Argentine director Agustina Pérez Rial’s debut feature-length film about the ninth edition of the International Film Festival in her native city of Mar del Plata from 1968 seems to find an uncommonly balanced solution to the primal dilemma of documentary storytelling. In an impressively brilliant montage of archive material, a story is constructed which, according to the director herself, is not necessarily true, but realistic.

Historical black and white photos of captivating beauty, film footage from various sources and documents from the now open archives of the surveillance authorities of the time are counteracted by a supposed witness report – de facto a female voice from offscreen. Pérez Rial is in subtle and intelligent control of her cinematic tools, pulling out all the stops: documentary and fiction, historical and contemporary, aesthetic, trivia and anecdotes. On the one hand, the meticulously researched facts unearth a forgotten microfacet of the Cold War, complete with militarisation, persecution and paranoia. On the other hand, they show a film festival as a node of ideologies and describe it as a highly politicised place. This opens unexpected spaces of reflection for the role assigned to such a cultural event – historical or current.

Not a single cloud ever seems to drift across this sky, the sun never ceases to send its powerful rays down. Here, in southern California, where the San Andreas Fault has created an unmistakable topography and invisible water currents run under the barren soil, date palms thrive best: feet in water, head on fire. Terra Long has looked around, traced the history of the plants which originally came to North America from the Middle East, and visited the parades and festivities dedicated to the sugary fruit. Layer by layer, she constructs her very own perspective on the landscape and the people, translates her haptic impressions into magnificent 16mm shots and designs a complex soundtrack.

Long manages to join the past and present and produce a concise, quasi sensual extract. The laborious manual pollination of the date palms plays a role in it, as do the collapsed ecosystem of the Salton Sea, archived dresses of Arabian Nights beauty queens and interviews that testify only to what is now historical; as do elderly white couples floating in their pools and walking across the lawns of golf courses. “Feet in Water, Head on Fire” is a document of simultaneity that captivates from the first minute to the last.

The herb dispute, in this case about ’Akkoub (gundelia) and Za’atar (wild thyme) is one of the more bizarre aspects of the Middle East conflict. These plants are much sought-after ingredients of Palestinian cuisine and have been collected for generations; for reasons of nature conservation, however, this is forbidden in the West Bank. Israeli park rangers thus find themselves in hot pursuit of their collectors for a fistful of greens. Jumana Manna humorously presents the poaching as civil disobedience.

The Berlin-based Palestinian artist combines documentary and scripted material with pop references. Once, when archival footage illustrates the hype surrounding the illegal herbs, we hear Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Morricone’s harmonica melody from “For a Few Dollars More”. The ban also has an economic side, since Israeli companies are selling Za’atar as a spice mix. Drone and panoramic shots suggest the absurd manhunt for elderly people picking for their own needs. One of them says: “I’ll also be caught in 2050 with my children and grandchildren.” Manna wrote the court hearings based on real cases with lawyer Rabea Eghbarieh. Not mentioned in the film is the political success the attorney of the Adalah NGO contributed to in 2019: According to the new directive of the Ministry of the Environment five kilogrammes of the plants may be picked.

As a pioneer of Neo-Andean architecture, Freddy Mamani Silvestre attracts attention far beyond the borders of Bolivia. His non-conformist designs are influenced by the culture of the Aymara, the biggest ethnical group in the country, echoing their myths and patterns. Buildings constructed between 2008 and 2021 are circled, inspected and captured, in part 35 of the ongoing series “Photography and beyond”.

Like giant jewels, the Cholets rise into the sky above the Bolivian city of El Alto, at 4,000 metres above sea level. Cholets, a neologism created from chalet and Cholo, the local term for indigenous people, are the creations of architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre, born in 1971. Several dozen buildings designed by him adorn the otherwise fairly unglamorous city otherwise mainly dominated by raw red brick. Mamani’s built fantasies, on the other hand, are striking, arrogant and bold. Snakes seem to be slithering up their facades, scattered diamonds cling to the glazing and occasionally the whole thing is crowned by a stand-alone residential building. But the Cholets are mainly used for festivities, because they house the so-called “salones de eventos”. Emigholz unlocks psychoactive places that evoke the interior of pinball machines and, in their confident splendour, triumph over the richer neighbouring city of La Paz.

Wang Xilin does not enter the stage in a suite, as the title might suggest, but completely naked. He stretches and bends, appears to familiarise himself with his surroundings, does some vocal exercises, sits down at the piano. Wang Xilin is one of China’s most important composers of contemporary music, having written his first symphonies in his youth. Wang Bing gives the 86-year-old more than a little space. For his portrait, he presents him with the entire Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

This is where Wang Xilin reviews his life of torture and oppression, recapitulates the tribulations in communist China, reports knocked-out teeth and nightmares, suicides among intellectuals. His testimony is frequently underlaid, sometimes even drowned out by grandiose musical arrangements. When an orchestra thunders from offscreen, Wang Xilin’s body rears up – “Man in Black” is also an exorcistic oral history. The composer turns himself into his own instrument, into the medium of a violent epoch, sharing his emotions literally unveiled.

If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.

