A washing machine less ordinary: The electronic music duo Matmos probes the music making capabilities of the “Ultimate Care II” by Whirlpool and weaves the sounds of its housing, laundry cycle and switches into a beat. Using animation, optical effects and advertising film quotes from the time when fully automatic machines had their breakthrough, a lively piece of music video is created that makes us forget all our laundry worries.

Cristobal, a young fisherman at work outside the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, shares his insights: Fishing is harder than working out. Also, he and the sea are connected by a progressing disease. At night he perceives what can only be grasped from the boat: the chemicals flowing into the water, the smell, the red lights of the steel mill. “Men of Salt” tells of a dilemma: What if you identify with an ecosystem that’s ceaselessly being abused?

Three years before the Watergate affair brought down Richard Nixon, de Antonio exposed the President as a charlatan in this cruel and funny material montage. From an interview in the “Minutes” of the 1972 Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche: Question – “In each of your films, you expose a major American institution […]. Which did you choose for ‘Millhouse’?” De Antonio’s answer – “Nothing less than the traditional political process as a whole. The film is by no means a personal attack on Nixon. To expose a political opponent, all you need to do is rent a hall for him. The film attacks the American system, the credibility of this system, by turning on the perfect symbol of this system, the President.”

Using the Scanimate video synthesizer, da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa del Giocondo embarks on a surreal journey through real and artificial landscapes. In doing so, Toshio Matsumoto projects a kind of fantasy world of electronic images, exploding colour and movement onto his subject, animating Mona Lisa into a shimmering psychedelic vision accompanied by an abstract electronic soundtrack.

In the deliberately chosen style of an old-fashioned field report, a fictional explorer describes his observations on gold-mining in Venezuela. His mission takes him along the Orinoco, from remote jungle mines to industrial zones. His focus stays on the workers and their environment. The titular Moriche palm tree, an edible and crop plant growing along the river, serves as an example for the relationship between humans and nature and their use of raw materials. Paradoxically, the gold-diggers live in harmony with Mother Earth as their nourisher and healer, but at the same time destroy her. As in so many other places in the world, their very survival depends on an economic system inherited from colonialism. The rapid pace of capitalism is in glaring contradiction to the arduous extraction of the gold dust, produced only by slow processes of erosion.
As the narrator drifts along the river and meditates on different contexts, the images work their way through the layers of the complex subject. The immersive poetic journey alternates between observational Bolex shots, hand-drawn illustrations and abstract visualisations of photochemical reactions. Accompanied by a sound design both distinct and elaborate, the lustre of the gold literally glitters from the screen.

Set to high-contrast series of images in black and white that sometimes come to a standstill, the female first-person narrator recites an emphatic speech about her political awakening: her development from an exploited day-worker to a guerrillera fighting against the political and economic influence of the USA on Latin American states, in this case the globally active United Fruit Company and its dominance in Guatemala. “My Country Occupied” is a film in search of a political form, oscillating between rapidly edited agitprop in the spirit of Latin-American Third Cinema, polemically used found footage and rather catchy, folkloristic-looking passages about the country and its people.

“Beware of everything, especially men”, Zelma was told as a rule of thumb for a successful life as a woman. But when you meet the greatest love of all, and it happens to Zelma several times, biochemistry takes over and all advice is forgotten. In an animated musical, Signe Baumane’s protagonist dances her way through promising romantic beginnings, disappointed hopes and failing marriages – only to find out that she had better make the rules herself.

How much does this Zelma have in common with her inventor? Did Signe Baumane, too, meet a Sergey once and was so overwhelmed by noradrenaline, serotonin and dopamine that she simply failed to hear his condescending tone? In any case, the native Latvian and New Yorker by choice is known for using taboos and questionable notions of desirable and permitted, therefore “proper” femininity as a source of friction for her stories. For a long time, she remained faithful to the short form, until she presented her first feature-length animation in 2014 with “Rocks in My Pockets” – also at DOK Leipzig. She follows it up with “My Love Affair with Marriage” – not just in terms of length, but also in terms of the ironic, entertaining and yet serious exploration of the roles that biology and unexamined retold myths assign to women.

