Poland, 1981. Six friends squeeze into an old car that is far too small and set out for the Polish Baltic coast, fuelled by their longing for freedom. The further they come, the clearer the decrepit state of their country emerges. The pension where they spend the night has nothing that could be served for breakfast. Food and fuel are also in short supply elsewhere. There is a shortage of everything. The only thing one can buy anytime and anywhere is booze, which is plentiful. Just like the country, the car also falls apart piece by piece. But the trip continues, past demonstrating crowds, tanks, barricades and armed policemen.
Singing, laughing and carefree, Leszek and his companions finally make it to the sea. Is this the end of their journey? Or should they join the hundreds of thousands who have already left Poland? The borders of the frame, at least, are open. The sparse, fragmented graphic elements on the empty white background hardly seem an incentive to stay. There is no obstacle that could keep the friends from setting off for new shores.

Into a starry sky full of coloured spots! The propellers have been revved up. Accompanied by the drone and roar of the engine, the aircraft takes off. Its mission, to be followed live: compare images, sort out, superimpose, create a visual reality of dots and pixels. A park is requested, but with how many trees? A racy car is dreamt of, but which design is sleek enough? The variables dictated by the pilot determine what appears on the monitor – sculptures of possibilities or morphed set pieces. The tank is filled with millions of continuously flowing images for an infinite number of combinations. But who controls the projected flight path?
Aurelijus Čiupas’s short film essay is a well-considered and not unironic investigation of ethical and philosophical questions. What can and should animation generated by artificial intelligence based on diffusion models do? Pilot Čiupas prescribes “a kind of artificial dementia” to the machine. We can truly watch it come to rest, come to transcendence. The world of images dissolves back into a cosmos of coloured spots.

Lazy and yet insistent, summer knocks on the doors of a Berlin trailer park. Right next to the busy Ostkreuz intersection, this settlement stands in the way of the hectic hustle and bustle of the capital. A green oasis. This summer, among the plants and trees in full bloom and fruit, wild shrubs and lovingly improvised dwellings, Aalo, Jone, Royce, Noah, Kï, Neo, Marlek and Steffen must begin to say goodbye to their cozy home. Liberated from the heteronormative conventions of society, the Mollies collective has for years lived a queer-feminist counter lifestyle here.
Dane Komljen manages with great calm to make this hard-won free space tangible, to capture it as a momentum pointing beyond its own duration – even though the eviction has been long in coming. Building cranes rise to the sky behind the green walls, sounds of demolition come closer, the rattling of trains, the sirens of ambulances mingle with the busy humming of the many insects. What lies in store for the inhabitants is left open. But autumn is bound to come and when the leaves fall, the site will fall victim to the city’s development plans. Another space of possibility for alternative lifestyles disappears.

This animated short film documents a workshop with Mehndi artists in Ahmedabad. While the women work together to create phantastic forms in henna colours, they tell their tutor Isabel Herguera what they dream of: flying, for example, a women’s parliament, or a journey to Switzerland. Samira longs for independence – and makes herself heard with a rap.

Somewhere on the Bosnian-Croatian border. Green hills, forests, fields, a few houses and sheds scattered along the roads. If the territory of the European Union did not end here, it would be a rather unspectacular, interchangeable region. But the seemingly untouched landscape is deceptive – many mines from the Bosnian war have not been cleared yet; war traumas are far from over. Today the paths of migrants and locals cross here, refugees from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq trudge through the area, braving rain and snow in search of protection and a better life. At night you hear their cries from the forests when they are brutally chased across the border. The villagers on the Bosnian side open the old school building to allow their exhausted bodies a moment of rest. But everyday life continues. Wood is chopped, corn harvested, school kids recite poems. The imam calls to prayer. Everything normal, everything as usual.
As a reporter, Nicole Vögele spent several years researching this border region, reporting on the illegal pushbacks of the Croatian police for the “Der Spiegel” news magazine and others. In her film essay, she now takes the time to observe. She does not ask direct questions, giving as much space to the seasons, the weather and the forest as she does to the people.

This still controversial ethnofiction is one of Jean Rouch’s most famous films. It stages followers of the Hauka cult in Ghana incorporating their colonial masters to marching music imported from Europe. The disturbing work was released at the same time as the first Leipzig festival year, but would have gone beyond the scope of the “Culture and Documentary Film Week”. This was because the festival did not adopt an international focus until 1960. Nevertheless, Rouch floats through Leipzig’s festival history as an inspiring genius: He is regarded as the founder of Cinéma-Vérité, a documentary concept that was pursued with great interest in Leipzig, and he irritated the colonial gaze by encouraging African filmmakers to determine the images of their continent themselves.

She opens her arms wide: “I want to go home, do my dreaming.” Crossing from an unbearable reality to the world of magic sometimes takes only the snap of a finger, sometimes several press-ups. Gudrun Krebitz’s poetic combination of video and animation recommends pushing the gravestone aside and descending into one’s subconscious: with overpaintings and superimpositions.

One day, the young mother Christelle panics and runs. Her husband Laurent sets out to find her, baby in arms. He questions her father, sister, friends. Suddenly, Christelle’s disappearance exposes cracks that had remained hidden in a seemingly perfect world. A complex network of relationships turns out to be a fragile house of cards. Dominique Cabrera’s third feature film brings together a magnificent ensemble of actors, all of whom are allowed to express the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of their characters with wit and empathy, above all Marilyne Canto, who plays the leading role here and whom Cabrera cast in four of her five feature films.

