On the trail of the civil rights movement: with typical astuteness and charisma, James Baldwin returns to key locations of protest in the American South and sees old injustices repeated in new legal frameworks.

A semi-fictional correspondence between two women: one goes to Iran in 1979 to topple the Shah; the other experiences the onerous years of Ceaușescu’s Romania. Their biographies run in parallel via images of everyday life and videograms of revolution.

A young woman spends a day in some non-place between town and countryside, has random encounters and watches stones skip over the surface of the river. Tatsunari Ota’s film explores a world without productivity and finds joy in idle time and playfulness.

A prison cell is set up in an empty room on the edge of Paris. Three former political prisoners from Iran re-enact how they were once interrogated and tortured. With quiet scepticism, the film asks whether their experiences can be accessed in this way.

1985 – two years after the end of the military dictatorship in Argentina, leading members of the junta are tried in court. Ulises de la Orden creates 18 succinctly edited chapters from 530 hours of footage, bearing witness to state terror.

A prefabricated estate in Moscow is meant as a transit stop for four young people from Cuba – until Russia’s attack on Ukraine radically shifts their outlook. Moving telephone calls back home provide the structure for Luís Alejandro Yero’s debut work.

When he spies on his partner, Camil discovers something sinister: a cult with white robes and strange rituals. Sebastian Mihăilescu’s experimental narrative cinema plays with myths, gender roles and the set pieces of the horror genre.

At first observational and later hugely personal, Claire Simon’s film is an example of the sheer power of documentary cinema. With a gaze full of tenderness, she explores a gynaecological clinic in Paris to ascertain what it means to live in a female body.

In Burkina Faso, young men search under the earth for gold – and a better future. As a result, 16-year-old Rasmané barely seems like a teenager any more. This mainly observational film follows him into the 100-metre abyss of small-scale mining.

Scientist Edward O. Wilson has named the coming geological era Eremocene. In her analogue science fiction essay, Viera Čákanyová explores this era of loneliness in a dialogue with a virtual alter ego from the future.

Korhan Yurtsever’s feature is the story of a family’s disintegration, but also of left-wing activism in the context of Turkish migration to West Germany. The Turkish censorship office deemed it an insult to “the honour of Germany, our befriended nation”.

Iranian director Saless’ radical style was unique in the West German cinema of the 1970s and 80s. His black-and-white film dissects the disturbed state of an unemployed construction engineer entirely at odds with social norms.