The actor Hiam Abbass, who lives in France, is one of the greatest movie stars from the Middle East. She played leading roles in the award-winning films of Israeli director Eran Riklis, acted in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and recently in the U.S. hit series “Succession.” She served on the juries of the big Festivals in Cannes and Berlin, presented her own directing debut in Venice. But she is also a mother, daughter and sister in a large Palestinian family full of resourceful women. In this real role she steps in front of the camera in her daughter Lina Soualem’s work and travels back to her hometown of Deir Hanna in northern Israel – an Arab village in the Jewish state.

“Don’t open the gate to past sorrows,” the director quotes a kind of family dogma. It refers, among other things, to the family’s traumatic expulsion from Tiberias, the city on the Sea of Galilee, in the 1948 Palestine War. But with her confrontation of the family history, Soualem also opens gates to past joys and allegedly discarded identities. Between home videos, historical archive footage, photos and letters, Abbass is a touching and approachable screen presence as she returns to her roots. The long shadow of her origins also falls on a woman of the world.

The Huerta Valenciana is a unique cultural landscape of fields and plantations. For generations this region, mainly planted with perennially rotating crops of tigernuts, artichokes and onions, was regarded as the vegetable garden of Spain. “Camagroga” is a filmic elegy about peasant pride and how it is inscribed in the physiognomies, gestures and postures of the people behind these agricultural products.

Tardor, as autumn is called in the Valencian regional language, is the season when the tigernut straw is burned on the fields to make the winter harvest of the nut-sized bulbs easier. Antonio Ramon and his daughter Inma run a farm of just under four hectares north of Valencia – hardly a profitable size nowadays. And yet they apply a surfeit of care and traditional knowledge to their products, seemingly following the impulses of their vegetative nerve system rather than a deliberate programme. Ever since their fields were also identified as prime real estate in the development plan of the expanding provincial capital, however, they have known that the battle zone has already reached their barn door.

Two different planets: men and women. What used to be one in paradise was divided by original sin. Ever since then, the sexes have been facing each other in conflict, all the while consumed with longing for a reunion. Expectations are high, the excitement is immense, the imagination is boundless. A day in the garden of carnal delights – from ecstasy to exhaustion and back.

It could be called a portrait or a composition with text and sound. Ulrike Meinhof’s “Letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing”, written in prison in 1972/73, a document of detention in thought cascades, lends structure and weight to fifteen minutes of film. The apparently black background is dimly animated at intervals, hinting at a nocturnal outside or an area near water. This attempt to communicate the sensory deprivation resulting from isolation attempts what’s actually impossible, pushing towards abstraction, harsh, brutal, dry. Any narrative “grease” is discarded. There is no space at all, hence not for a narrative, either.

Everything seems neat at first in Randa Maroufi’s performative reconstruction. Cars form orderly queues; market women tie up their baggage. On the monotonous grey background, the scenes appear schematic, like a blueprint where suddenly everything becomes graphically condensed. Everyday life at the border between the Spanish exclave of Ceuta and Morocco, which is crossed illegally by all kinds of goods.

This musical, richly detailed 3D animation is based on a Slovenian folk tale which tells the story of a peasant couple from wedding to death and is also the story of a lifelong deception: Day by day, the wife serves chicory coffee substitute, though her bully of a husband demands real coffee. Everyone knows about the swindle; he is the only one who remains clueless.

There are children, too, among the Palestinian insurgents. For some time now, the Israeli side has observed minors who take an active part in an Intifada, especially with knives. They are harshly dealt with: prison, hardly any judiciary support. Ada Ushpiz, filmmaker and journalist, comes surprisingly close to some of the Palestinian families concerned. She has accompanied the dubious insurgents over several years and witnessed terrible pressure.

Freshly released from prison, 12-year-old Dima encounters a crowd of television people. A few months ago, she was caught with a knife. The attack was said to be aimed at Jewish Israelis. Now, in a frenzy of camera flashes, her mother stands close by her side. But instead of offering protection she assumes the role of an agitator, demanding that her daughter report how she was treated by the Israelis. But Dima remains silent. Her family describes the pubescent girl as mentally handicapped. Dareen is younger than Dima and lives with her brothers, father and a few snakes in the immediate vicinity of their Israeli neighbours. Soldiers stalk the house, sometimes stones fly, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, is allegedly involved. In her astonishing film, Ushpiz shows a life in constant tension. Her approach is unapologetic and familiar.

What do the Algerian war of liberation and Yugoslavia have in common? Stevan Labudović. In 1959, Tito himself sent his favourite cinematographer to Algeria. The resistance against the French colonial rule needed the eyes of the world, and the experienced partisan Labudović helped open them: His images gave the lie to the propaganda of the occupiers and their Western allies. This is a portrait of the man, the mission and the age – as film, ideological and personal history.

