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.

After the Wehrmacht invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Jewish population was disenfranchised and killed, as this etude, staged at the Terezín Memorial, recalls. The fact that there was successful Jewish resistance even in extermination camps like Sobibór did not fit in with the traditional image of the passive victims that is melodramatically re-enforced by this film.

A mysterious film reel from the “Regional Film Studio Leipzig” holdings: labelled “Sierra Leone”, passed down without sound. After some official speeches, an ensemble from Sierra Leone perform a danced symbolic fight for their GDR hosts. Later, local and international couples sway on the dance floor to live music – non-protocol encounters with independent guests, in both senses of the word.

Inspired by the estate of a Romanian photographer in which 5,000 glass plate negatives from the 1930s to the 1950s survived undiscovered for a long time, a touching love story evolves. In 1939, Anna Florea meets the young soldier Jean Mihail in her home village in Bukovina. A moonshine kiss seals their affection. But all too soon, Jean is ordered to the frontline. His passionate letters keep the connection alive. But when Anna must flee the site, the contact breaks off.
Their great love is fragile, damaged by war and time – just like the old studio and everyday photographs this animated documentary uses to illustrate optimism and impending loss. Anna Florea herself narrates the film: in retrospect, at the age of 91. Her warm and gentle voice reanimates the memories seemingly stored in these pictures. Those “frozen” on the photographic plates begin to move, are made to glow in oil-on-glass overpaintings, blossom and take us with them into the past.

Jamila is nine, Rachel eleven and Faseeha twelve when they take their first steps into a new hip-hop culture. The Berlin girls meet at a rap project, become friends and take off with their Sisterqueens crew. This documentary follows them over four years through their daily life with parents, siblings and their unusual chosen hip-hop family, where they learn a lot about hook lines and even more about self-respect.
We watch the three at rehearsals, studio recordings and stage performances, where they counter the well-known gender clichés of rap with their own songs. They also discuss their experiences with racism and exclusion and turn what happens to them into rhymes. Faseeha tests the boundaries with other artistic forms of expression, Rachel thinks about what self-determination means to her, and Jamila witnesses a frightening incident that makes her doubt the sanity of the police. They formulate their ideas and questions about what it means to be themselves, always with humour and to the point.

Under the banner of international solidarity, Arab children from refugee camps in Jordan are spending a holiday in the GDR in 1970. This political gesture ties in with the recently redefined position of the GDR in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the World Youth Festival in 1973, Yasser Arafat was already seen standing next to Erich Honecker on camera.

The winters in the Siberian taiga may be long, but at least Moscow is far away. In the early 1990s, a religious community lead by former traffic cop Sergei Torop settled in the endless landscape at the foot of the eastern Sayan Mountains. After a religious revival he calls himself Vissarion, wears flowing robes, long hair and acts as the Son of God on earth. Misty-coloured portraits on which “the Teacher” gazes obliviously into the distance hang in the homes of his followers. Together they have created the model town of “Abode of Dawn”, also called “Sun City” by the locals, to build a new society.
Director Kristina Shtubert travelled to Siberia five times between 2013 and 2022. Her gaze is observational, less concerned with the search of faith and meaning than with the question whether the Sun City dwellers are happier here than in their discarded lives. And what would their alternatives be? More and more, the long-term observation turns into a post-Soviet narrative of a faded-out state. Meanwhile, the militarisation of the country progresses. Moscow is coming closer.

Isabel Herguera herself welcomes us in the title sequence of this autobiographical short film and gives us a brief glimpse behind the scenes of her work as an artist. Right after that, we join her on a fast-paced trip through the part of her family history that begins with the birth of her brothers in 1965 and ends with the death of General Franco in 1975.

“You got to try to live your own life,” Arzu, one of the football players from the Turkish-Kreuzberg girls’ team Ağrı Spor, demanded in a 1995 film by Aysun Bademsoy. Today she is in her late forties and leads her own life, like her former teammates Türkan, Nalan and Nazan. Bademsoy visited the four of them for the fourth time, following their lives, recalling their visions for the future from back then. And this time she also talked to their daughters, some of whom on the brink of adulthood, who also think about adaptation, tradition, religion and culture. Little has changed between then and now, being German remains a difficult question to answer for every generation.
Aysun Bademsoy has produced a delicately layered work of German-Turkish perspectives in which female concepts of identity are reflected back at a society where integration is formulated only as expectation. “If others don’t accept that we are Germans, how are we supposed to accept that?” Selin, Türkan’s daughter, asks. You don’t need to know the other three films to understand “Game Changers” – and to appreciate the significance of this project which now spans almost thirty years. The best thing about it: Football is being played again!

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.

A man’s voice from offscreen. He lists individual words, has problems of articulation. At first these are abstract terms, the screen stays black. Sky, street, village and house, however, are accompanied by suitable images. They take us into the speaker’s life. It is his house. These are his automatic shutters. We look into the kitchen where his wife is preparing something. He exercises in a specially equipped room. Later he sits in front of the microphone again, obviously recording his voice to preserve it. Another dimension opens between the recorded words and sentences and beyond the images. There is an inevitability in the room – and a great love. The robot vacuum makes its rounds. Who will put the words stored on the computer into a meaningful context later?

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.