the sofa in his mother’s Stuttgart living room, it becomes clear that this range of different worlds also means a constant balancing act.

August 2022, a 360° view of a Ukraine that has been fighting the Russian invasion for six months. In the midst of warfare, a shared solidarity emerges which also releases resistive-creative forces: museums hide collections, a street artist finds his calling, opera companies and rave communities raise their volume when the bomb alerts threaten to drown them out …

Under file entry Z32, the testimony of a former elite soldier of the Israeli army is preserved. He confesses to having participated in the killing of Palestinians. Was it a breach of duty resulting from high spirits, collateral damage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the self-fulfilling prophecy of every military training? Avi Mograbi uses the testimony and his own disturbance as an occasion to re-interrogate the confessor who is made anonymous by image manipulation. He calls his cross examination a “documentary musical tragedy”, because he sings his comments right into the experimental interrogation room: “Oy, I’m harbouring a murderer, oy, inside my film.”

“Zaho Zay!”, it’s me. This is the daily salute of the prisoners in a crowded Madagascan prison whose guard looks for her lost father in each new prisoner. Her projections and fantasies let the mystical, murderous father figure roam the island in simultaneously dreamlike and nightmarish sequences, accompanied by a poetic voiceover. A hybrid narrative, speculating about the mysterious paths and profound traumas of its landscapes and all who walk in them.

A pair of dice, a quiet murderer and his victims, traces of history and magic realism. Rituals and riddles, revenge, remorse and imprisonment are unravelled and re-interlaced between the brutal reality of a detention centre, the fantasies of the fictionalised narrator and the vast natural spaces of an island – slowly and poetically. Crises, colonial violence and its continuities are suggested and condensed. The montage of documentary material and staged sequences references western and film noir and develops an intense visual and narrative pull. An almost lyrical text and the precisely framed images bear witness to an impossible quest that’s actually a haunting, referring to individual and collective traumas and the strange forces with which such shocks inscribe themselves into narratives and places.

Going under or a lonely island life – there is not exactly a surfeit of options in this Polish village by the sea. The community functions, but social intercourse is rough, alcohol present. Archaic-seeming rituals and social patterns are handed down from the old to the young men. Winter envelops the village in white silence which every now and then betrays its deceptive appearance in small things. At midnight on Christmas Eve the voices of the dead and tortured souls ring out. Anka lives in the middle of this. The young woman takes hits, gets up, struggles through with her love of Jesus.

“Zima” portrays a state of suspension with occasional rollercoaster rides and builds up to tremendous emotional power. Colours are rare in the black and white drawings of the winter landscape and the dark houses, but when they appear, they lend great intensity to the events. Scenes of daily routines and village life are associatively interwoven both on the sound and graphic level. They burst with excess and expressive design, transforming into mystical dream images.

In 2043, humanity launches a spaceship called Zoopticon to send a greeting to distant galaxies. Lightyears later, the once proud – loaded with valuable cultural artefacts and lots of hope, after all – ambassador’s spirits sink in the infinite expanse. Loneliness leads to a blundering suicide attempt which jolts the spaceship’s body awake, whereupon the genetic material of five animals from five continents stored in petri dishes unexpectedly comes to life.

Jon Frickey, Sandra Trostel and Thies Mynther brush the science fiction classic “2001” against the grain. Their Zoopticon, a benevolent relative of Stanley Kubrick’s supercomputer HAL 9000, takes a surprising route on its odyssey through space. Their extraordinarily stylish animation starts with a moving monologue of the sensitive protagonist and finds its perfect orbit as a grandiose opera gradually begins to unfold – complete with soulful drama, brightly coloured radiant pop charm and tongue-in-cheek cathartic confidence.

Set theory, one of the cornerstones of mathematics, serves as a metaphor for “social structures as spatial arrangement”, as the first sequence of the film reveals. The visual playfulness first becomes an exploration of two- and three-dimensionality and then turns out to be a well-founded reflection of social power relations. The search for a supposedly correct “order of things” triggers the compulsive element in many viewers. Who’s (not) afraid of being different?