Where the sandy beach of the Salton Sea, the biggest lake in California, begins to crunch harder, it does not even consist of sand any more: Millions of dead fish, plants and insects pile up on the shore to form a highly toxic substance. This is how Derek explains it, a member of a Cahuilla tribe that managed to escape an attempted genocide in the 19th century to the Salton Sea and now sees itself as a protective force for the once flourishing but increasingly deserted area and its outcasts.
Derek is one of the many locals whose trails Lukas Marxt and Vanja Smiljanić calmly follow, gliding with them through the desolate landscapes. In the process, they pick up slivers of nuclear history time and again: During the Second World War, the area was a test site for the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The experiments continued through the Cold War; the armed forces are still training here. The film finds its starting point and end two states away: The nuclear devices were sent on their way from Wendover, Utah. The local Airfield Museum pays tribute to their development. Once, the camera performs an almost weightless dance around a model of the Hiroshima bomb “Little Boy” on display there, to the sounds of the indestructible World War classic “We’ll Meet Again.”

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.

Poland, 1981. Six friends squeeze into an old car that is far too small and set out for the Polish Baltic coast, fuelled by their longing for freedom. The further they come, the clearer the decrepit state of their country emerges. The pension where they spend the night has nothing that could be served for breakfast. Food and fuel are also in short supply elsewhere. There is a shortage of everything. The only thing one can buy anytime and anywhere is booze, which is plentiful. Just like the country, the car also falls apart piece by piece. But the trip continues, past demonstrating crowds, tanks, barricades and armed policemen.
Singing, laughing and carefree, Leszek and his companions finally make it to the sea. Is this the end of their journey? Or should they join the hundreds of thousands who have already left Poland? The borders of the frame, at least, are open. The sparse, fragmented graphic elements on the empty white background hardly seem an incentive to stay. There is no obstacle that could keep the friends from setting off for new shores.

In autumn 1989, many Leipzig citizens lost patience with the GDR. Within weeks, they brought down a forty-year-old state apparatus resistant to change by rallies. Now their patience is tested again: In 2008, the German Bundestag promised the “City of Heroes” of the Peaceful Revolution a monument. Planning has been going on and on … Leipzig bears the waiting with equanimity; after all, it was not idle in the meantime. Right after reunification, the citizenry took charge of its culture of remembrance with such vigour that the monuments are piling up today. Looking up to the crown of the palm tree of the Nikolai Column, one had better take care not to step on a commemorative plaque, fall into a commemorative fountain or bump into a commemorative bell.
Classicist? Figurative? Abstract? What is the formal language a city chooses to tell itself its own history while it is practically still happening? Locals and newcomers roam the current Leipzig collection of monuments, a man ties his shoelaces on the big toe of the bronze sculpture “Step of the Century”. Do people think about what monuments give them to think about? The subtly framed and laconically presented impressions of the city are intermingled not only with the trademarks and emblems of lived urbanity, but also with the voices of local cultural delegates. They are thinking: about the pros and cons of accelerated remembrance.

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).

Maybe it really was the innocent hand of an infant clasping a soldier’s index finger that was to determine the course of three lives. Lives that did not end in early death after all, but continued in the asylum of a foreign country. The Rutikaras reside on the outskirts of the capital of Rwanda and call their newborn child Justice, because justice is really becoming scarce in their country. In the spring of 1994, when the little boy is six months old, the political situation is getting increasingly tense, the Tutsi ethnic minority is being hunted, abused and murdered by the Hutu militias. In the summer of that year, the world learned of the extent of the violence: a genocide with hundreds of thousands killed. The Rutikaras are affected, too. But with luck, chance and their unperturbable baby they manage to save themselves in the care of the United Nations.
Director Justice Rutikara, born in Kigali and grown up in Quebec, is the son of Valentine and Jean-Claude, who report from offscreen. His first animated film, carried by broadly coloured images, an impressive factuality and mild poetry, is a memento that rises above the individual and takes on a universal note in the chorus of human sounds, all the unifying and threatening ones.

In 1945, the Red Army are advancing on German territory, the Second World War is drawing to an end. Families are still trying to escape to America, but many plans fail. Five-year-old Sophie also loses her father and mother during the flight. They are killed by Nazi officer Scharf and a Soviet soldier named Vasily, with Hitler Youth Beckmann as a witness. The gruesome event takes place in an extremely strange hotel which henceforth will bind the four survivors to its premises in bizarre ways, no matter which rooms of the truly scary building they find themselves in. Up in the lounge, where the new customers arrive one by one, down in the kitchen, where the now grown-up Sophie prepares food, or even in an alcove near the elevator shaft, where Beckmann hides with the rats. The involuntary permanent guests age but never tire of courting Sophie.
Heinrich Sabl has built an excitingly disturbing dollhouse decorated with quotes from reality for the German-Soviet history of guilt and coping. In his first feature-length animated film, on which the director worked for more than twenty years, he sends extraordinary characters on an equally extraordinary visual and acoustic time journey through the war-damaged suites of the 20th century.

It’s Hungary in the early 1990s and Ákos, Petya and Laci, too, are young and need the money. The Iron Curtain has fallen, Europe lies at the friends’ feet, but train tickets to Stockholm, Paris, Berlin or Madrid are almost unaffordable for ordinary people. Far from losing courage, the three develop a clever method to enjoy the new freedom to travel: They forge the official tickets, still handwritten on carbon copy forms, bleaching the carbon ink out with sanitiser, ironing the paper smooth and dry, getting some stamps, researching the operating procedures of the national railway, studying timetables, prices and routes and filling in the boxes on the forms again. And off they go. But that is not the end of the story. A feeling of blind infatuation sets a business idea in motion. How about making these very special tickets available to others in need? One becomes ten, 150 soon become 1,000 – until a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities begins.
László Csáki’s scintillating gangster comedy is loaded with contemporary history. His excellent montage of drawn fiction, authentic film documents and memoirs broadens our view of the suspended years of social upheaval in his Hungarian homeland.

It is said of Krzysztof Kieślowski that he did not see himself as a political filmmaker. At least this early documentary casts doubt on this, for it depicts the cold stranglehold of bureaucracy. The setting is a municipal funeral home in Warsaw. Phone calls are made, documents checked and stamped. Business runs like clockwork, from the cradle to the grave.
Leipzig naturally maintained ties with older Polish documentarists like Jerzy Bossak, even after he relocated to Denmark. The fact that Kieślowski and other notable Polish film artists of his generation did not appear in the programmes before 1990 fits into the image of a life consumed by pettiness painted here. The real issue was probably animosities with the festival in Cracow.

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.

In an Indian city, the young Spanish artist Inés comes across the book “Sultana’s Dream” by the Bengali writer Rokeya Hossain. This feminist science fiction story from 1905 will accompany Inés on her travels through present-day India. Her experiences intermingle with Sultana’s utopia: in translucent watercolours and detailed henna paintings.

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?