The Nepalese shaman Lil Bahadur and his granddaughter Hima have dedicated themselves to the revival of his native language, Kusunda. It’s about more than communication, namely identity, tradition and awareness of one’s own history. The interactive voice-control of this VR experience allows us to learn Kusunda ourselves. We learners become human archives of an all but lost indigenous language.

The chalk chases the shadow. Once it is captured, only traces of the game remain. Drawing, erasing, drawing again on a porous surface. Like on a sloppily wiped blackboard, shades of images that have long ceased to exist shine through. Špela Čadež stages a race between fleeting and manifest forms that – at least in terms of film theory – knows no winner.

A pain in the heart, never-drying tears and turned heads are hard to treat, but fortunately not incurable. In X-ray images and tissue samples, on examination couches and in waiting rooms, always under medical supervision, Špela Čadež’s puppet animation studies the difficult-to-diagnose lovesickness. An animated physiological case study.

As a pioneer of Neo-Andean architecture, Freddy Mamani Silvestre attracts attention far beyond the borders of Bolivia. His non-conformist designs are influenced by the culture of the Aymara, the biggest ethnical group in the country, echoing their myths and patterns. Buildings constructed between 2008 and 2021 are circled, inspected and captured, in part 35 of the ongoing series “Photography and beyond”.

Like giant jewels, the Cholets rise into the sky above the Bolivian city of El Alto, at 4,000 metres above sea level. Cholets, a neologism created from chalet and Cholo, the local term for indigenous people, are the creations of architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre, born in 1971. Several dozen buildings designed by him adorn the otherwise fairly unglamorous city otherwise mainly dominated by raw red brick. Mamani’s built fantasies, on the other hand, are striking, arrogant and bold. Snakes seem to be slithering up their facades, scattered diamonds cling to the glazing and occasionally the whole thing is crowned by a stand-alone residential building. But the Cholets are mainly used for festivities, because they house the so-called “salones de eventos”. Emigholz unlocks psychoactive places that evoke the interior of pinball machines and, in their confident splendour, triumph over the richer neighbouring city of La Paz.

Lukas Marxt’s fourth film about the Salton Sea in Southern California focuses on 1944/45, when about 150 dummies, replicas of the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were dropped there for ballistic tests. “Marine Target” measures the remains of the wooden target platforms from up close and high above. The disconcerting soundtrack to this fascinating filmic study is provided by a swelling adaptation of the Nigerian hit “Atomic Bomb” by William Onyeabor.

Daily life at the tailor’s shop is so tumultuous that sometimes you need to cheat a little to cope. Imagination and spontaneity will not always be enough. When the tailer feels unobserved, he tends to let his brain do all the work. But what happens when love enters the scene and thoughts get out of control?

The black circle becomes a round creature, becomes a worm, becomes a whale, becomes a swimmer, becomes a little deer. Coloured shapes playfully flow in and out of each other and transform. But before you can get dizzy, the little deer winks and runs away. A film that shows that everything is made up of many parts and that ultimately, we are all connected.

Ginkgo trees are separated by sex; only the female trees bear fruit. Once highly esteemed as natural sources of health, city dwellers today object to their pungent smell and, as gardeners, prefer the less complicated, more fragrant “fruitless” male plants. Tang Han explains with infographics, apt short sound comments and sympathetic objectivity.

There’s probably no other citizen of Gelsenkirchen who has ever mastered Nō singing and playing the Shakuhachi flute as authentically as Uwe Walter. He has lived in the mountain village of Miyama north of Kyoto for three decades and emulates the local residents, whether they earn their living on the fields, breeding cattle or hunting. People tend their gardens, repair fences to keep away the macaques and grow their own rice. Uwe has become perfectly Japanese, at one with his environment.

However well-suited his Ruhr area wit makes him as a figure of identification, the camera keeps a respectful distance, more reserved than Uwe himself. Only at one point does it come touchingly close: When he is forced to say goodbye to an essential part of his past in the interest of the village community. But the real subject of this film is not the German with his greyish blonde curls but rather that very community, portrayed by Rainer Komers in bittersweet polyphony. It emerges in the children’s games, the adults’ pursuits and the old people’s tales, in the summer downpours of the rainy season, the white moon over the nocturnal village and the blood-red leaves of autumn.

After years of touring together, the Berlin supergroup “Moderat” decided in 2017 to go on a (recently terminated) hiatus. “The Last Days” portrays the three protagonists of “Intelligent Dance Music” at their most human. Black and white images taken around their last concert tour serve as a projection surface for off-screen interviews in which Sascha, Szary and Gernot describe each other, allowing deep insights into their artistic dynamics.

