Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, the region of Abkhazia has been acting independently of Georgia. This has turned a massive dam into a border. But the hydroelectric power station also connects the two political entities: Because over a distance of fifteen kilometres the water flows freely, underground, from one side to the other. When a young journalist gets stranded here, stories of division emerge.

On the way back from a reportage trip to the dam, director Maradia and her cameraman’s car breaks down. Ika takes care of them. For decades, the joyous engineer has worked – in cooperation with his colleagues on the Abkhazian territory – on the maintenance of the plant. Maradia, representative of a whole generation of Georgians who know this place of longing on the Black Sea only from stories, becomes curious. But while the workers take the bus across the border every morning, the film crew is thwarted by bureaucracy. Time and again they are denied passage. This turns out to be fortunate for the film, because waiting for the permission, in the cafeteria of the dam, in drives around the river, the stories of people emerge whose lives are shaped by the secession. They talk of legal and clandestine border crossings, weddings and funerals and of life in the here and there.

Narimane Mari dedicates a touching portrait that tells of parting to her now deceased lover, the artist Michel Haas. She captures first and foremost the small, everyday moments – street scenes, working at the studio, watching films together, reading to each other in bed. The absence of a traditional narration, long shots and intense conversations invite us to think about our own relationship with temporality.

A recurring potpourri of poems, prose and music by Nâzım Hikmet, Stéphane Mallarmé through to Sun Ra gives the film its very own leisurely rhythm. The scenes at the studio are carried by this mood, too. As with Jackson Pollock, the art is created mostly on the floor. But Michel Haas works with ink, large-format paper sheets and hot water instead of canvas and thinned paint. Humming happily, he hits the soaked paper with his bare hands until edges, creases and folds form. The abstract outlines and flat shapes are recognisable as figures only when viewed from a distance: Often, they are intertwined couples. A contemplative tribute to love.

An Athenian filmmaker is struggling with insomnia and seeks help from a tarot reader. She says that when she does manage to sleep, her dreams are strange, she dreams of her childhood apartment, where everyone has turned to stone. Yet such surreal thoughts hardly sound outlandish given the current state of Greece: petrified monuments to past glories as far as the eye can see, even as any sort of movement in the present has slowed to a standstill. She sets out to understand this curious paradox, dipping into literature, fiction and documentary to do so, disparate elements given unity by playfulness, political sensibility and shimmering celluloid.
Conversations with locals on the streets of the Greek capital about the nature of statues; the 1944 manifesto by poet Yorgos Makris that proposed blowing up the Parthenon and the groupuscule that now seeks to complete his work; the story of the political prisoners forced to rebuild the same monument in miniature; a rogue Caryatid now discovering love. Such times are hard to make sense of, whether in Greece or beyond, and perhaps there is only one way to proceed, to move forward, to live: everything bit by bit. “When will we gather the world together piece by piece?”

The kidnapping and murder of the politician Aldo Moro; four slashed tyres that were to save a florist’s life; the lost soundtrack to Antonioni’s film “Zabriskie Point”; the meeting of two avant-garde composers; archive material and found footage – these are the elements of this “freely composed” film that is imbued with the city of Rome and juxtaposes the human urge for constant rebellion and the thesis of the end of history.

For the US electronic composer Alvin Curran, whose intellectual and artistic world are at the centre of Éric Baudelaire’s exceptionally rich collage, music is a vehicle that carries us to places we have never travelled before. In Rome, where Curran settled in the 1960s, he met his then considerably more experienced professional colleague Franco Evangelisti, who shocked him with the question: “Don’t you know that there’s no more music to write?” Baudelaire’s congenial montage of image and sound fragments suggests that Curran’s solo work – as well as his collaboration with the pioneering collective “Musica Elettronica Viva” – is the answer to Evangelisti’s question: We have to keep reassembling the world.

Does farmer Ly have dealings with the Chinese, who have recently been tampering with the infrastructure of the village of Sitabaomba, not far from the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo, director Nantenaina Lova asks as bluntly as mischievously. Ly denies it. However, it becomes increasingly clear in the course of “Where Zebus Speak French” that the various development measures, often introduced by foreign initiatives and fuelled by corrupted politicians, also affect him.

Focussing on Sitabaomba, Lova shows over several years how the village population attempt to defend their farmland. Their fight is reminiscent of David against Goliath but doesn’t lead to despondence. Because in Madagascar, a very unique form of artistic, especially linguistic expression has always been cultivated which, at its best, allows people to maintain an inner independence. The commentary is therefore spoken in the style of “Kabary.” This polite, rhetorically sophisticated and sometimes mocking form of speech elegantly circumvents criticism, thus stating it all the more clearly. An artist also visits the village repeatedly and makes stones speak with the children, confirming an attitude Nantenaina Lova describes as follows: “Laughing at injustice rather than crying, resisting rather than pitying.”

On Guadeloupe, an archipelago in the Caribbean, the past speaks up. Sylvaine Dampierre has the workers of an old sugar refinery read passages from the transcripts of an 1842 court case, while the machines roar and groan in the background. The testimonies of the slaves from back then in the rusty halls of today give rise to a polyphony both explosive and poetic in nature.

The “Grande Anse” sugar refinery is a monster from a distant past: Flames like long tongues spew from the furnaces, piles resembling bones everywhere. The workers cut them with machetes in the plantations of Marie-Galante, a tiny island that belongs to the archipelago of Guadeloupe. The long bones, the sugar cane, are the scaffold that keeps everything together here. Sylvaine Dampierre is in the thick of it, shows the pulsating factory and the hard labour that goes on inside. Seasonal workers come and go; the men organize themselves. They are free. There are occasional flashes of the peculiar bond with France, of which this overseas territory is an integral part, but Dampierre foregrounds the transcripts of a court case from almost two hundred years ago, in which slaves testified against their violent master. An act of self-empowerment, whose gestus the director brings into dialogue with the present.