Words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish float through this film: “Tell me. Perhaps I will remember my home whose perfume is only on my lips.” A 17-year-old Palestinian introduces herself: Aida, the returning one. When her father was killed in battle, her mother was already dead, killed by a bomb. When she was eight, she was sent to a PLO orphanage in Beirut, then to an orphanage in Damascus, then to an orphanage in Tunis. Here she takes care of new orphans. The portrait of a girl expands: countless children who will forget their homeland and origin. There is nothing but war left in their drawings. The PLO had assigned its collaborator Marwan Salamah to study cinematography at Babelsberg. Here, he is also the director. In 1985, “Aida” won the Prize of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Leipzig.

Identity is a myth. Berthold Barluschke, an ambitious cog in the GDR foreign trade system, has changed names and roles multiple times. Thomas Heise follows him as he moves house. He once went from Mittenwalde to New York, now he is leaving his family in Paris. A polyglot secret agent with a petty bourgeois background. Barluschke worked for the GDR secret service and the West German Federal Intelligence Service, always anxious to get the most out of it for himself. “What should really be talked about?” the filmmaker asks. The impossible endeavour of getting to the professional impostor using the means of documentary film results in one of the freest, most fragmented works in Heise’s oeuvre. Awarded the Silver Dove at DOK Leipzig but rarely screened since.

The world stands still. Gaudily painted cruise ships lie in the oil port of Augusta on the south-east coast of Sicily. Their lustre fades a little more every day. On the scorched, tinged 16mm film stock they seem as unfit for the future as the refineries visible behind them. When, if not in the early summer of 2021, would the time have ever been riper for reflection and reassessment?! Old, exploitative economic systems that keep people away from Europe and let only raw materials enter are in lockdown. Their future is unimaginable. But is there a way back? To the gentle sound of the waves, the birds and the insects, the smoke of the industrial plants wafts back into the chimneys. But the images have been damaged.

In the north of Georgia, twelve kilometres from the Russian-influenced region of Abkhazia, a family are realising their dream. Under the optimistic motto “Plant the Future,” the Georgian government has launched a funding programme that enabled the people in this state which has been shaken by wars and crises for years to make a fresh start on their own farmland. With this support Soso, a retired engineer, took the big step in 2021 with his wife and two young sons and began growing blueberries.
Director Elene Mikaberidze and a dynamic camera follow the bold endeavour of the greenhorn farmers as they settle into their unfamiliar new life month by month. In the evenings, they pass the time with games and conversations, while the television is on in the background: images of a Ukraine under attack, news of the escalation in the Middle East remind the adults of the Russo-Georgian War sixteen years ago. Soso, the head of the family, contemplates his homeland in the midst of an escalating global situation. What dreams will still find a place there? Mother Nino is worried about her children’s future. She wants them to have the freedom to go their own way, to travel abroad and leave Georgia behind. Whether these ideas correspond with Soso’s remains to be seen.

In 1973, General Pinochet, with the support of the US secret service, staged a coup against the democratically elected Marxist-Socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende. Pinochet’s military junta murdered and tortured their way across the country. Juan Forch, Santiago-born journalist and filmmaker, managed to escape the terror via Mexico to the GDR and continued his opposition work from here until his return in 1979: as a director at the DEFA Studio for Animation Film in Dresden. With silhouette film specialist Jörg Herrmann he realised this animated agitation miniature, in which the dictator and his allies dance to the caustic artist’s tune – and to organ music.

Words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish open this film: “I do not hate people, I do not assault anyone, but if I get hungry, I eat the flesh of my usurper. Beware, beware of my hunger, and of my anger.” This is followed by the title, then the subtitle: “An Israeli reports.” Her name is Edna Politi; she was born in Lebanon, emigrated to Israel and was accepted into the German Film and Television Academy in West Berlin in 1971. Politi’s student film is explanatory: Where does the Palestinian rage, the desperation come from? Soberly and carefully, she compiles everyday observations, facts and figures to draw attention to the mechanisms of the economic and political disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people. Her aim is to convince, not persuade.

Thomas Heise’s last film deals with his family archive, initiated by the deaths of his mother and brother. With suggestive comments and inserted into contemporary images, he appropriates the term “Heimat” by bringing the contradictions of more than a hundred years of German history to the fore. The counter-programme is formulated in a hit song by Marika Rökk: “Don’t look hither, don’t look thither, just look forward.” Heise’s monumental arrangement of fragments is at the same time open and insistent, devastated and hungry for life, never straightforward. Historiography and self-observation, never completely belonging: a touch in the dark cinema, a crack in the autobahn, lists, biographies, après-ski. Watching what happens (to them).

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.

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times. As a Palestinian gynaecologist practising in an Israeli hospital he was able to pass the strictly guarded checkpoints to Gaza without a hitch. His humanist perspective is expressed in words like these: “Do we need to be sick in order to understand that we are equal?” When the Israeli army attacked Abuelaish’s home in Gaza in January 2009 and three of his daughters died, he picked up the phone. On the other end of the line was Shlomi Eldar, a Channel 10 reporter who decided to broadcast his friend’s despair live to the Israeli audience. A historic television moment; the shelling of Gaza was terminated soon afterwards.
Director Tal Barda has given her portrait the same title as Izzeldin Abuelaish’s book, which was published in 2011. More than ten years after the publication of this memoir, the doctor as well as his now grown-up children speak out in her film, talk about traumas, their new beginning in Toronto and the struggle to obtain an official apology from Israel. “I Shall Not Hate” addresses the complicated ties between the fates of Palestine and Israel. Izzeldin Abuelaish’s conviction that peaceful coexistence is the only chance of survival remains unbroken.

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.

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.

History in a hurry: Namibia becomes independent in March 1990, in July the Publicly Owned Enterprise DEFA becomes a GmbH, in October GDR becomes FRG East, in August a West and an East German filmmaker record one of the last GDR inconsistencies for DEFA. The state in pre-retirement sends 425 Namibian children, whom it had rescued from Angolan camps eleven years earlier, “home.” Hastily. But why? When Grote, Kunert and the children arrive, a Namibian minister explains that the East German supporters of these colonial war victims are now out of power. The new powers had no interest … In the Leipzig festival selection in 1990, and again in 1991, this film about German-Namibian foreignness and alienation cannot be found. The Retrospective 2024 makes up for this strange omission.