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.

The old shots smell like phenol and brown coal dust. In the spring of 1991, two documentary filmmakers travelled through the former energy triangle of the GDR, centred around the towns of Spremberg, Hoyerswerda and Schwarze Pumpe. In the midst of despair and resignation, they demanded analyses. Those who faced layoffs answered: “When there’s no work, there’s no work.” Or more simply: “Bang, out, gone, that’s it.” Thirty years later, Martin Gressmann and the documentarists from 1991 are not done yet with the fractures and open wounds of the industry liquidations right after reunification.
The comparison between the history – full of murky air and people who hide from the camera – and the apparently appeased present does not lend itself to make-overs; the landscapes that followed brown coal mining are not pretty yet, the river Spree is only halfway cleaned-up, the power plant is still one of the main CO2 emitters in Europe. You often have to look twice to understand that an important leap in time was made in the images. The dirt and the energy of the past keep coming back, and Lusatia continues to “serve and work” in the “subconscious of the distant capital”. Idiosyncratic texts and bold documentary manoeuvres generate an ambivalent mix of surfaces and deep strata, erosion and repair of an industrial landscape.