An old family secret is fermenting in the father’s winery in southwest France. The grandfather had been executed by the Résistance in 1944 because he had collaborated with the Nazis. For decades, no one talked about it, daily work continued, from cultivation to harvest, from the wine press to maturation, an eternal cycle. The daughter comes to visit with a camera and a microphone. She remixes the sounds of farming, asks questions, builds openings in the experimental interstices between image and sound for the father to come to himself. Maybe what was buried and ploughed under can be reflected today – if they succeed in breaking the cycle for a moment.

The father has answers. He knows the patriarchal system of agriculture, where neighbours are envious and unpleasant things are quickly interred so they will not be passed on to the children. And yet what was interred has not dissolved completely, over generations. Insects buzz over the soil, something underneath attracts them. A small frog is caught in the wine press with the grapes. And the filmmaker’s daughter looks for a new tune on the old family piano.

Wang Xilin does not enter the stage in a suite, as the title might suggest, but completely naked. He stretches and bends, appears to familiarise himself with his surroundings, does some vocal exercises, sits down at the piano. Wang Xilin is one of China’s most important composers of contemporary music, having written his first symphonies in his youth. Wang Bing gives the 86-year-old more than a little space. For his portrait, he presents him with the entire Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

This is where Wang Xilin reviews his life of torture and oppression, recapitulates the tribulations in communist China, reports knocked-out teeth and nightmares, suicides among intellectuals. His testimony is frequently underlaid, sometimes even drowned out by grandiose musical arrangements. When an orchestra thunders from offscreen, Wang Xilin’s body rears up – “Man in Black” is also an exorcistic oral history. The composer turns himself into his own instrument, into the medium of a violent epoch, sharing his emotions literally unveiled.

The end of real-socialist oppression, doomed love and tacit double morals unfold in colourful felt-pen images and clear lines. Leipzig, 1989. The city still belongs to the blue shirts of the Free German Youth, there is still talk of a flourishing country in festive speeches. Locked away in a mental hospital for belonging to the Leipzig punk scene and abused as “belonging to an enemy faction” that undermines the GDR from within: Margarethe can stand it. Ultimately, however, the lack of briquettes and the cold water in the communal shower make the young woman dream of being close to her boyfriend Heinrich. While the protests in the streets are growing, Heinrich and his band play church-organised punk concerts that hint at the prospect of freedom. But Stasi spies are more present than ever – until the newly gained freedom to travel scatters them to the winds along with the lights of the fireworks.