This Marxist education offensive cast into actions and images is part of a bigger cycle of so-called educational films that, following Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the didactic experimental play, use lucid illustration to fill abstract terms with practical meaning. In fifteen learning unites, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky address the basic concepts of Karl Marx’s main political work, “Capital”, discussing a section that, according to their own statements, they do not consider self explanatory. “The intention is to make a person who is walking think about walking so that he falls down,” as the two filmmakers noted about their project. It remains to be seen whether such a fall also makes the penny drop among the audience.

Picture postcards, travel brochures and holiday photos are all this merrily caustic collage needs to portray moods and desires between the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. In spring 1990, the first Interflug plane carrying GDR citizens touched down on Majorca. About the mediterranean colours of the island, the first-person narrator remarks in the voiceover: “We knew them from the postcards sent by our West German relatives. This was the West, this was West-West.” Ostensibly naïve, her recollections nonetheless develop an ironic undertone. However blue the sea shines in the photos, however loud the castanets play, the travel group with their East German money are never more than onlookers in this half-board paradise. Everything seems like an empty promise: the bursting oranges on the trees, the sumptuous breakfast buffet and the giant hotel pools.

Director Thomas Heise’s brother worked for Mitropa at the Berlin-Lichtenberg railway station for a while. Heise knew that all doors would be open for him there, that he could shoot his graduation film as a master student of the Academy of Arts there. In addition, the 40th anniversary of the GDR on 7 October 1989 was coming up, a holiday on which riots were to be expected. Thomas Heise wanted to bring these two things together: the employees at work between the counter and the kitchen, on the backdrop of the events of October 1989. A sound collage contrasts the statements of the employees in an end-of-time mood with the jubilant reporting of the festivities – a filmic image of the beginnings of the dissolution of the state.

At the turn of 1968/69, the decision was taken to introduce a Leipzig City Express to “relieve inner city traffic as an attractive local passenger transport system”. A forward-looking measure of traffic policy which – at a time when the car-friendly city was still the dominant concept in urban planning – represented an appealing mobility option for the citizens of Leipzig.

“Who are you to change anything!?” Yisrael Meir Lau, once Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, rages against non-orthodox movements in Judaism. His nephew, queer activist Amichai Lau-Lavie, has an answer that packs a punch: born in 1961 on Israel’s Independence Day, 38 generations of rabbis in his family tree, son of a Holocaust survivor, drag queen, today also an ordained rabbi and spiritual leader of an interdenominational Jewish congregation in New York. Amichai wants to be a “virus inside the system” to break patriarchal traditions and make Judaism more humane, more open. His drag alter ego urges: “Redemption will only come through transgression!”
Director Sandi DuBowski followed his protagonist over more than twenty years. The long production period enabled him to document different phases in Amichai’s life, to show him celebrating, crying, doubting and triumphant. Supporters and critics comment on every decision and life change. The result is a complex portrait that sensitively introduces not only Amichai but also his family and congregation. An inspiring story that gives us hope.

Tattooed skin, harbour music, the horror of a shipwreck, the fog bells of a lighthouse, the changing of the tides. This film about the glorious and deadly ocean, which pulls you down into the depths of the sea, is the result of an interoceanic workshop that uses the creative mechanisms of the cadavre exquis technique. An intuitive tale arises from a collective act of creation.

The starting point of this documentary exploration is a 1980s abuse scandal in Cleveland, northern England, which turned out to be a scandal of false accusations. In his uniquely personal and literarily remarkable way, Ben Young discusses this historical event from offscreen. What we see is surprising contemporary footage of the region. Image and sound unite in a strong-minded attempt to capture a piece of local history by cinematic means.

Black and white, white and black. At first everything seems well-ordered in this bicoloured world. The black cat lives in the white field, the white bird in the black one. Each in their place. But when the two venture into each other’s space, nothing stays the same and their world unravels. A fast-paced silhouette animation.

Slaughterhouses with concrete blades on top, monumental cemetery gates in the plains: Architect Francisco Salamone (1897–1959) shaped the image of the Argentinean pampa around Buenos Aires. In part 34 of his “Photography and beyond” series, Heinz Emigholz once more probes architecture for biographical traces. Salamone, who immigrated from Sicily as a child, realised his ideas between 1936 and 1940, when Mussolini’s Italy re-discovered architecture as an ideological craft.

