Patrick Bokanowski subjects his own early cine film footage to a magical optical transformation. In the glistening drizzle of electronic sounds and the deep rumbling of drone waves by Michèle Bokanowski, light eruptions, sweeping colours and shadowy apparitions unfold while the original footage shines through. A diary of awake dreaming observation.

She first appeared on stage at the age of eleven with the legendary Krautrock band “Embryo”. Her father, Christian Burchard, founded the band in 1969 and led it until 2016. Today – in her mid-thirties – Marja Burchard is the bandleader in this project, which has become a kind of family for her. But what seems so simple and organic is far from self-evident in an extremely male-dominated sphere, as Rebecca Zehr shows in her precisely observed and designed film.

This strictly and yet lightly composed melange mixes archival footage, psychedelic animation sequences and everyday observations of the normal life of a female musician between organisation and inspiration. With the visual level restricted to black and white and thus deliberately restrained, all the more attention is focused at the sound. The – who wonders? – outstanding score never takes the music for granted but works robustly with our perception. It’s the lucid, calm images and the narrative that is always anchored in the here and now that let this film stay incredibly haptic despite its concentration on our sense of hearing. Rebecca Zehr is not interested in portraying a musical legend, but in showing us what it could look and feel like to not only make music but live in it.

Mount Sinai Hospital in New York is one of the largest and oldest hospitals in the United States. Mati, an aspiring hospital chaplain, works here. She is about to complete her one-year residency in the department of “Spiritual Care,” a branch of palliative medicine. Patients struggling with insecurity, trauma and grief get emotional and spiritual support here. The film follows Mati and her colleagues through 2020 and 2021, the years with the highest number of deaths in the history of the USA. Mati herself must struggle daily to find her balance. Because, as her supervisor puts it, if one’s own bandwidth is used up, there is simply no room left for the tougher things. It is therefore an important part of the work of a counsellor to get support and guidance for oneself.

Luke Lorentzen observes this cosmos with great sensitivity and, despite being so close, with pleasant restraint. The calm camera often keeps its distance, especially in moments of doubt or when observing conflicts in the team. A film unafraid of intimacy that spans a thought-provoking arc: between questions of faith, loss and professional sustainability.

In the mid-19th century, a massive fireplace was the centrepiece of every stately home in England. Children are agile enough to keep the flow of air going in the narrow and dark flues. Their young skin is scraped raw by the sooty stone walls. Their fear of falling is as strong as their fear of the master’s punishment. Black-brown-red cross hatching and unusual camera perspectives bring to life the report of a chimney sweep of the time.

The people, among them an astonishing number of workers, react with visible anger to the sudden lack of matches – and threaten to go to the barricades. The problem is solved, of course. But does it mean the population’s anger is placated? Puppet animation director Johannes Hempel created this satire based on a draft by Wolfgang Kohlhaase – at the same time as the uprising of 17 June 1953.

“If you want to storm, you use stormer methods”, to quote a direct reference to the infamous anti-Semitic smear sheet of the Nazi era. Set to shrill trumpet sounds, this outraged film pamphlet dissects, or so it seems, the drastic jargon of the “West German monopoly press”, especially the publications of the Springer publishing house, in their coverage of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. At the same time, it uses the reviled style for its own argumentation. Under the auspices of the DEFA newsreel editors of “Der Augenzeuge” (The Eyewitness), a sweeping blow against the Bonn Republic arises from news images and superimposed newspaper articles.

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.

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.

The railway from the point of view of people who travel by bicycle, on foot or by car: A Schlager music recording of GDR singer Chris Doerk is re-cut many times to accompany the endless-seeming wait at a railway crossing. Meanwhile, young people find each other, couples form. Even the birth of a child finds a place in this ironic short film.