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.

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?

A Soviet figure skater, a female Yugoslav sex partisan, a Vietnam veteran, Father Stalin and the Austro-American orgasm researcher Wilhelm Reich rumble in the belly of this film. Some people believe that Dušan Makavejev invented subversion in the first place. He exploited the gaps of freedom in the Yugoslav brand of socialism and developed an exceptional cinematic model which irritated both the dos and don’ts of the medium as well as those of political unambiguousness. The Western world was amused by this collage of feature, documentary and sexual education that transgressed all boundaries of ideology and modesty, but the tolerance of the Yugoslav censorship authorities was overstrained – at least temporarily. The 1971 screening ban was lifted in 1986. In 1988, Makavejev returned to Yugoslavia from the West.