Axes seem to be buried in the façade of the Coronel Pringles city hall. Elsewhere, stone tree fungi grow. And in front of the Saldungaray cemetery, viewed from the rear, a giant pancake or satellite dish forms, while in front the head of a suffering Jesus protrudes from the concrete. Monumental designs, occasionally incorporating elements of Art Deco or Italian Futurism, towering in the sky and advertising importance. Francisco Salamone worked in the years of the “Década infame”, that infamous decade followed shortly afterwards by the presidency of Juan Perón. The buildings seem inhospitable and full of hubris. They are supposed to herald modernity and progress and yet loomed terrifyingly over the peasantry of the country. Heinz Emigholz documents these intimidating buildings from every conceivable angle.

It’s lonely out in space and only the sun can warm you. In his imaginative 2D animation, Darko Masnec makes lines come alive and breathes life into abstract geometrical figures, as if Paul Klee and the Shadoks were celebrating a colourful banquet of metamorphoses. Stylised forms sprout luminescent organic compounds that tell a touching love story in outer space.

What happens when we have to leave the destroyed earth? This VR experience takes us into space: Our consciousness becomes collective and our DNA is modified into new life forms. Time is nothing but an illusion here – past, present and future merge. We end up where we began, but in what form and when? A cycle of endless reincarnation.

From a distance, the glass greenhouse looks like a spaceship which could have landed decades or only minutes ago. In any case, the Botanical Garden in Berlin seems to belong to another era. A group of young people are exploring, feeling plants, trees, and the building according to their very own criteria. Are they aliens? Are they imitating the expeditions of German explorers from the colonial period?

The commentary muses on the history of the place: at the end of the 19th century, work began on the construction of the new greenhouses of the Botanical Garden in Dahlem to bring the world to one garden. This idea formulated a claim of omnipotence, too. In the rambling park, the camera comes across the naturalistic statue of a semi-nude man sowing seeds. It was created by the sculptor Hermann Joachim Pagels, who was very successful under the Nazis. The deeper the film penetrates the thickets of this garden, the more traces of imperial and colonialist thinking come to light. But the Botanical Garden is also a utopian place. What if this greenhouse-spaceship were to take off to distant spheres again? Could the plants guarantee the survival of our species on other planets? But perhaps they have a different plan, a life of their own?

An Argentinean builder who has built council halls, cemetery gates and abattoirs in the pampa as if from a modernist assembly line. Then a Bolivian architect, whose gaudy functional buildings in the highland defy description and imagination. Last, but not least, a new old palace in the middle of Berlin. Connections are plentiful, none of them edifying. Heinz Emigholz uses them for a pamphlet against stylistic amnesia and historical falsification.

The first film in Heinz Emigholz’s series “Photography and beyond” was released in 1983 and, including the two works screened by DOK Leipzig this year in the Camera Lucida section, there are now 35. But although “Slaughterhouses of Modernity” uses a number of sequences from the other two works, it has little in common with them in terms of form and ductus. While the aforementioned rather minimalist films do without commentary and partly without inserts, this one is characterised by its edgy monologues and courageous use of stylistic inconsistencies. Polemics and black humour are not unusual in Emigholz’s universe. But one has never seen him spoiling for a fight as gleefully as in this complex exploration of German history and its ugly manifestations. Not so much a late work as a new departure.

A pair of socks used to be inseparable and lived as soulmates in their drawer. But they lose sight of each other during the spin cycle in the washing machine. How awful to be suddenly alone, one of the socks thinks. But for the first time it becomes aware of the other clothes around it. These new encounters put the socks’ friendship to a tough test.

Four creatures wobble like marionettes in the black void. An alien power tries to subdue them, police voices strike like truncheons. Bent, with bulging or thread-thin limbs, their skin turned inside out – human anatomy has mutated. But these vulnerable bodies start to fight back … “Scum Mutation” takes us into the battle zone without protection, into an indelible energy field of radical feminist protest – and becomes a resounding beacon of reconquest.

Ship ahoy, the musifants are back! This time, Charlie and Grandpa Günter get mail from the small green cactus in New Zealand and set sail with Fox and Captain Krause. On the way, they fish the little wild sow Svenja from the sea and sing their special shanty. The waves rise when the retired circus elephant makes musical forays into 1920s and 1930s song collections.