Spices we didn’t choose, words stuck in our throats, gentle touches we may have missed — can the currents that carry us still be redirected? Four films, four personal worlds in transition — between childhood and coming of age, routine and rebellion, shame and surrender, illusion and acceptance.

In Fabula Rasa (animation, Croatia, dir. Dora Klanac), Špiro grows up in a pot full of spices, where each new flavour leaves a mark and helps shape his world. The River (fiction, Serbia, dir. Uglješa Ranisavljević) takes us to a small village in Vojvodina, where a boy named Mirko spends the summer in the shadow of his father’s absence, while first loves and family tensions quietly ignite his turbulent adolescence. In a Seidlian style, the documentary Everything Else (Croatia, dir. David Gašo) turns classified ads and online posts into a map of loneliness and the human need for connection. And in the German animation Detlev (dir. Ferdinand Ehrhardt), the daily ritual of a man at a gas station slowly crumbles under the weight of accumulated shame and the gaze of a witness.