Many people probably know Chris Marker’s story of a time trip from a dystopian future back to the present, in which the hero experiences a traumatic event again, only through Terry Gilliam’s extroverted remake “12 Monkeys”. The original, Marker’s experimental science fiction classic “La Jetée”, however, was groundbreaking rather because of its minimalist narrative form: The 28-minute black and white photo novel with a single moving shot has made film history.
Dominique Cabrera now takes a very personal approach to putting the influential work in a historical context: The year of its creation, 1962, was also the year when Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule and hundreds of thousands of French people with roots in Algeria, the so-called Pieds-noirs, left their homeland to enter exile via Orly airport. In France, a new, uncertain existence awaited them – including Cabrera’s family. Six decades later, her cousin, who happened to be present on the pier of Paris-Orly when Marker took photos for his film, is convinced that he recognises himself in the fifth shot of “La Jetée”. This is the prelude to one of the most thrilling and at the same time loving time trips one can imagine – and the beginning of a detective and cinephile research with ever more astonishing twists.

“Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean – so get yourself a little loving in between.” This advice of the African-American civil rights activist and jazz poet Langston Hughes precedes Jyoti Mistry’s found footage storm of images and runs like a guiding line through the archive material, a panopticon of revelries: parties, boxing matches, visits to the beach and above all, time and again, testimonies of lived queer sexuality. Sometimes clandestine, sometimes quite public.

Mistry mirrors the uninhibitedness of her sources in the way she arranges them – not neatly staggered but boldly mixed. The associative editing often virtually leaps into the images, linking them with purple colour explosions and three-dimensional animations of shoals of fish. On the soundtrack, a spoken word performance joins multi-channel dubbed noises and countless variations of the jazz standard “Diga Diga Doo.” This is how the film wrests its testimonies from the past and returns them to their inherent liveliness and transgressive explosive power.

Luciano cuts a slight figure as he wanders through the narrow streets of the improvised Barrio Tablada on the edge of Rosario, taking care of his mother and sister and the makeshift home they share, finding occasional work on building sites as the search for a proper job continues, lifting weights at the gym. Manuel Besedovsky lays out the different episodes of this precarious, if not atypical existence with such deliberate deemphasis that it feels almost like a plot twist when Luciano meets with a consultant to talk about the various options for constructing a penis. And yet this part of Luciano’s experience has actually been there all along – another thread woven often imperceptibly into the fabric of the film with gentleness and care.
Handing CVs out, hormone injections, smoking joints with buddies from the neighbourhood, talking to his mother about the daughter that is no longer there, some slightly awkward rapping, thinking about having children – the most radical thing about this portrait is how each challenge, each diversion, each encounter is presented with the same sense of normality with which Luciano experiences it. Class, gender identity and their seldom-seen intersection shown as nothing more than getting on with life.

In this documentary essay, Congolese artist David Shongo addresses the problems of knowledge production and asks the important question of how it was influenced permanently and systematically by colonialist power. Analysing historical photographs, he exposes the perfidious mechanisms of colonial historiography and contrasts them with conversations with traditional scholars. They represent an exploited culture confronted not only with the theft of economic goods. It was also robbed – in a historical dimension, too – of self-perception and self-determination.

The starting point of his analysis is the examination of the photo archive of the German ethnographer and anthropologist Hans Himmelheber at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich. But Shongo’s critique of colonial historical fictions – poetic and meticulously precise at the same time – goes far beyond this. Combining specially produced and expressive images of present-day Congo with staged scenes, an offscreen commentary and documentary recordings, he manages to penetrate extremely complex contexts. A film essay that denounces the “privatisation of memory” – and contributes a long overdue, extremely important political and aesthetic position to the virulent restitution debate.