The multicoloured dotted record is on the turntable and spins, the handheld stroboscope emits its flashes of light. The mesmerising rain of confetti begins to the beat of the psychedelic organ krautrock celebrated by the Finnish Shogun Kunitoki quartet. A manual for home use that demonstrates how the picture disc, when used correctly, can sweep us off our feet acoustically and optically.

There is something very subtle about the moment when children become adults that it can hardly be put into words. In fact, hidden, almost imperceptible changes suddenly appear that act like tectonic shifts in the human psyche. In her documentary debut, Marie-Magdalena Kochová has managed to capture this subtle move. She documents the life of 18-year-old Johana, who lives with her parents and her younger sister in a small town in the Czech Republic.
The sister has autism. Her health condition is severe and unpredictable. Her hysterical fits and aggressive outbursts dictate the life of the whole family. All the schedules are synchronised so that someone is always with the youngest. The well-practised routine is threatened when Johana decides to apply for a study programme in psychology at the university after her school exams. This means that she will soon have to move to another city, leaving the entire burden on the parents. Kochová shows us a transitional period in anticipation of massive changes, which requires everyone involved to have firm confidence in their own decisions. The mental tension is palpable, but the camera maintains an equalising distance. Step by step, the beauty of a challenged life unfolds, where courage becomes the only measure.

Lines scrawled on white paper with a ballpoint pen. Everything looks like a hastily drawn scribble – a sketch of ideas rather than a finished film, possibly only a quick storyboard. The jerkily connected images show a food stall somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Something extraordinary happens here: Two filmmakers – brother and sister – hire the chef as the leading actor of their project. They are planning a biopic about their father. The fast-food expert is not only the spitting image of the famous man, he is just like him! The casting could not be more apt, the film business newcomer lets them convince him. But the task turns out to be difficult. Though the cook does everything to do justice to this demanding role, he seems less and less suited for the job every day. Completely engrossed in the preparations for the part, he becomes increasingly distant from his own children. The boundaries between the film and the single father’s real life begin to blur. Is it possible that shooting has already begun?

When Hollywood star Errol Flynn appeared on the Leipzig festival screen in 1960, he had been dead for a year. The audience saw him in his last role: as an aged lover – of Havana, casinos and cocktails, as the nemesis of the Cuban liberation movement, which had declared war on corrupt bon vivants like him. The movie swashbuckler rhapsodises about his Cuban counterpart Fidel Castro and nonchalantly moderates the history of the dictatorship and liberation of the island state, cigarette holder in hand.
Did Hollywood call Leipzig to recommend this film? It was probably Moscow, because its world premiere is said to have taken place there in 1959. But how did the self-confessed anti-communist Errol Flynn come to make this declaration of love? Maybe his new friend Fidel did not tell him the whole truth?

Something is wrong. Something is completely wrong. With the sound and with the image. The notes are crooked, the piano lid squeaks, the movement falters. Corrections are needed to bring everything together in harmony and in tune with Johann Sebastian Bach’s beautiful music.
Six roles of painted toilet paper are worked on by human hands on an editing table, one after the other. The editing device consists of coloured building blocks and a few wooden sticks. It is a game, a trick, it’s entertainment. At the same time, the simple images on the film strip take us deep into the current events of our time. But the material resists sharply delineated representation. It soaks up the paint and blurs the boundaries. It tears. It is limited. Before the story can pick up speed, the roll is unspooled. Narrative is difficult in view of this situation. And yet animation artist Anna Samo manages, with a very light touch, to transform ambivalent feelings, confusion, rigidity and speechlessness into a work of hope and courage.

Director Yvann Yagchi, the son of Palestinian migrants, and his Jewish best friend spend a carefree childhood far away from politics on the neutral ground of Switzerland. As adults, both long for religious and ethnic affiliation. Yvann wants to visit Palestine at last and break generations of silence about the fate of his family. His friend moves to a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Thus begins the story of a failed reunion.
With frankness and patience, Yvann’s film, addressed directly at his former closest confidant, documents his own emotional development: Initial optimism and diplomatic reserve soon give way to an underlying unease. When a Palestinian refugee challenges him to give up the platitudes about striving for truth and formulate his opinion clearly, we realise that there can be only one standpoint for Yvann. There is a rift between the friends, vividly illustrated by animated doodles. Reflections on a lost friendship turn into a search for identity, made immeasurably harder by the ongoing destruction of Palestinian existence.

The filmmaker’s grandmother moved into this house in 1971. When Rolande Ségalini died, everything remained as it was during her lifetime. But what to do with all the accumulated things? As her granddaughter Céline begins to film this material legacy, she realises that her grandmother has remained an enigma to her to this day. Room by room, she inventories, classes, counts, sorts the possessions retrieved from wardrobes, drawers, cabinets and boxes and arranges the objects into new still lives. It is an attempt to understand the deceased woman better and find out more about her. Step by step, the heiress discovers various connections to France’s colonial history.
The film unfurls the facets of a discreet relationship with one’s origin – searching, questioning, interpreting, at the same time investigating the construction and external perception of identity, the practice of passing. The things of a life, displayed like the findings of an archaeological dig, are laid out ready to be analysed. They express a desire: to be recognised as a white Frenchwoman.

Will Bishop-Stephens has been working on kinetic sculptures he calls “Thrum” since 2020. Version IX links a bicycle wheel to a guitar. Butterfly wings, snail shells, poppy seed capsules and feathers grow and shrink on the spokes, the guitar strings produce a vibrating drone. The animation and sound machine takes us to a state of floating.