“Which side are you on?” sings Florence Reece, an icon of the miners’ movement in Harlan County, Kentucky, with a brittle voice into the microphone at a union rally. Barbara Kopple’s long-term observation of the 1973 Brookside strike might even be called a music film. Because aside from Reece’s classic strike anthem, song and speech, folklore and politics, rhythms of speaking and editing are combined throughout: a successful attempt at partisanship that appeals to all the senses, where slogans are absent – or put into song. “Harlan County, USA” was presented in a special screening at the Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche in autumn 1977, its fame having preceded it: It had already won the Oscar for Best Documentary Film in April of that year.

On a light blue sheet of paper, a grid emerges which is immediately overgrown by an organic dark surface. Grid and surface seem to enter a symbiotic relationship and, merged into a whole, to try out a new shared form. Geometrical possibilities between two-dimensionality and depth, control and instability are acted out.

This film is part of the international “Happiness Machine” project that explores the idea of the “Economy for the Common Good” – a slogan created by Austrian activist Christian Felber. In “Hierarchy Glitch”, a web constrains the free movement of shapes and sounds. When the matrix dissolves, connection and direction are lost. But soon they re-form organically.

This experimental animation shows the enigmatic shapes and colours of cultured crystals. Their production, once an indispensable basic process of material science and research, has lost its scientific usefulness today. But the beauty of the resulting objects has no expiry date. Enlarged, sorted and arranged, the crystals become art.

Something pulls us into the deep. We plunge deeper and deeper into the centre of the image, into swelling liquids, through lakes of circling colours, through the cracks in the paper. A tactile film that brings us into contact with colour and material textures – irritatingly sensual and strangely familiar. The sound opens the horizon of interpretation: It is a journey across a female body.

The dew drips promisingly from the leaves. Ayla wakes up in a beautifully flowering, lush landscape. A new mountain range arises in the distance. The summits: a smiling woman’s head. Ayla sets out towards it. The hills are the supportive nipples, the downy hair on the forearms is the grass she tenderly strokes with her fingers. When she sees a small dense forest on the horizon, she knows where she must go to find the ultimate fulfilment.
Luma Flôres shows Ayla’s self-exploration as an exquisite sensual and tender journey in intense colours. The discovery of her own body and lust are intertwined with the discovery of another, also female body. The intense sensuality remains metaphorical but vivid to the end – for example, when Ayla discovers her lover’s lap as a natural fountain in which she first dips her fingers and then her whole head and body. When the two are at last united in the water and sleep with each other, the animation changes from concrete representation to abstraction – which in turn bursts in the sky like fireworks. Flôres resolves her metaphorical dance only in the final moments of the film: The two women kiss, drift on the water. The fine art of love, but also the simplest, most natural thing in the world.