There’s a submarine in the middle of Leipzig. It’s not only the architecture of the former Bowlingtreff in the heart of the city that evokes such a vessel. In terms of relevance, the building also gradually sank from view over the years. It was built as an example of postmodern architecture in the late 1980s, behind the authorities’ back, as it were, and then tolerated. A piece of aesthetic resistance in the city of the “peaceful revolution”, it became a meeting point for athletic activity with a Western flair. Builders and volunteers speak and take us back to the palace of the people built by Leipzigers for Leipzigers. Let’s hope that this submarine will be allowed to resurface one day.

Kim Busch

The catholic priory of St. Trinitatis, Leipzig 2016. A chance meeting in the newly opened church is followed by a conversation. The documentary filmmaker and the passionate amateur photographer get to know each other better. Nonetheless, both stay mostly behind their devices – a meeting in restful long shots and extreme close-ups. Over a selection of Silesian cakes in the oldest prefabricated building in Leipzig the conversation throws flashlights on more than half a century of a post-war biography.

Nadja Rademacher

Megalomania is a character trait shared by geniuses, madmen and Leipzig. If evidence should be required: a place surrounded by nothing but dry land and run through only by a small river boasts a considerable port with warehouses, canals and locks. Basically, it’s Leipzig by the sea, if it wasn’t for reality which has invariably crossed the city’s plans so far. If you look at it from that perspective you see wind-swept ruins and useless concrete blocks cluttering the landscape.

Ute Puder pulls of the feat of uniting both points of view: there’s the dream of a link to the sea, born out of the colonial pursuit of profit of an entrepreneur who in the age of industrialisation wanted to transport cotton straight from his plantation in Africa to the biggest cotton mill in Europe in Leipzig. Today some people dream of developing new forms of housing and living instead of hip galleries and lofts in these places, others dream of huge steamers in the shadow of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (monument to the Battle of the Nations). One side is hampered by insufficient depth of water, the other by financial and municipal politics (the pursuit of profit again). Talking with experts and residents, using archive material, with poetic images, precise sound effects and a jazzy soundtrack, Puder explores both, desire and delusion.

Grit Lemke

The old main post office at Augustusplatz in Leipzig. In the early 1960s, the seven-storey steel frame construction by Kurt Nowotny set architectural standards. Its constructive clarity is taken up by Louis Volkmann’s film. During its production in the spring of 2015 the building was still derelict, since it’s to not see its resurrection before 2017. The film preserves glimpses of an interim period in 13 concentrated shots.

Ralph Eue