The period from 1965 to 75, during which this film was presented at this festival, was called the “Vietnam decade” in Leipzig. “Documentarians” and photographers were the first to spotlight the horrors of a war which initially took place far from the eyes of the world. The two genres merged beautifully in the persons of Nestler and the renowned East German photographer Thomas Billhardt: Billhardt’s photos of the life of a tortured nation, but also of moments of respite and happiness, which sometimes – and this is where he is very close to Nestler – focus on the smallest details, burn themselves into the viewer’s memory. Cleverly edited, with a sober voice-over by Zsóka Nestler, contrasted with poems by Vietnamese children read by Swedish children – the only moving images.
– Grit Lemke

This feature was produced for a Swedish Public Television youth magazine as a simple and easy-to-follow explanation of the background of the military coup in Chile. In the typical Nestler style, the film uses historical documents, drawings and photos (including some by Thomas Billhardt) to trace an arc from the Indian struggle for liberation to Allende and his fall. Notwithstanding its ostentatious factuality it is a passionate plea for the cause of the Unidad Popular: “There’s a connection between the fact that many are so terribly poor and so many are rich.” The film was never broadcast.
– Grit Lemke

In the archives of Swedish Public Television, Peter Nestler came across photos of a mining disaster in Lower Silesia that killed 155 miners in 1930. In only six minutes, the portrayals of the people waiting above ground, the desperate relatives and helpers, the memorial ceremony and the German Communist Party’s protests as well as the pictures of miners’ work at the time, combined with quotes from Swedish newspapers and sombre music by Weber and Grieg, outline a society that will literally walk over dead bodies to make a profit.
– Grit Lemke

Nine years after the military coup, Peter Nestler comes to a country that seems to have gone back to normal. But behind the images of wealth and urbanity he discovers the fault lines of the past: traumatised families, children who were forced to watch as their parents were arrested and tortured. Broken people who make their painstaking way back to a normal life. Oppression is also presented in its psychological form as a process of suppressing grief, anger and memories that makes a whole society sick.
– Grit Lemke

A poem by Hans Sachs narrated in single frames of charcoal drawings by Peter Nestler: the rabbits team up against the hunter, a parable on the possibility of resistance.
– Grit Lemke

Roma talk about their experiences in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic of Germany, inspired by Otto Pankok’s paintings of Roma in the 1930s. These are moving narratives of persecution, discrimination, marginalisation, of life as second-class human beings, all of which lasts, incredibly enough, right up to the allegedly democratic present day of the film, since they live in inhumane conditions in barracks at the margins of cities and society and are not officially recognised as Nazi victims. Long, nearly uncut sequences open up space for the people and their stories. That’s all it takes.
– Grit Lemke