In this early short, Lee Anne Schmitt and Lee Lynch craft an ambling, quietly profound portrait of a place quite literally close to home: the so-called Wash, a strip of wasteland by the Santa Clara River that backs on to Newhall, California, where the two directors lived at the time. As the duo take turns explaining in voice-over, this in-between space is used by and home to a diverse group of local residents, a balance that is quickly upset once the adjacent hills are turned into an upmarket housing estate. As the natural and the urban blur together, the mood turns pensive. Nostalgia can be felt for even the most unremarkable of settings.

When Stella Nyanzi enters a room, action is guaranteed. The Ugandan feminist, gender researcher, anthropologist and poet does not mince her words in her fight against state oppression. She went to prison in 2017 for a vulgar poem in which she ridiculed head of state Yoweri Museveni, who has been in office for almost 40 years. After she was released, Nyanzi ran for Parliament without the necessary funds for a campaign, printing and distributing posters and flyers in the slums of Kampala with her children. Her daughter did her mother’s make-up and hair for public appearances. Sometimes her almost adult children longed for more time for themselves. The family repeatedly faced police violence and finally emigrated to Germany.
Using a mobile handheld camera, the film absorbs its protagonist’s power, its rhythm matching her angry lyrics. The result is the portrait of a woman who has made radicalism and provocation her way of life. We get to know an activist who permanently pushes herself and the people around her to the limits. Still, it is hard not to get infected by Stella Nyanzi’s energy.

Despite many hardships and misfortunes, Joan Williams radiates an infectious zest for life. The seventy-year-old works as a cleaner in the washrooms of a high-class Chicago night club. When it closes at the end of the 1970s, her professional biography also ends – involuntarily, because Joan liked her job. After all, it brought her into contact with the showbiz and glamour of the city. Set against the glittering backdrop of downtown Chicago, “Where Did You Get That Woman?” uses an individual’s story to explore class antagonisms, race relations and the difficulties of relationships and getting older. Last but not least, the film also discovers in Williams’ story the long history of African-American migration from the segregated South to the supposedly more liberal North of the United States.

In August 1975, 80,000 coal miners in the Appalachians laid down tools for several weeks in a so-called wildcat strike, that is, a labour dispute organised without unions. They went on strike for the right to strike in the first place, which until then had been de facto taken from them by dubious contracts. The film team is in the thick of the dynamic events, filming spontaneous and prepared speeches, interviewing strikers, recording strike songs by left-wing folk musicians who perform in the crowd. A film about speech and speechlessness, solidarity and social injustice.

Based on the book “Witness to War: An American Doctor in El Salvador”, the film, which won awards both at the Oscars and in Leipzig, tells the story of the deeply religious Vietnam veteran Charlie Clements. The son of a military family, he first embarked on a career as a high-ranking soldier and flew numerous supply missions in the Vietnam War, only to finally make a radical turn. In 1970, he refused to serve, was discharged from the Air Force and studied medicine. In the early 1980s, he ended up on the side of the guerrilla in El Salvador, one of the “new Vietnams” of interventionist US foreign policy, as contemporary critics put it. The film is about how both wars reverberated back in the United States.

A woman drives home by night and feels another woman watching her, a brief story at once opaque and ominous told first via intertitles before being partially repeated in voice-over. 16mm shots of a city by night, shop fronts, highways, street lights passing in a blur, muted traffic noise, snatches of music, the sound of crickets. Lee Anne Schmitt’s mysterious miniature draws a line between two women and a trauma they seemingly share. Undefined yet no less deeply felt, it remains as hard to fully parse as the horses riding over a prairie in grainy black and white or the figure in a dress lying on the side of a road, stretched out in the sunshine and leaves.