This graduation film by future DEFA documentarian Karlheinz Mund presents a piece of GDR working worlds in the best poetic and earthy Babelsberg school tradition: the everyday life of railway workers – with two women in the electric locomotive driver’s cab.
In 1963, Leipzig audiences were able to get to know Mund’s study in the festival’s university film presentation. At the end, the “Spring Song of the Railwaywoman” can be heard off-screen, sung by Wolf Biermann. The GDR still tolerated the rebellious tormentor. Those who heard him in this film at the time probably only found out later that the authorities had long had him in their sights. In 1963, East Berlin’s Humboldt University refused to grant him a degree in philosophy despite passing his exams. Listening to Biermann’s song today, the words become charged: spring storm, great rain, a land waiting …

The powerful interventions of the Indonesian artist, cultural studies scholar and filmmaker Timoteus Anggawan Kusno are internationally renowned. What distinguishes them are the empowering attitude and the breathtaking aesthetics he employs to re-interpret in different media the cultural traditions passed on in his homeland. With “Afterlives”, he delivers another unequivocal reckoning with the representations of history shaped by colonial annexation.
The opening sequence is already a declaration: On the soundtrack we hear screaming, in which both pain and its liberating relief are manifest and united. On screen we see an explosion of colours: Jathilan, a ritual Javanese war game, is being performed. Men are dancing on horses made of plaited bamboo until they fall into a trance or the evil spirits are driven away. The impressive precision of the editing to tribal trance music by Setabuhan makes the colonialist archive images expose themselves – and fade. Those of (dance) performances in which the Javan tiger, killed multiple times in historic rituals, is symbolically reanimated come to the fore. In the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, it now guards – in the shape of a re-interpreted colonial sculpture – the empty frames that once gave (representative) power to the governors-general of the Dutch East Indies.

Starting from the children’s party where Zhang Shengjia celebrated his ninth birthday at a KFC fast food restaurant in 2006, the Chinese artist and filmmaker’s essayistic archive film unfolds a cheerful cultural history of the birthday cake from a Chinese perspective. The convention reached China from Western Europe and North America in the early 20th century and merged with local birthday traditions. The constantly growing influence of Western consumer culture since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the 1980s was exemplified in 1990 when almost 13,000 customers were registered on the opening day of the country’s very first McDonald’s restaurant in Shenzhen.
The laconically commented foray through a colourful selection of archival film, advertising and photo footage from several decades takes us from the first Chinese emperor eating birthday cake and early pioneers of cake design to the commercialisation and politicisation of cuisine and food culture.

In 1974, the GDR and the Leipzig festival celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution with the “Cuban Documentary Film” retrospective. Santiago Álvarez, vigorous propagandist of documentary film as an art of war against imperialist cinema entertainment, spoke at soporific length at the opening.
One wonders whether, in addition to the invited officials, the “fighting” youth of Leipzig addressed by Álvarez were present at the event. The speech has survived only as an audio document, the images must be imagined. The recording was commissioned by the State Film Documentation, a government agency that was to preserve GDR reality for the future. In 1974, no one in the room could have imagined that this future would one day take place without the GDR.

East Berlin plays host to the world at the 10th World Youth Festival. The secret capital of the GDR, Leipzig, also gets some reflected glory. On 3 August 1973, festival delegations from forty countries take a special train to the trade fair city. Between the official events there is room for ambiguous side glances, captured in this report of the day made by several Leipzig company and amateur film groups.

Many people probably know Chris Marker’s story of a time trip from a dystopian future back to the present, in which the hero experiences a traumatic event again, only through Terry Gilliam’s extroverted remake “12 Monkeys”. The original, Marker’s experimental science fiction classic “La Jetée”, however, was groundbreaking rather because of its minimalist narrative form: The 28-minute black and white photo novel with a single moving shot has made film history.
Dominique Cabrera now takes a very personal approach to putting the influential work in a historical context: The year of its creation, 1962, was also the year when Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule and hundreds of thousands of French people with roots in Algeria, the so-called Pieds-noirs, left their homeland to enter exile via Orly airport. In France, a new, uncertain existence awaited them – including Cabrera’s family. Six decades later, her cousin, who happened to be present on the pier of Paris-Orly when Marker took photos for his film, is convinced that he recognises himself in the fifth shot of “La Jetée”. This is the prelude to one of the most thrilling and at the same time loving time trips one can imagine – and the beginning of a detective and cinephile research with ever more astonishing twists.

More than twenty years have passed since the death of Catalan architect Enric Miralles. He left iconic traces with his buildings, not just in and around Barcelona – the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh is also based on his designs. Maria Mauti chooses a poetic approach to her impressive protagonist, in eleven variations. They take us from the Igualada cemetery to a community centre in Hostalets de Balenyà, a gym in Huesca or the Torre Marenostrum office skyscraper in Barcelona. The architect’s home with its open and at the same time labyrinthine character is given a major role, becoming the starting point and epicentre of a unique mind.
Maria Mauti carefully scans the still lively architectures, stages them. In Huesca, the smell of a sweating soccer team seems to mingle with the omnipresent cool raw concrete, while a group of Spanish cowboys and cowgirls shake their leather boots in the futuristic community centre. Despite the tragic note that comes from the work of the prematurely deceased, “Miralles” is not without a certain wit. This poised essay which combines personal and theoretical statements achieves a multi-layered quality that is in itself evocative of a Miralles design: airy and dense, abrupt and fluid, always idiosyncratic.

Moscow, summer 1957: The famous amateur filmmaker Alfred Dorn takes us to the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students, which was intended to promote encounters and exchange between young people from all over the world as a reaction to the Second World War. Curious and amazed, the camera explores the metropolis Moscow with its iconic buildings and squares, complete with numerous festival visitors.

“My therapist said it’s like an Abschied,” Monica Vanesa Tedja says. Monic embarks on a journey from Berlin to Indonesia to return to the bosom of the family for a short while. The camera is in the luggage, and an important question: Can the devout Christian parents who are so happy about the visit accept their child’s non-binary, queer concept of life and identity instead of blocking it out?
In the beginning we see private archival footage of a supposedly perfect childhood. Monic talks about their own dreams and fears. We listen to tense phone calls with the mother and exchanges with friends, we learn details from therapy sessions. This film is not about harsh confrontations but rather about a quiet departure, about changing relationships, the significance of biological and chosen families, about letting go and arriving – perhaps where you least expect it.

This pointed montage of contrasts recalls the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorised by US President Harry S. Truman, and the devastating consequences: images of Harry in a warm embrace with a girl, images of wounded children in Japan. In September 1945, the island state in the Far East surrendered and the Second World War was officially over.

Director Nora Rosenthal brings a very specific focus to this portrait of her parents, Heidi and Alan: She shows them dancing. But these are far from “easy dances.” Rosenthal realises quickly that her own inflated expectations threaten to make her ambitious project fail. She hires two professional dancers – mirror images and, as it were, interaction partners for Heidi and Alan – to spread the enormous pressure on robust shoulders and with whom they can waltz or even do a disco number.
Abstractly playful, yet empathetic, “Nine Easy Dances” addresses heavyweight subjects like transience and illness, opens the door to the family archive and tries to tell a story whose end already hangs in the air. A multilayered endeavour, associative, free and intelligent.

Gruesome grimaces, craftsmen at work, running animals, wild fountains of colours – the “not yet films” from the prehistory of cinema were only sixteen animation images long, but they left people amazed and satisfied the sensation-seekers. Parisian artist Dominique Willoughby has retrieved some 19th century wonder discs from the archives and re-animated them in a variety of ways to minimalist music.