For the first time in six years, Barbara Morgenstern, pioneer of German-style electronic intimate pop, works on a new album. Her laptop sits on a shoebox, in the privacy of her home she finds first lines and harmonies: “I like to be alone,” one song begins. One by one, musicians join her. Intuitive ideas take shape. A window has opened. Arrangements, rehearsals, recordings follow. Step by step, the music enters public space, images are produced, videos, narratives. Questions arise: New beginning or back to the roots? New Biedermeier or tough political comment? The bigger the band, the riskier the booking. The more crisis-ridden the environment, the more comforting the music-making.
Sabine Herpich shows the creation of a pop album as a working process. Her view is as unpretentious as her protagonist, her quiet observation not interested in story and glamour, but in closeness and comprehension. We understand why someone works as an artist, even if it is never explained. Barbara Morgenstern shares what moves her: “Labour of love / for the rest of the earth / I’m more than certain / that this still has worth.”

Identity is a myth. Berthold Barluschke, an ambitious cog in the GDR foreign trade system, has changed names and roles multiple times. Thomas Heise follows him as he moves house. He once went from Mittenwalde to New York, now he is leaving his family in Paris. A polyglot secret agent with a petty bourgeois background. Barluschke worked for the GDR secret service and the West German Federal Intelligence Service, always anxious to get the most out of it for himself. “What should really be talked about?” the filmmaker asks. The impossible endeavour of getting to the professional impostor using the means of documentary film results in one of the freest, most fragmented works in Heise’s oeuvre. Awarded the Silver Dove at DOK Leipzig but rarely screened since.

The world stands still. Gaudily painted cruise ships lie in the oil port of Augusta on the south-east coast of Sicily. Their lustre fades a little more every day. On the scorched, tinged 16mm film stock they seem as unfit for the future as the refineries visible behind them. When, if not in the early summer of 2021, would the time have ever been riper for reflection and reassessment?! Old, exploitative economic systems that keep people away from Europe and let only raw materials enter are in lockdown. Their future is unimaginable. But is there a way back? To the gentle sound of the waves, the birds and the insects, the smoke of the industrial plants wafts back into the chimneys. But the images have been damaged.