Free-floating yet rigorously structured, this essay film presents botanist and educationalist Catharina Helena Dörrien and her time in Orange-Nassau in the 18th century. Via regulations and floral formulas, nature philosophy and social policy converge.

Greatness paired with modesty: 93 years old and a daughter, world-famous director Lana remembers her mother Nutsa, Georgia’s first female filmmaker. A cinema legacy that revolves around being human in dark times: feminist, loving, critical of violence.

Narges Shahid Kalhor is a director seeking to be rid of the “Shahid” (martyr) in her name which is too heavy a burden. From Bavarian bureaucracy and therapy to dancing with Iran’s past generations and their long shadows, she twirls through a heady autofiction.

Meena stubbornly refuses to speak. She loves a man from a lower caste. Her family thinks she is possessed and the spell is cast out of her. The day begins, a road movie starts, as religious fervour and insane misogyny are narrated in passing.

Three sisters on the Canary Islands, their everyday lives infused with a magical, meditative lyricism. Three life strategies without a breadwinner, narrated via the body, a mix of staging, observation and memory. Before the volcano, serenity arrives.

Young biologist Jura still lives with his mum and witnesses arson while looking for marmots on the Kherson steppe. As he tries to make what happened public, he ends up entangled in shady affairs. A surreal, self-critical satire on media and politics.

A rich American-Korean family has been cursed. When their ancestral vault is opened, something is released. A pair of shamans, a geomancer and an undertaker try to tame the spirit with pig head and horse blood rituals in this horror mystery thriller.

Eryang has turned his Beijing cave into a private micro-club with fine music and a mezzanine bed for love. No space at all, but lots of time to kill, with passion and psychedelics. They drink and ponder money, Communism and the cosmos.

Invited by the then 74-year-old James Danaqyumptewa, two Swiss artists come to witness and document the non-violent resistance of the Hopi in Arizona, combining sketches, photography and animation. At once a message in a bottle and a cry for help.

An ample community of cats has set up home around the Shinto shrine in Ushimado. Some local residents take care of them, others are disturbed by their mess. Kazuhiro Soda observes their co-existence with kindness, precision and occasional involvement.

Eryang has turned his Beijing cave into a private micro-club with fine music and a mezzanine bed for love. No space at all, but lots of time to kill, with passion and psychedelics. They drink and ponder money, Communism and the cosmos.

Twenty years after Swiss publishing house Pendo closed its doors, the descendants of its founders repeatedly circle, examine and lose sight of its legacy. Frölke’s film gives structure to this archive via media experimentation.

A painterly Romanian landscape around 1900. A Jewish man named Leiba runs the village inn, a meeting point for Christians and Jews alike, although the conviviality masks racism and anti-Semitism. Between Passover and Easter, a spark.

The ensemble of buildings that makes up the maternity clinic and art school in Hamburg where the director taught is the starting point for this sober interrogation of how motherhood and career can be combined based on three generations of German women.

Three sisters on the Canary Islands, their everyday lives infused with a magical, meditative lyricism. Three life strategies without a breadwinner, narrated via the body, a mix of staging, observation and memory. Before the volcano, serenity arrives.