For three years, until the Democratic Republic of Algeria was proclaimed, Labudović put himself and his camera at the service of the people fighting for independence. Mila Turajlić found the newsreel footage shot at the time in the Filmske Novosti archive in Belgrade, got in touch with the aged pensioner and followed his trail. From a wealth of archive material, diary entries by and interviews with Labudović, with contemporary witnesses from Yugoslavia, Algeria and New York, where the young Maghreb state, like many other former colonies, struggled for admission to the United Nations, she distils the promising origins of an alliance that stood at the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was to oppose the dichotomy of the superpowers. Thus the bow to her compatriot also gains global political topicality.

Soft clouds of light rotate, fan out and change colour: With his cosmic “Luxograms”, Pawłowski radically rethinks the Lumières’ serpentine dance and dematerialises the moving body. It exists neither on a real stage nor in the shape of a real dancer but solely in the projection with a sophisticated system of optical lenses.

To the film enthusiast Marshall Tito, who had his own projection room and employed a full-time projectionist, cinema was also a means to consolidate socialist Yugoslavia. Filmmaker Mila Turajlić, on the other hand, raised in a state that was falling apart, draws on the wealth and glamour of Yugoslavian cinematography in her first long film to better understand her own history. In a clever montage of interviews and film clips, she tells stories of nation-building and images of a nation, but also of how the collapse of the film industry after Tito’s death heralded the collapse of her country.

Who hasn’t?! You arrive in a foreign land, ready to embrace the world, but the world refuses to be embraced. Tomoko from Japan travels to London. She is well-prepared, works hard on a language course and has brought her goldfish to fight homesickness. And yet she feels lonely and unable to utter a word when spoken to. What to do? How about a slight change of perspective?

Clown*esses are more than jesters; they hold a mirror up to society. They move between the worlds and like to break rules, albeit with a wink. At the same time, clown*esses are contradiction experts by nature, because they know on the one hand that life is far too short to be sad, and on the other hand use their art not only to entertain us but to make oppression and violence visible and attackable.

The artists portrayed in this film, for example, look closely at patriarchal structures and learned social behaviours. When Gözde in her unerring performances questions and satirises the images of women still prevalent in Turkey, this critique is rooted in her own experience – and that is precisely what makes it so funny. Lokke from Germany, on the other hand, emphasises the transformative aspect of clowning that allows them to try out different identities and characters, to refuse being pinned down and to ridicule stereotypes. Jana Rothe’s cogent short portrait presents these and other clownesque attitudes towards the world. It makes you wonder how in the world we ended up sacrificing fun and subversion to rationality in our daily lives.

Mies van der Rohe revolutionized architecture with his radically reduced formal language of clear lines and transparency. Claudia Larcher pieces together his building elements – frames, columns, banisters –, makes them rotate around their vertical axes, multiplies and superimposes them until a dizzying compression is achieved which supplants the enclosed space and thus transparency.

Painting, virtual sculptures, technophile hybrids of reality and illusion – Aaron Jablonski has been creating mobile face filters for social media channels since 2018. Sometimes they form a confusing swarm of echoes around a head, sometimes they come as spiky digital punk. His immaterial masks, hovering between fashion and art, conceal as much as they reveal about their wearers.

In 2015 a fire breaks out in the Bucharest club “Colectiv”: 27 dead, 180 injured. But for the survivors of the disaster, the hospitals become death traps, as many die of wounds that are not considered life-threatening. A doctor turns to the press. The research uncovers one of the biggest scandals in Romania’s health care system. This powerful film offers insights into the work of the investigative journalists, lets whistle-blowers speak and gives the survivors a voice.

A Malay fairy tale tells of Sang Kancil, the wily mouse deer that crosses a river by persuading the crocodiles in it to form a bridge for him. Inspired by this story, Zhang Xu Zhan, one of Taiwan’s most distinguished young artists, in his latest stop-motion animation depicts the crossing of the river as a breakneck shaman dance in the deep jungle where acrobatic skill replaces cunning. Spurred on by drummers on the bank, guided by ringing bells, the costumed creature, half human, half animal, leaps from crocodile back to crocodile back, always in danger of losing more than feathers.

Despite the overwhelming complexity of the animated scenery, the hand-made papier-mâché figures recall the seductive power of traditional Javanese Wayang shadow theatre. Its fixed backdrops are transformed here into an extremely fluid world of continuous transformation and metamorphosis reflected in oddly shaped mirror shards, giving us an idea of what it would be like to see through compound eyes.