Please note:Stroboscopic effects are used in this film.

A virtual tour of a computer-generated desert landscape and a story of failure: In 1998, the “Oasis”, Palestine’s first casino, opened. The peace-making idea associated with this development project lost out against political reality. Game over – the oasis becomes a multifaceted fata morgana of interviews with employees, operators and guests.

The vast expanses of the Argentinian salt deserts hold one of the greatest lithium deposits in the world. International corporations are mining the “white gold”, robbing the indigenous groups who, since time immemorial, have bred llamas and lived on traditional salt-mining in this area, of precious ground water. In magnificent images and with a narrative approach that combines poetry and agitprop, “Oro Blanco” shows how the indigenous population are fighting against the exploitation and destruction of “pacha mama”. Their resistance needs some heightened awareness on the other side of the world, where lithium batteries are all too often regarded as the cure-all against the use of fossil fuels.

An investigative examination of the colour spaces of the 100 Yuan note reveals a paradigm shift. Officially declared by the central bank to be red, the note bearing the portrait of Mao is, physically speaking, actually pink. This has consequences for China’s political narrative, as Tang Han’s uncompromisingly precise and refreshingly clever cinematic experimental setup illustrates.

The rough, unkempt facades in Prenzlauer Berg – as if the skin had been peeled off the houses, says photographer Tina Bara. Having grown up in a prefabricated building, the young woman was drawn to East Berlin. She quickly got in conflict with the state, just like the artists Cornelia Schleime and Gabriele Stötzer, whom director Pamela Meyer-Arndt questions in her film about memories, traumas and creative genesis.

Stötzer, Schleime, Bara – none of them had it easy in the GDR. One of them ended up in prison for a petition, the other was harried by refused exit permits, all of them suffered psychologically to the point of pain. Spying, abuse and oppression are reflected in the women’s works. Tina Bara’s dark self-portraits, taken in a sparse Berlin apartment, Cornelia Schleime’s paintings denounced as “garbage art”, Gabriele Stötzer’s photo series of women in cut-up dresses and runny make up – testimonies of desperation, but also evidence of the urge for unconditional self-expression. Meyer-Arndt visits the artists, rediscovers places from the past with them and observes the creation of new works. The narratives shock and touch, and at the same time inspire awe for the vehemently chosen paths in life which more than once skirted very close to the abyss.

Slaughterhouses with concrete blades on top, monumental cemetery gates in the plains: Architect Francisco Salamone (1897–1959) shaped the image of the Argentinean pampa around Buenos Aires. In part 34 of his “Photography and beyond” series, Heinz Emigholz once more probes architecture for biographical traces. Salamone, who immigrated from Sicily as a child, realised his ideas between 1936 and 1940, when Mussolini’s Italy re-discovered architecture as an ideological craft.

Axes seem to be buried in the façade of the Coronel Pringles city hall. Elsewhere, stone tree fungi grow. And in front of the Saldungaray cemetery, viewed from the rear, a giant pancake or satellite dish forms, while in front the head of a suffering Jesus protrudes from the concrete. Monumental designs, occasionally incorporating elements of Art Deco or Italian Futurism, towering in the sky and advertising importance. Francisco Salamone worked in the years of the “Década infame”, that infamous decade followed shortly afterwards by the presidency of Juan Perón. The buildings seem inhospitable and full of hubris. They are supposed to herald modernity and progress and yet loomed terrifyingly over the peasantry of the country. Heinz Emigholz documents these intimidating buildings from every conceivable angle.

An Argentinean builder who has built council halls, cemetery gates and abattoirs in the pampa as if from a modernist assembly line. Then a Bolivian architect, whose gaudy functional buildings in the highland defy description and imagination. Last, but not least, a new old palace in the middle of Berlin. Connections are plentiful, none of them edifying. Heinz Emigholz uses them for a pamphlet against stylistic amnesia and historical falsification.

The first film in Heinz Emigholz’s series “Photography and beyond” was released in 1983 and, including the two works screened by DOK Leipzig this year in the Camera Lucida section, there are now 35. But although “Slaughterhouses of Modernity” uses a number of sequences from the other two works, it has little in common with them in terms of form and ductus. While the aforementioned rather minimalist films do without commentary and partly without inserts, this one is characterised by its edgy monologues and courageous use of stylistic inconsistencies. Polemics and black humour are not unusual in Emigholz’s universe. But one has never seen him spoiling for a fight as gleefully as in this complex exploration of German history and its ugly manifestations. Not so much a late work as a new departure.