Once upon a time there was a town on the banks of the Mississippi. The streets are still lined with neo-classicist Antebellum houses. Horse-drawn carriages full of tourists move through the streets, a travelling organist performs on a truck bed. Time seems to stand still in Natchez. But while the descendants of the European colonists, dressed up as “Southern Belles” in historical hoop skirts, welcome their guests and feed them Southern nostalgia, the façades are beginning to crumble. Built on the shoulders of children, women, and men in chains, the epicentre of cotton capitalism and the second-largest slave market in the US, with 750,000 Black exploited persons, emerged here in the mid-19th century.
This part of the former “Cotton Kingdom” is practically absent from the whitewashed version of history. On the contrary, it is dripping with romanticisation and racist clichés. But people like the Black pastor and tour guide Rev are breaking with this tradition and shattering the nostalgically glorified illusion of an ideal world. Suzannah Herbert directs the clash of different perspectives and characters with an unerring eye for direct and indirect contradictions. At the same time, she exposes a rift in society that extends far beyond the Natchez microcosm.

This film can go on forever. Or at least until we shut it off. A collaboration between a filmmaker, an artist and a machine, this generative film spans the length of the festival. Based on the visual archive and music of Brian Eno, as well as new interviews, this meditative audiovisual experience is created in real time through the imagination of a machine.

Cooking is a wonderful occasion to think, reminisce and talk. And if you have never learned to cook, if you’ve spent your life seeing the place at the stove as a feminist step backwards, then you can only have braised pork ribs while reflecting on your distant first home, your mother. How fortunate then that one can also reminisce in animated form and do it so impressively that the fragrant images make our mouth water.

A background study of a dying amusement culture, filmed in slovenly dressing rooms in front of badly polished make-up mirrors. – Director Yoichiro Okutani follows the Odoriko, the Japanese strippers, through their daily routine between dressing and undressing, between pragmatic approaches to life and eroticism made fit for the stage. Okutani’s cut begins naked: A nude woman descends a staircase, filmed not to advantage but with the brutal ordinariness of routine. One production year and five minutes lie between this – Okutani’s – director’s cut and Mary Stephen’s editor’s cut “Nude at Heart”. But how much more?

The peace of the superpowers is based on “mutual assured destruction”. States can annihilate each other completely with their arsenals. On 13 January 2018, 1.4 million people on Hawaii got a taste of this: A false missile alert text message brought their lives to a standstill that lasted 38 minutes, panic broke out and the nuclear threat suddenly became real.

“There was a body that didn’t want to be human. It didn’t know it belonged to someone. To me.” María Cristina Pérez González opens her film with these poetic and cryptic words, diving deep into the visually powerful, hand-painted animation. Associative rather than narrative, the sad voice pulls us into a maelstrom of remembered fragments that all revolve around the protagonist’s body: A voluminous shape that sometimes eats itself with loathing, stretches until it fills the frame or cowers like a pea – in the blackness of the fluid, generous brushstrokes, but above all in its own fleshy self.
There is the estranged sister who once called the feet of this body ugly. The good friend who disappeared without a farewell. The father who once said that all unhappy women grow fat. And most of all there is this nameless figure that lives in her belly and feeds her depression with a cute grin. As so often in life, the only path to contentment is reconciliation. With the sister, of course, but above all with her own body which does not fit into narrow social norms – but is the only one she has. And with which she can dance, jump, and even laugh quite splendidly once she understands that it is not a monster to be fought.

Quartzsite, Arizona. A town in the middle of the desert which regularly turns into a huge camping ground where up to a million people from the northern US states escape winter. It’s less chilly here, and people of every kind are welcome to rent a plot of dry land for 180 dollars. Ryan Maxey joins them for three seasons in a row, approaching the motley community with an intimate and at the same time soberly observant eye.

Meth junkies, gun lovers, constitution keepers, a trans woman dressed in pink and breeding cuddly pets and white men wearing “Black Guns Matter” t-shirts. People trade everything and help each other. Sometimes it can get rough. But the US-American flag, the ever-present guns and collective prayer are part of life, just like the democratic choice between pancakes and hamburgers. Maxey’s documentary foray takes him through all these lives and lifestyles which he seems to register sometimes with affectionate tenderness, sometimes shaking his head. Despite his critical semi-distance, he is clearly a part of the community he portrays. His film, a collaborative work in some ways, combines shots of this place from different perspectives and different times. Ambivalences persist, which is why all judgement must be preliminary.

The Sand Creek Massacre on 29 November 1864: More than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho were murdered by the U.S. Cavalry. Ignorant hand-downs from the past and the omnipresence of statues glorifying murderers are juxtaposed with an empty museum of indigenous history for which there is no funding. This film against forgetting by a white female director also examines its own position: she talks frankly with descendants of the survivors – many of whom are choosing a scientific approach to history.

To promote the start of season five, Špela Čadež summarises the first four seasons of the legendary US comedy drama show for Netflix. From the streaming provider’s logo to the canteen food through to vomit – Čadež “unravels” her condensed version of the stories from the women’s prison in soft and scratchy wool, yellow as urine and red as blood.