Lancit deeply involves his family in his fantasies, letting them become demons and lurch through the living room together. The documentation of his own diabetes also allows us a look at a modern Paris family life with two small children and a partner who usually plays along sympathetically with her husband’s carryings-on. Lancit’s approach deliberately transgresses borders, opens body, soul and front door. The result is a humorous and occasionally disturbing self-testimony.

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.

One film, two women, three rules: a one-year video correspondence, every three weeks and modelled on experimental female film artists. The two friends Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa begin their dialogue between São Paulo and Los Angeles in the upheavals of 2020 – in the midst of pandemics, election campaigns and anti-racist protests. In thoughtful, sometimes playful visual essays they also search for feminist cinematographic forms for the female body.

Marie Menken, Yvonne Rainer, Chick Strand, Cheryl Dunye and Ximena Cuevas are only some of the renowned experimental film inspirations for “Swing and Sway”. Sixteen references are listed in the opening credits and the stylistic variety is proportionately wide: black and white and colour, analogue and digital images, text inserts and voiceovers, CGI and stop motion, dissolves, overexposures, colour effects. In this cinephile potpourri, orientation is provided by clips of political events. “I left Brazil under Bolsonaro to come to Trump’s United States”, Barbosa reflects on her status as an immigrant denied political participation. Meanwhile, Pessoa becomes an activist during the São Paulo municipal elections and asks herself a question that other left movements will also ask looking back on 2020: “We didn’t win – but we moved forward?”

After Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious commander of the American Civil War, maverick Jim Finn has now tackled the Apostle Paul. Eighteen centuries lie between the two and yet those historical super-figures have a lot in common. The acts of both were epoch-making, both had to undertake prolonged expeditions to achieve them, and both have inspired a host of propaganda, including numerous board games that also serve as a visual framework for Finn’s latest film. Above all, both remain controversial to this day, though Paul’s actions, due to the thin factual basis, provided and still provide better groundwork for substantially more outlandish interpretations. The films quotes some of the more outrageous ones in an eclectic montage of red-tinged excerpts from biblical epics, Christian fundamentalist talk shows, cartoons, children’s books, dioramas, theme parks and performances by magicians and rapturous choirs.

The curious title refers to a paper of the German theologist Ernst Käsemann, whose research snatched Paul from the grasp of the Antisemites who had usurped him and placed him back in the tradition of Jewish mysticism. That is also the objective of Jim Finn’s film as it gleefully dissects two thousand years of appropriation and propaganda in a wild ride through history.

A series of tuba thefts that occurred ten years ago at Californian schools is the starting point of a multilayered and entertaining reflection about sounds and music, how they are represented in images and described in words. The artist Alison O’Daniel tells the story from the perspective of Deaf people; her film resembles a musical composition that varies its material in several movements.

In one sequence we hear the swelling drone of a passenger plane flying at low altitude over a residential area and gradually drowning out the sounds of the wind before we first see its shadow glide over the houses and at last the source of the noise. The subtitles, an integral part of this film, not only describe the sounds in amazing precision but also quantify their acoustic pressure in decibels.

Alternating between passages with and without sound motivates us to be more differentiated, focused, targeted in our perception. The film revolves around the motifs of hearing, sounds, noise pollution more than around the narrative of the mysteriously vanished tubas, more even than around the impressive protagonist Nyeisha “Nyke” Prince who plays a Deaf drummer in “The Tuba Thieves.” The tuba thefts are first and foremost a metaphor: What does the lack of a specific sound do to our perception?

Narimane Mari dedicates a touching portrait that tells of parting to her now deceased lover, the artist Michel Haas. She captures first and foremost the small, everyday moments – street scenes, working at the studio, watching films together, reading to each other in bed. The absence of a traditional narration, long shots and intense conversations invite us to think about our own relationship with temporality.

A recurring potpourri of poems, prose and music by Nâzım Hikmet, Stéphane Mallarmé through to Sun Ra gives the film its very own leisurely rhythm. The scenes at the studio are carried by this mood, too. As with Jackson Pollock, the art is created mostly on the floor. But Michel Haas works with ink, large-format paper sheets and hot water instead of canvas and thinned paint. Humming happily, he hits the soaked paper with his bare hands until edges, creases and folds form. The abstract outlines and flat shapes are recognisable as figures only when viewed from a distance: Often, they are intertwined couples. A contemplative tribute to love.

The kidnapping and murder of the politician Aldo Moro; four slashed tyres that were to save a florist’s life; the lost soundtrack to Antonioni’s film “Zabriskie Point”; the meeting of two avant-garde composers; archive material and found footage – these are the elements of this “freely composed” film that is imbued with the city of Rome and juxtaposes the human urge for constant rebellion and the thesis of the end of history.

For the US electronic composer Alvin Curran, whose intellectual and artistic world are at the centre of Éric Baudelaire’s exceptionally rich collage, music is a vehicle that carries us to places we have never travelled before. In Rome, where Curran settled in the 1960s, he met his then considerably more experienced professional colleague Franco Evangelisti, who shocked him with the question: “Don’t you know that there’s no more music to write?” Baudelaire’s congenial montage of image and sound fragments suggests that Curran’s solo work – as well as his collaboration with the pioneering collective “Musica Elettronica Viva” – is the answer to Evangelisti’s question: We have to keep reassembling the world.